Quotes About Truth

I remind myself of Einstein's remark that common sense is nothing but a collection of misconceptions acquired by age eighteen.

Como veíamos antes, los casos de desconfirmación tienen mucha más fuerza para establecer la verdad. Sin embargo, tendemos a no ser conscientes de esta propiedad.

is neither meaningful nor relevant.

But there are some things I can remain skeptical about, and others I can safely consider certain.

let governments predict (it makes officials feel better about themselves and justifies their existence) but do not set much store by what they say. Remember that the interest of these civil servants is to survive and self-perpetuate—not to get to the truth.

Are we so plagued with the narrative fallacy?

With novelists, names and dates are wrong, the rest is true. With historians, names and dates are correct, the rest is false.

the researcher has the incentive to select the experiment that corresponds to what he was looking for, hiding the failed attempts.

You can test a given rule either directly, by looking at instances where it works, or indirectly, by focusing on where it does not work. As we saw earlier, disconfirming instances are far more powerful in establishing truth. Yet we tend to not be aware of this property.

that is often associated with classroom knowledge that may get in the way of understanding what's going on in real life.

People do not realize that the media is paid to get your attention.

First ethical rule: If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud. Just as being nice to the arrogant is no better than being arrogant toward the nice, being accommodating toward anyone committing a nefarious action condones it.

the truth came out eventually, and his mission ended up paying off, with some delay.

Indeed, people tend to fool themselves with their self-narrative of "national identity," which, in a breakthrough paper in Science by sixty-five authors, was shown to be a total fiction. ("National traits" might be great for movies, they might help a lot with war, but they are Platonic notions that carry no empirical validity—yet, for example, both the English and the non-English erroneously believe in an English "national temperament.")

Platonicity is what makes us think that we understand more than we actually do.

Less is more: Truth is lost with too much altercation

We are built to be dupes for theories. But theories come and go; experience stays. Explanations

Compendiaria res improbitas, virtusque tarda—the villainous takes the short road, virtue the longer one. In other words, cutting corners is dishonest.

mistaking what we don't see for the nonexistent, a sibling to mistaking absence of evidence for evidence of absence.

In a famous argument, the logician W. V. Quine showed that there exist families of logically consistent interpretations and theories that can match a given series of facts. Such insight should warn us that mere absence of nonsense may not be sufficient to make something true.

Compromising is condoning. The only modern dictum I follow is one by George Santayana: A man is morally free when … he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity. This is not just an aim but an obligation.

A man is morally free when Ã¢â'¬Â¦ he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity.

Half the people lie with their lips; the other half with their tears.

knowledge is reached (mostly) by removing junk from people's heads.