Quotes About Knowledge

As Francis Crick liked to say, "Any theory that can account for all the facts is wrong, because some of the facts are wrong.

Yet the single best predictor of emancipative values is the World Bank's Knowledge Index

PHILOSOPHY TODAY GETS no respect. Many scientists use the term as a synonym for effete speculation. When my colleague Ned Block told his father that he would major in the subject, his father's reply was "Luft!"—Yiddish for "air." And then there's the joke in which a young man told his mother he would become a Doctor of Philosophy and she said, "Wonderful! But what kind of disease is philosophy?

our own susceptibility to illusions and fallacies, tell us that men and women are fallible. One therefore ought to seek good reasons for believing something. Faith, revelation, tradition, dogma, authority, the ecstatic glow of subjective certainty—all are recipes for error, and should be dismissed as sources of knowledge.

The linguist Noam Chomsky once suggested that our igno- rance can be divided into problems and mysteries. When we face a problem, we may not know its solution, but we have insight, increasing knowledge, and an inkling of what we are looking for. When we face a mystery, however, we can only stare in wonder and bewilderment, not knowing what an explanation would even look like.

Science is thus a paradigm for how we ought to gain knowledge—not the particular methods or institutions of science but its value system, namely to seek to explain the world, to evaluate candidate explanations objectively, and to be cognizant of the tentativeness and uncertainty of our understanding at any time.

Remember your math: an anecdote is not a trend. Remember your history: the fact that something is bad today doesn't mean it was better in the past. Remember your philosophy: one cannot reason that there's no such thing as reason, or that something is true or good because God said it is. And remember your psychology: much of what we know isn't so, especially when our comrades know it too.

We have already seen that better-educated countries have lower rates of belief, and across the world, atheism rides the Flynn effect: as countries get smarter, they turn away from God.85

Could the world be getting not just more literate and knowledgeable but actually smarter?

Everything that is not forbidden by laws of nature is achievable, given the right knowledge; but that's the problem.

Finally, an intensifying application of knowledge and rationality to human affairs - the escalator of reason - can force people to recognize the futility of cycles of violence, to ramp down the privileging of their own interests over others', and to re-frame violence as a problem to be solved rather than a contest to be won.

The history of human folly, and our own susceptibility to illusions and fallacies, tells us that men and women are fallible. One therefore ought to seek good reasons for believing something. Faith, revelation, tradition, dogma, authority, the ecstatic glow of subjective certainty - all are recipes for error, and should be dismissed as sources of knowledge.

It's often said that with climate change, those who know the most are the most frightened, but with nuclear power, those who know the most are the least frightened.

An adult mind that is brimming with chunks is a powerful engine of reason, but it comes with a cost: a failure to communicate with other minds that have not mastered the same chunks.

The inability to set aside something that you know but that someone else does not know is such a pervasive affliction of the human mind that psychologists keep discovering related versions of it and giving it new names.

Though our ignorance is vast (and always will be), our knowledge is astonishing, and growing daily.

Once again, it's good cognitive psychology: people learn by integrating new information into their existing web of knowledge. They don't like it when a fact is hurled at them from out of the blue and they have to keep it levitating in short-term memory until they find a relevant background to embed it in a few moments later.

A definition that is more or less faithful to the way the word is used is "the ability to use knowledge to attain goals.

Probabilites are not about the world; they're about our ignorance of the world.

Are you infallible? Are you certain that you're right about everything? If so, what makes you different from your opponents, who also are certain they're right?

Richard Feynman once wrote, "If you ever hear yourself saying, 'I think I understand this,' that means you don't." Though

The schooling, together with health and wealth, are literally making us smarter—by thirty IQ points, or two standard deviations above our ancestors.

Mind, n. A mysterious form of matter secreted by the brain. Its chief activity consists in the endeavor to ascertain its own nature, the futility of the attempt being due to the fact that it has nothing but itself to know itself with.

Una sociedad sin erudición histórica es como una persona sin memoria: engañada, confundida y fácilmente explotada.