Quotes About Knowledge

I noticed that very intelligent and informed persons were at no advantage over cabdrivers in their predictions, but there was a crucial difference. Cabdrivers did not believe that they understood as much as learned people - really, they were not the experts and they knew it. Nobody knew anything, but elite thinkers thought that they knew more than the rest because they were elite thinkers, and if you're a member of the elite, you automatically know more than the nonelite.

Those who think religion is about "belief" don't understand religion, and don't understand belief.

Our problem is not just that we do not know the future, we do not know much of the past either. We

For The curse of modernity is that we are increasingly populated by a class of people who are better at explaining than understanding, or better at explaining than doing.

bounded rationality: we cannot possibly measure and assess everything as if we were a computer; we therefore produce, under evolutionary pressures, some shortcuts and distortions. Our knowledge of the world is fundamentally incomplete, so we need to avoid getting into unanticipated trouble. And even if our knowledge of the world were complete, it would still be computationally near-impossible to produce a precise, unbiased understanding of reality.

My best definition of a nerd: someone who asks you to explain an aphorism.

Mine was the only job you could do if you thought of yourself as risk-hating, risk-aware, and highly ignorant.

scholars—scholarship without erudition and natural curiosity can close your mind and lead to the fragmentation of disciplines.

It is the same logic reversal we saw earlier with the value of what we don't know; everybody knows that you need more prevention than treatment, but few reward acts of prevention.

but at least I know that I cannot forecast and a small number of people (those I care about) take that as an asset.

Survival comes first, truth, understanding, and science later.

Problema noastr? nu este numai c? nu cunoa?tem viitorul, ci ?i c? nu cunoa?tem nici trecutul.

Prediction requires knowing about technologies that will be discovered in the future, but that very knowledge would almost automatically allow us to start developing those technologies right away. Ergo we do not know what we will know.

There are some people who, if they don't already know, you can't tell them. As the great philosopher of uncertainty Yogi berra once said, Don't waste your time trying to fight forecasters, stock analysts, economists and social scientists, except to play pranks on them.

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.

We would not even need a statistician; a second-rate engineer would do.

studying courage in textbooks doesn't make you any more courageous than eating cow meat makes you bovine.

The problem lies in the structure of our minds: we don't learn rules, just facts, and only facts.

Cabdrivers did not believe that they understood as much as learned people—really, they were not the experts and they knew it. Nobody knew anything, but elite thinkers thought that they knew more than the rest because they were elite thinkers, and if you're a member of the elite, you automatically know more than the nonelite.

You cannot do anything with knowledge unless you know where it stops, and the costs of using it.

It would be preferable if we were better at understanding cancer or the (highly nonlinear) weather than the origin of the universe. How

Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books.

science is about how not to be a sucker.

don't understand?" is, simply, work on the undesirable states of f(x). It is often easier to modify f(x) than to get better knowledge of x. (In other words, robustification rather than forecasting Black Swans.) Example: If I buy an insurance on