Quotes About Knowledge

Ex cura theoria nascitur.

How can we logically go from specific instances to reach general conclusions? How do we know what we know? How do we know that what we have observed from given objects and events suffices to enable us to figure out their other properties? There

certain professionals, while believing they are experts, are in fact not. Based on their empirical record, they do not know more about their subject matter than the general population, but they are much better at narrating—or, worse, at smoking you with complicated mathematical models. They are also more likely to wear a tie.

Our sophistication continuously puts us ahead of ourselves, creating things we are less and less capable of understanding.

My biggest problem with the educational system lies precisely in that it forces students to squeeze explanations out of subject matters and shames them for withholding judgment, for uttering the "I don't know." Why

Scranton showed that we have been building and using jet engines in a completely trial-and-error experiential manner, without anyone truly understanding the theory. Builders needed the original engineers who knew how to twist things to make the engine work. Theory came later, in a lame way, to satisfy the intellectual bean counter.

There is, in the Black Swan zone, a limit to knowledge that can never be reached, no matter how sophisticated statistical and risk management science ever gets.

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

Someone who did not find something is providing others with knowledge, the best knowledge, that of absence (what does not work)—yet he gets little or no credit for it.

the (stated) purpose of science is to get to the truth, not to give you a feeling of organization or make you feel better. We tend to use knowledge as therapy.

Wittgenstein's ruler: Unless you have confidence in the ruler's reliability, if you use a ruler to measure a table you may also be using the table to measure the ruler. The less you trust a ruler's reliability (in probability called the prior), the more information you are getting about the ruler and the less about the table.

How? Probability is not a mere computation of odds on the dice or more complicated variants; it is the acceptance of the lack of certainty in our knowledge and the development of methods for dealing with our ignorance.

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.

The only condition for such brand of more sophisticated rationalism: to believe and act as if one does not have the full story—to be sophisticated you need to accept that you are not so.

central problem is that birds rarely write more than ornithologists—Combining

Only the autodidacts are free. And not just in school matters—those who decommoditize, detouristify their lives.

you cannot separate knowledge from contact with the ground. Actually, you cannot separate anything from contact with the ground. And the contact with the real world is done via skin in the game—having an exposure to the real world, and paying a price for its consequences

for decades doctors never suspected that this "useless" tissue might actually have a use that escaped their detection. The

illusion of local causal chains—that is, confusing catalysts for causes and assuming that one can know which catalyst will produce which effect.

an erudite can be dissatisfied with his own knowledge, and such dissatisfaction is a wonderful shield against Platonicity, the

If you know all possible conditions of a physical system you can, in theory (though not, as we saw, in practice), project its behavior into the future. But

The wise man listens to meaning; the fool only gets the noise.

La persona a quien se atribuye la difusión de esta idea del semiescepticismo tendencioso es sir Doktor Professor Karl Raimund Popper, posiblemente el único filósofo de la ciencia a quien leen y de quien hablan los actores del mundo real (aunque es posible que los filósofos profesionales no lo hagan con tanto entusiasmo).

Per lo studioso e leader religioso arabo 'AlÄ« ibn AbÄ« T?lib (che non è un mio parente), mantenere le distanze da una persona ignorante equivale a stare in compagnia di un saggio.