Quotes About Insight

Like everyone else, scientists have intuitions. Indeed, hunches and flashes of insight—the sense that something is true even if you can't prove it—have been behind countless breakthroughs. The interplay between System 1 and System 2 can be subtle and creative.

The truth is, the truth is elusive.

Foresight isn't a mysterious gift bestowed at birth. It is the product of particular ways of thinking, of gathering information, of updating beliefs.

Need for cognition" is the psychological term for the tendency to engage in and enjoy hard mental slogs. [...] superforecasters score high in need-for-cognition tests.

What people didn't grasp is that the only alternative to a controlled experiment that delivers real insight is an uncontrolled experiment that produces merely the illusion of insight. Cochrane

What qualifies as a good question? It's one that gets us thinking about something worth thinking about. So one way to identify a good question is what I call the smack-the-forehead test: when you read the question after time has passed, you smack your forehead and say, "If only I had thought of that before!

Popular books often draw a dichotomy between intuition and analysis—"blink" versus "think"—and pick one or the other as the way to go. I am more of a thinker than a blinker, but blink-think is another false dichotomy. The choice isn't either/or, it is how to blend them in evolving situations.

explore the similarities and differences between your views and those of others—and pay special attention to prediction markets and other Methods of extracting wisdom from crowds. Synthesize all these different views into a single vision as acute as that of a dragonfly. Finally, express your judgment as precisely as you can, using a finely grained scale of probability.

What make the difference is correctly identifying and responding to subtler information so you zero in on the eventual outcome faster than others.

The appropriate attitude to mystical experiences for those who haven't had them is probably one of agnosticism, the withholding of belief either that mystical experiences provide genuine insight into the nature of reality or that they are delusions.

This is what fascinates me most in existence: the peculiar necessity of imagining what is, in fact, real.

My definition of a good book is one that you would read for pleasure despite having no prior interest in the subject. The ostensible subject may be whale hunting, or survival in Auschwitz, or waking up as a cockroach—but you don't read it because you're into fisheries or Nazis or entomology: you read it because your life was poorer before you started it, and because now you can't stop.

You must, although you know you won't like what you'll see.

Autobiography is an unrivaled vehicle for telling the truth about other people.

The detective story is the normal recreation of noble minds.

Alfred the Great] possessed the supreme military virtue of willingness to be taught by the enemy.

some lesssons couldn't be taught, only learned.

I think you can tell when you meet someone whether they read novels. There's some hollowness if they don't.

The worst men often give the best advice.

Know a man's faith, and you knew at least half the man. Know his wife, and you knew the other half.

La sabiduria consiste en saber cuando evitar al perfeccion

a writing in the sand which all may read but few understand." - Philip Jose Farmer in 'Riders of the Purple Wage

They say eyes clear with age.

Poetry is an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are.