Quotes About Knowledge

Steve's fun to take to any Wall Street meeting," said Vinny. "Because he'll say 'explain that to me' thirty different times. Or 'could you explain that more, in English?' Because once you do that, there's a few things you learn. For a start, you figure out if they even know what they're talking about. And a lot of times they don't!

When we walked down the aisle, they played Taco Bell's Canyon," Quinn says knowingly. (Named for its German composer, Johann TacoBell.)

Knowledge is literally prediction," said Morey. "Knowledge is anything that increases your ability to predict the outcome.

a new definition of the nerd: a person who knows his own mind well enough to mistrust it.

No one ever asked Friedberg the question: If my knowledge is no longer useful, who needs me? But it was a good question. "There is stuff the farmer picks up on that we haven't got data on yet," he said. "For example, are there bugs in the field? But over time

He had a diffidence about him—an understanding of how hard it is to know anything for sure. The closest he came to certainty was in his approach to making decisions. He never simply went with his first thought. He suggested a new definition of the nerd: a person who knows his own mind well enough to mistrust it.

Knowledge makes life messier. It makes it a bit more difficult for a person who wishes to shrink the world to a worldview.

The absence of definite information concerning the outcomes of actions one has not taken is probably the single most important factor that keeps regret in life within tolerable bounds," Danny wrote. "We can never be absolutely sure that we would have been happier had we chosen another profession or another spouse. . . . Thus, we are often protected from painful knowledge concerning the quality of our decisions.

There was, Carter thought, a downside to experience. "Experience is making the same mistake over and over again, only with greater confidence

Theories for Amos were like mental pockets or briefcases, places to put the ideas you wanted to keep. Until you could replace a theory with a better theory—a theory that better predicted what actually happened—you didn't chuck a theory out. Theories ordered knowledge, and allowed for better prediction.

any player unaware of the fool in the market probably is the fool in the market.

Back in 1921 Veblen had predicted that engineers would one day rule the U.S. economy. He argued that since the economy was premised on technology and the engineers were the only ones who actually understood how the technology worked, they would inevitably use their superior knowledge to seize power from the financiers and captains of industry who wound up on top at the end of the first round of the Industrial Revolution.

those with the least training (graduate students) were just as accurate as the fully trained ones (paid pros)

If the highly paid, publicly scrutinized employees of a business that had existed since the 1860s could be misunderstood by their market, who couldn't be? If the market for baseball players was inefficient, what market couldn't be? If a fresh analytical approach had led to the discovery of new knowledge in baseball, was there any sphere of human activity in which it might not do the same?

is the ceding of technical and scientific leadership to China. It is the innovation that never occurs, and the knowledge that is never created, because you have ceased to lay the groundwork for it. It is what you never learned that might have saved you.

Simply knowing about a bias wasn't sufficient to overcome it:

Al hombre más torpe se le pueden explicar los temas más difíciles si no se ha formado todavía ninguna idea de ellos; pero no se puede aclarar ni aun lo más sencillo al hombre más inteligente si está firmemente convencido de que conoce ya, sin la menor sombra de duda, lo que se presenta ante él.   LIEV TOLSTÓI, 1897

Much later, he heard Murray Gell-Mann, a Nobel laureate in physics, hold forth on seemingly every subject under the sun. After Gell-Man was done, Amos said, "You know, Murray, there is no one in the world who is as smart as you think you are." Once

the nerd: a person who knows his own mind well enough to mistrust it.

You Can Be a Stock Market Genius

It is amazing how dull history books are, given how much of what's in them must be invented." What

downside to experience. "Experience is making the same mistake over and over again, only with greater confidence," he said. The line wasn't his, but he liked it.

Statistics wasn't just boring numbers; it contained ideas that allowed you to glimpse deep truths about human life. "Because

A lot of what people did and said when they predicted things, Morey now realized, was phony: pretending to know things rather than actually knowing things. There were a great many interesting questions in the world to which the only honest answer was, It's impossible to know for sure.