Quotes About Knowledge

You do not want to win an argument. You want to win.

A good book gets better at the second reading. A great book at the third. Any book not worth rereading isn't worth reading.

much of what other people know isn't worth knowing.

More data means more information, but it also means more false information.

They agree that chess training only improves chess skills but disagree that classroom training (almost) only improves classroom skills.

Education makes the wise slightly wiser, but it makes the fool vastly more dangerous.

The problem with information is not that it is diverting and generally useless, but that it is toxic.

Note another element of Switzerland: it is perhaps the most successful country in history, yet it has traditionally had a very low level of university education compared to the rest of the rich nations. Its system, even in banking during my days, was based on apprenticeship models, nearly vocational rather than the theoretical ones. In other words, on techne (crafts and know how), not episteme (book knowledge, know what).

keeping one's distance from an ignorant person is equivalent to keeping company with a wise man.

In science you need to understand the world; in business you need others to misunderstand it.

Most info-Web-media-newspaper types have a hard time swallowing the idea that knowledge is reached (mostly) by removing junk from peoples heads

Scientists may be in the business of laughing at their predecessors, but owing to an array of human mental dispositions, few realize that someone will laugh at their beliefs in the (disappointingly near) future.

So knowledge grows by subtraction much more than by addition—given that what we know today might turn out to be wrong but what we know to be wrong cannot turn out to be right, at least not easily.

Let us say that, in general, failure (and disconfirmation) are more informative than success and confirmation, which is why I claim that negative knowledge is just "more robust.

be. So I follow the Lindy effect as a guide in selecting what to read: books that have been around for ten years will be around for ten more; books that have been around for two millennia should be around for quite a bit of time, and so forth.

People overvalue their knowledge and underestimate the probability of their being wrong.

Further, in writing, I feel corrupt and unethical if I have to look up a subject in a library as part of the writing itself. This acts as a filter--it is the only filter. If the subject is not interesting enough for me to look it up independently , for my own curiosity or purposes, and I have not done so before, then I should not be writing about it at all, period. It does not mean that libraries (physical and virtual) are not acceptable; it means that they should not be the source of any idea.

Increasingly, data can only truly deliver via negativa–style knowledge—it can be effectively used to debunk, not confirm.

It is my great hope someday to see science and decision makers rediscover what the ancients have always known, namely that our highest currency is respect.

The problem with experts is that they do not know what they do not know.

What I learned on my own I still remember.

we have evidence that collectively society doesn't advance with organized education, rather the reverse: the level of (formal) education in a country is the result of wealth.

In other words, history teaches us to avoid the brand of naive empiricism that consists of learning from casual historical facts.

Learning is rooted in repetition and convexity, meaning that the reading of a single text twice is more profitable than reading two different things once.