Quotes About Explanations

Once someone loses trust, that's it, Gerald. It's gone. It's broken. You can't repair it with explanations. You can't wheedle trust back from someone.

science is not only about building carefully-constructed theories that explain general phenomena. It is also, and primarily, about distinguishing good explanations from bad ones. This is where traditional history has been deficient. Historians have created, and continue to create, new explanations, but they are not in the business of testing them with data.

I think literary theory satisfied a deep love I have for big, encompassing narratives about the world and how it works - which are usually, in the end, more creative visions unto themselves than illuminating explanations.

Classical psychoanalysis regards conscious thoughts as a disguised representation of unconscious conflicts that are presumably causing the problem. The patient's own explanations are regarded as spurious rationalizations, his coping mechanisms as defenses. Consequently, his conscious ideas, his reasoning and judgements, his practical solutions to problems are not taken at face value: they are treated as stepping-stones to deeper, concealed components of the mind.

Human beings are pattern-seeking animals. It's part of our DNA. That's why conspiracy theories and gods are so popular: we always look for the wider, bigger explanations for things.

Science is not a game in which arbitrary rules are used to decide what explanations are to be permitted.

Science has not been successful by making up explanations of things that fit with the current social fabric.

I have thought it best to group all the explanations which any letters of Rilke necessarily involve, at the end of the book and out of the way; indeed, no harm will be done if the ordinary reader ignores them altogether, and enjoys the letters simply for what they are. But the student will probably care to pursue further some of the astonishing wealth of ideas which the poet here raises.

People in pain may look for comfort and explanations. People disappointed in pleasure look for purpose.

our mind is strongly biased toward causal explanations and does not deal well with "mere statistics.

Many facts of the world are due to chance, including accidents of sampling. Causal explanations of chance events are inevitably wrong.

The reliance on flawed explanations is perhaps inevitable, if the alternative is to give up on understanding our world.

Indeed, we pay people quite well to provide interesting explanations of regression effects. A business commentator who correctly announces that "the business did better this year because it had done poorly last year" is likely to have a short tenure on the air.

Statistics produce many observations that appear to beg for causal explanations but do not lend themselves to such explanations. Many facts of the world are due to chance, including accidents of sampling. Causal explanations of chance events are inevitably wrong.

Statistics produce many observations that appear to beg for causal explanations but do not lend themselves to such explanations.

Indeed, we pay people quite well to provide interesting explanations of regression effects.

In fact, when you get right down to it, almost every explanation Man came up with for anything until about 1926 was stupid.

Magic doesn't sweep you away; it gathers you up into the body of the present moment so thoroughly that all your explanations fall away: the ordinary, in all its plain and simple outrageousness, begins to shine -- to become luminously, impossibly so. Every facet of the world is awake, and you within it.

The theoretical physicist Richard Feynman was such a lauded lecturer in large part because, like Hui Tzu, he was skilled in finding the right analogies to illustrate his explanations of extremely abstract-and extremely difficult-concepts. He once compared a drop of water magnified 2,000 times to "a kind of teeming...like a crowd at a football game as seen from a very great distance." That description has all the precision of good physics and good poetry.

Koans offer the possibility that you could free the mind in one jump, without passing through stages or any pretense at logical steps. In the territory that koans open up, we live down a level, before explanations occur, beneath the ground that fear is based on, before the wanting and the scrambling around for advantage, before there is a handle on the problem, before we were alienated from the world. A koan doesn't hide or even

Mitchell and Jessen were advocating torture tactics that had been originally designed to break men and force them to spout lies and propaganda, but they claimed that these techniques were not torture, and that they would elicit the truth, not lies and propaganda. In the upside-down world of the global war on terror, their explanations were widely accepted.

People think that if you just say 'hallucinations' it explains anything you want it to explain and eventually whatever it is you can't understand will just go away. It's just a word, it doesn't explain anything. It doesn't explain why the dolphins disappeared.

Occam's razor. The simplest explanation is usually the correct one.

You seem to have explanations for everything, Mr. Poirot." "That's his speciality,