Quotes About Oversimplification

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.

At the risk of oversimplification, maybe abiding doesn't require deep analysis. Perhaps all I need to ask myself at the moment is whether or not I am still tender. Still flexible. At times I am neither. The branch that snaps easily is either dead or stuck in a long-past winter.

In general, we are lazy as consumers and just want to label people as good guy, bad guy.

The method of science depends upon our attempts to describe the world with simple theories: theories that are complex may become untestable , even if they happen to be true. Science may be described as the art of systematic over-simplification–the art of discerning what we may with advantage omit.

People in my situation get to read about themselves whether they want to or not. It's generally wrong. Or oversimplified - which is sometimes useful.

When you take a subject and reduce it to something like a four-second sound bite and a check mark on a ballot, I think that that's inappropriate and insensitive.

We live in an age of sound bites and buzz words.

And the Black Swan is what we leave out of simplification.

Where simplifications fail, causing the most damage, is when something nonlinear is simplified with the linear as a substitute. That is the most common Procrustean bed.

the same condition that makes us simplify pushes us to think that the world is less random than it actually is. And the Black Swan is what we leave out of simplification.

Categorizing always produces reduction in true complexity.

There's a small paradox here; the job of supposed intellectuals is to combat oversimplification or reductionism and to say, well, actually, it's more complicated than that.

Il problema con i luoghi comuni è che, purtroppo, spesso dicono la verità. In modo grossolano, ma la dicono.

We think that once one has discovered that thirty thousand, let us say, Negroes, Chinese or Puerto Ricans or whatever have syphilis or don't, or are unemployed or not, that we've discovered something about the Negroes, Chinese or Puerto Ricans. But in fact, this is not so. In fact, we've discovered nothing very useful because people cannot be handled in that way.

we are all guilty of oversimplification at one point or another. It's an enticing idea. It fulfills our need for instant gratification. We find one thing and scream, "Eureka!" We found IT—the one thing that explains it all. The only trouble is that it never works. We are more likely to squeeze gold from our coffee grinder than we are to meet with success when adopting an idea that has been simplified beyond recognition.

It'll always be easier to fight others if you reduce them to a single word or look at them just one way.

Of course, I'm guilty of oversimplification here. First, there are real-world legal concerns: doctors aren't punished for overdiagnosis, but they are punished for failing to diagnose. So it's hard for doctors to ignore incidentalomas. Second,

The Icesave matter is complex and it is understandable that the issue has been oversimplified by many. Unfortunately some of the basic facts of the matter have been unilaterally interpreted, and sometimes distorted, giving rise to unjustified criticism of the conduct of the Icelandic authorities.

Community-based policing has now come to mean everything. It's a slogan. It has come to mean so many different things that people who endorse it, such as the Congress of the United States, do not know what they are talking about.

Instagram doesn't leave a lot of room for nuance.

To bluntly suggest that all Nazis had a common, homogenous extraordinary personality that predisposed them to the commission of extraordinary evil is an obvious oversimplification.

The historian always oversimplifies, and hastily selects a manageable minority of facts and faces out of a crowd of souls and events whose multitudinous complexity he can never quite embrace or comprehend.

For every problem, there is one solution which is simple, neat and wrong.

There is always an easy solution to every human problem -- neat, plausible, and wrong.