Quotes About Clarity

Prediction, not narration, is the real test of our understanding of the world.

You do not want to win an argument. You want to win.

he tends to mistake the unknown for the nonexistent.

Most info-Web-media-newspaper types have a hard time swallowing the idea that knowledge is reached (mostly) by removing junk from peoples heads

But never engage in detailed overexplanations of why something is important: one debases a principle by endlessly justifying it.

I suspect that they put Socrates to death because there is something terribly unattractive, alienating, and nonhuman in thinking with too much clarity.

Perhaps the wise one is the one who knows that he cannot see things far away.

So let us call here the teleological fallacy the illusion that you know exactly where you are going, and that you knew exactly where you were going in the past, and that others have succeeded in the past by knowing where they were going.

Categorizing is necessary for humans, but it becomes pathological when the category is seen as definitive, preventing people from considering the fuzziness of boundaries, let alone revising their categories.

Our propensity to impose meaning and concepts blocks our awareness of the details making up the concept. However

Our propensity to impose meaning and concepts blocks our awareness of the details making up the concept.

you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple.

During a radio interview, when I tried explaining to the journalist the nuance and the difference between the two statements I was told that I was "too complicated"; so I simply walked out of the studio, leaving them in the lurch. The depressing part is that those people who were committing such mistakes were educated journalists entrusted to represent the world to us lay persons.

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.

One may have a million ways to explain things, but the true explanation is unique, whether or not it is within our reach.

What is easy to conceive is clear to express / Words to say it would come effortlessly.

Out of sight, out of mind: we harbor a natural, even physical, scorn of the abstract.

could not understand what made one explanation more likely than the other

They love precision at the expense of applicability.

People with too much smoke and complicated tricks and methods in their brains start missing elementary, very elementary things. Persons in the real world can't afford to miss these things; otherwise they crash the plane. Unlike

What emerges from the minority rule is more likely to be black-and-white, binary rules.

via negativa (acting by removing) is more powerful and less error-prone than via positiva (acting by addition

via negativa (acting by removing) is more powerful and less error-prone than via positiva (acting by additionfn1).

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