Quotes About Knowledge

Education is a progressive discovery of our ignorance.

Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.

Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.

Sixty years ago I knew everything; now I know nothing; education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.

And last are the few whose delight is in meditation and understanding; who yearn not for goods, nor for victory, but for knowledge; who leave both market and battlefield to lose themselves in the quiet clarity of secluded thought; whose will is a light rather than a fire, whose haven is not power but truth: these are the men of wisdom, who stand aside unused by the world.

When liberty exceeds intelligence, it begets chaos, which begets dictatorship.

true experts know the limits of their knowledge.

You build the best possible story from the information available to you, and if it is a good story, you believe it. Paradoxically, it is easier to construct a coherent story when you know little, when there are fewer pieces to fit into the puzzle. Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.

The amount of evidence and its quality do not count for much, because poor evidence can make a very good story. For some of our most important beliefs we have no evidence at all, except that people we love and trust hold these beliefs. Considering how little we know, the confidence we have in our beliefs is preposterous - and it is also essential.

Searching for wisdom in historic events requires an act of faith—a belief in the existence of recurrent patterns waiting to be discovered.

Considering how little we know, the confidence we have in our beliefs is preposterous—and it is also essential.

More than 50% of students at Harvard, MIT, and Princeton gave the intuitive—incorrect—answer.

the mystery of knowing without knowing is not a distinctive feature of intuition; it is the norm of mental life.

there are many pseudo-experts who have no idea that they do not know what they are doing (the illusion of validity), and that as a general proposition subjective confidence is commonly too high and often uninformative.

a puzzling limitation of our mind: our excessive confidence in what we believe we know, and our apparent inability to acknowledge the full extent of our ignorance and the uncertainty of the world we live in. We are prone to overestimate how much we understand about the world and to underestimate the role of chance in events. Overconfidence is fed by the illusory certainty of hindsight.

puzzling limitation of our mind: our excessive confidence in what we believe we know, and our apparent inability to acknowledge the full extent of our ignorance and the uncertainty of the world we live in. We

What you learned about the Müller-Lyer illusion did not change the way you see the lines, but it changed your behavior. You now know that you cannot trust your impression of the length of lines that have fins appended to them, and you also know that in the standard Müller-Lyer display you cannot trust what you see. When asked about the length of the lines, you will report your informed belief, not the illusion that you continue to see.

We marvel at the story of the firefighter who has a sudden urge to escape a burning house just before it collapses, because the firefighter knows the danger intuitively, "without knowing how he knows." However, we also do not know how we immediately know that a person we see as we enter a room is our friend Peter.

the accurate intuitions of experts are better explained by the effects of prolonged practice than by heuristics.

puzzling limitation of our mind: our excessive confidence in what we believe we know, and our apparent inability to acknowledge the full extent of our ignorance and the uncertainty of the world we live in.

Facts that we know do not always come to mind when we need them. People

raramente nos quedamos sin saber qué responder. Es cierto que en ocasiones nos enfrentamos a

people who spend their time, and earn their living, studying a particular topic produce poorer predictions than dart-throwing monkeys who would have distributed their choices evenly over the options. Even in the region they knew best, experts were not significantly better than nonspecialists.

Those who know more forecast very slightly better than those who know less. But those with the most knowledge are often less reliable. The reason is that the person who acquires more knowledge develops an enhanced illusion of her skill and becomes unrealistically overconfident. "We reach the point of diminishing marginal predictive returns for knowledge disconcertingly quickly," Tetlock writes.