Quotes About Knowledge

el mayor y más acuciante objetivo humano es comprender cómo actuar en condiciones de información incompleta.

One day in the 1980s I had dinner with a famous speculator, a hugely successful man. He muttered the hyperbole that hit home: "much of what other people know isn't worth knowing.

The very same desire for order, interestingly, applies to scientific pursuits-it is just that, unlike art, 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.

Epistemic arrogance bears a double effect: we overestimate what we know, and underestimate uncertainty, by compressing the range of possible uncertain states (i.e., by reducing the space of the unknown).

in spite of having spent some time in libraries I feel that I am truly an amateur in the subject matter).

Mother Nature knows more than he will ever know, not the other way around.

I remind myself of Einstein's remark that common sense is nothing but a collection of misconceptions acquired by age eighteen.

Como veíamos antes, los casos de desconfirmación tienen mucha más fuerza para establecer la verdad. Sin embargo, tendemos a no ser conscientes de esta propiedad.

Rewriting the history of technology. How, in science, history is rewritten by the losers and how I saw it in my own business and how we can generalize. Does knowledge of biology hurt medicine? Hiding the role of luck. What makes a good entrepreneur?

Corollary to Moore's Law: every ten years, collective wisdom degrades by half.*

Let us remember that economists are evaluated on how intelligent they sound, not on a scientific measure of their knowledge of reality.

We tend to treat our knowledge as personal property to be protected and defended. It

is neither meaningful nor relevant.

But there are some things I can remain skeptical about, and others I can safely consider certain.

La maldición de la modernidad es que cada vez estamos más colonizados por una clase de personas cuya capacidad para explicar las cosas supera a su capacidad de comprensión. O cuya capacidad explicativa supera a sus acciones.

the best way to mitigate interventionism is to ration the supply of information, as naturalistically as possible. 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.

that is often associated with classroom knowledge that may get in the way of understanding what's going on in real life.

For a theory is a very dangerous thing to have.

I came to discuss Black Swans, and I intended to tell them that the only thing I know is that we know precious little about them, but that it was their property to sneak up on us, and that attempts at Platonifying them led to additional misunderstandings. Military people can understand such things, and the idea became recently prevalent in military circles with the expression unknown unknown (as opposed to the known unknown).

Black Swan logic makes what you don't know far more relevant than what you do know.

people often think that it will surely be the next batch of news that will really make a difference to their understanding of things.)

You can effortlessly look up accident statistics on the Web, but they do not easily come to mind. Note

Historians should stay away from chaos theory and the difficulties of reverse engineering except to discuss general properties of the world and learn the limits of what they can't know.

What do they seem to have in common?