Quotes About Knowledge

You are taking the joy of ignorance out of the things we don't understand.

We certainly know a lot, but we have a built-in tendency to think that we know a little bit more than we actually do, enough of that little bit to occasionally get into serious trouble.

The problem with experts is that they do not know what they do not know. Lack of knowledge and delusion about the quality of your knowledge come together—the same process that makes you know less also makes you satisfied with your knowledge.

as he can carry a library on his device and "optimize" his time between golf outings.

We know with much more clarity what is bad than what is good.

Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allow you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.

knowledge is reached (mostly) by removing junk from people's heads.

My point is that wisdom in decision making is vastly more important—not just practically, but philosophically—than knowledge.

10 year old books feel very aged, out of place, out of sync. 200 year old books feel contemporary. 2000 year old books feel fresh.

those who cannot learn from experience, or don't mind taking risks they don't understand, may kill many.

We said that mere judgment would probably suffice in a primitive society. It is easy for a society to live without mathematics—

You may outlive your strength, never your wisdom. –

regardless of their levels of sophistication and learning.

The rarer the event, the less tractable, and the less we know about how frequent its occurrence—yet the rarer the event, the more confident these "scientists" involved in predicting, modeling, and using PowerPoint in conferences with equations in multicolor background have become.

Expert problems (in which the expert knows a lot but less than he thinks he does) often bring fragilities, and acceptance of ignorance the reverse.

Conversely, when you think you know more than you do, you are fragile (to error).

or "what are the ten best books

that classroom education does not lead to wealth as much as it comes from wealth

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. … Mother Nature does not tell you how many holes there are on the roulette table … In this book, considering that alternative outcomes could have taken place, that the world could have been different, is the core of probabilistic thinking.

Hume came to warn us against such knowledge, and to stress the need for some rigor in the gathering and interpretation of knowledge

So when I presented to what was until then the most hostile crowd in the world, members of the American Statistical Association, a map of the four quadrants, and told them: your knowledge works beautifully in these three quadrants, but beware of the fourth one, as this is where the Black Swans breed, I received instant approval, support, offers of permanent friendship, refreshments (Diet Coke), invitations to come present at their sessions, even hugs.

for someone to be able to help me, he had to be both a practitioner and a researcher, with practice coming before research.

Even popular opinion warns that bad information is worse than no information at all.

They only knew enough math to be blinded by it.