Quotes About Knowledge

that we depend on them for what information we need to obtain.

Randomness, in the end, is just unknowledge. The world is opaque and appearances fool us.

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

Having spent a couple of decades in this mind-set, I am convinced (but cannot prove) that training and education can help us avoid its pitfalls.

because we take what we know a little too seriously.

Plutarch, Livy, Suetonius, Diodorus Siculus, Gibbon, Carlyle, Renan, and Michelet.

Learn to read history, get all the knowledge you can, do not frown on the anecdote, but do not draw any causal links, do not try to reverse engineer too much—but if you do, do not make big scientific claims.

We do not spontaneously learn that we don't learn that we don't learn.

the tendency to look at what confirms our knowledge, not our ignorance)

Simply, things that move, and therefore require knowledge, do not usually have experts, while things that don't move seem to have some experts. In other words, professions that deal with the future and base their studies on the nonrepeatable past have an expert problem (with the exception of the weather and businesses involving short-term physical processes, not socioeconomic ones).

later legitimized by some type of formalization. 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.

Journalists can teach us how to not learn.

just as with the color blue, having a word for something helps spread awareness of it.

True, our knowledge does grow, but it is threatened by greater increases in confidence, which make our increase in knowledge at the same time an increase in confusion, ignorance, and conceit.

is the exact contrary of knowledge; one should learn to avoid using terms made for knowledge to describe its opposite.

even if x remains vastly beyond our understanding.

Platonicity is what makes us think that we understand more than we actually do.

Does the book industry suffer from the classical "expert problem" with the buildup of rules of thumb that do not have empirical validity? More than half a million readers later I am discovering that books are not written for book editors.

While I accept the notion of epistemic base, what I question is the role it has really played in the history of technology.

Double a man's erudition; you will halve his citations.

we know a lot more what is wrong than what is right

It illustrates a severe limitation to our learning from observations or experience and the fragility of our knowledge.

why does reading the newspaper actually decrease your knowledge of the world?

they have what is lacking in the young: