Quotes About Knowledge

They had all the means to develop a spinning machine, but "nobody tried"—another example of knowledge hampering optionality. They probably needed someone like Steve Jobs—blessed with an absence of college education and the right aggressiveness of temperament—to take the elements to their natural conclusion. As we will see in the next section, it is precisely this type of uninhibited doer who made the Industrial Revolution happen.

this was his most significant insight, but it remains his least known.

There were two main sources of technical knowledge and innovation in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the hobbyist and the English rector, both of whom were generally in barbell situations.

Empirically, if you want an author to cross a few generations

traditions provide an aggregation of filtered collective knowledge

I disbelieve in structured learning—actually I believe that one can be an intellectual without being a nerd, provided one has a private library instead of a classroom

That was my best investment—risk turned out to be the topic I know the best.

No author should be considered as having failed until he starts teaching others about writing.

Cualquier reducción del mundo que nos rodea puede tener unas consecuencias explosivas, ya que descarta algunas fuentes de incertidumbre, y nos empuja a malinterpretar el tejido del mundo.

Some books cannot be summarized; some can be compressed to about ten pages; the majority to zero pages.

mistaking what we don't see for the nonexistent, a sibling to mistaking absence of evidence for evidence of absence.

Modernity provides too many variables (but too little data per variable), and the spurious relationships grow much, much faster than real information, as noise is convex and information is concave. Increasingly, data can only truly deliver via negativa–style knowledge—it can be effectively used to debunk, not confirm.

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.

People don't walk around with anti-résumés telling you what they have not studied or experienced (it's the job of their competitors to do that), but it would be nice if they did.

Real mathematicians understand completeness, real philosophers understand incompleteness, the rest don't formally understand anything.

except to make fun of them or provide a historical reference.

to show people how lacking in clarity they were in their thoughts, how little they knew about the concepts they used routinely

The ancients knew very well that the only way to understand events was to cause them.

It has been difficult for people to understand that, historically, skepticism has been mostly skepticism of expert knowledge rather than skepticism about abstract entities like God, and that all the great skeptics have been largely either religious or, at least, pro-religion (that is, in favour of others being religious).

so she could read it in the original.

Extremistan, you will have trouble figuring out the average from any sample since it can depend so much on one single observation. The idea is not more difficult than that. In Extremistan, one unit can easily affect the total in a disproportionate way. In this world, you should always be suspicious of the knowledge you derive from data. This is a very simple test of uncertainty that allows you to distinguish between the two kinds of randomness. Capish?

They found it difficult to accept that their grasp was a little short. But

that wealth leads to the rise of education

Clearly you cannot manufacture more information than the past can deliver; if you buy one hundred copies of The New York Times, I am not too certain that it would help you gain incremental knowledge of the future. We just don't know how much information there is in the past.