Quotes About Knowledge

T]he worst thing one can do to feel one knows things a bit deeper is to try to go into them a bit deeper.

It takes considerable effort to see facts (and remember them) while withholding judgment and resisting explanations. And

Perhaps the wise one is the one who knows that he cannot see things far away.

There are secrets to our world that only practice can reveal, and no opinion or analysis will ever capture in full.

Amateurs in any discipline are the best, if you can connect with them. Unlike dilettantes, career professionals are to knowledge what prostitutes are to love.

The way to avoid the ills of the narrative fallacy is to favor experimentation over storytelling, experience over history, and clinical knowledge over theories. Certainly

I then completely gave up reading newspapers and watching television, which freed up a considerable amount of time (say one hour or more a day, enough time to read more than a hundred additional books per year, which, after a couple of decades, starts mounting).

Read books are far less valuable than unread ones.

It takes a huge investment in introspection to learn that the thirty or more hours spent "studying" the news last month neither had any predictive ability during your activities of that month nor did it impact your current knowledge of the world.

So let us call here the teleological fallacy the illusion that you know exactly where you are going, and that you knew exactly where you were going in the past, and that others have succeeded in the past by knowing where they were going.

We have managed to transfer religious belief into gullibility for whatever can masquerade as science.

Let me insist that erudition is important to me. It signals genuine intellectual curiosity. It accompanies an open mind and the desire to probe the ideas of others. Above all, an erudite can be dissatisfied with his own knowledge, and such dissatisfaction is a wonderful shield against Platonicity, the simplifications of the five-minute manager, or the philistinism of the overspecialized scholar. Indeed, scholarship without erudition can lead to disasters.

The knowledge we get by tinkering, via trial and error, experience, and the workings of time, in other words, contact with the earth, is vastly superior to that obtained through reasoning, something self-serving institutions have been very busy hiding from us.

My principle activity is to tease those who take themselves and the quality of their knowledge too seriously.

So the modern world may be increasing in technological knowledge, but, paradoxically, it is making things a lot more unpredictable.

understanding how to act under conditions of incomplete information is the highest and most urgent human pursuit.

An erudite is someone who displays less than he knows; a journalist or consultant, the opposite.

ignoramus et ignorabimus—we are ignorant and will remain so. Somehow

To become a successful philosopher king, it is much better to start as a king than as a philosopher

This is hard to accept in the age of the Internet. It has been very hard for me to explain that the more data you get, the less you know what's going on, and the more iatrogenics you will cause. People are still under the illusion that "science" means more data.

we can control a function of x, f(x), even if x remains vastly beyond our understanding.

The IYI subscribes to The New Yorker, a journal designed so philistines can learn to fake a conversation about evolution, neurosomething, cognitive biases, and quantum mechanics.

The first leg of the triplet is the pathology of thinking that the world in which we live is more understandable, more explainable, and therefore more predictable than it actually is.

Never hire an academic unless his function is to partake of the rituals of writing papers or taking exams.