Quotes About Explanation

If some really acute observer made as much of egotism as Freud has made of sex, people would forget a good deal about sex and find the explanation for everything in egotism.

Part of the value in asking naïve questions, Bennett says, is that it forces people to explain things simply, which can help bring clarity to an otherwise complex issue. "If I just keep saying, 'I don't get it, can you tell me why once more?,' it forces people to synthesize and simplify—to strip away the irrelevances and get to the core idea.

root cause of the problem may be happening, further isolating the problem. This section begins with a brief explanation of how ping works. It then moves on to some suggestions and analysis of how to use the ping command to isolate problems by removing some items from consideration.

People will listen a great deal more patiently while you explain your mistakes than when you explain your successes.

The bad debater never knows that one explanation is better than five.

She is a hedgehog. She has a theory that explains everything, and it gives her the illusion that she understands the world.

The ultimate test of an explanation is whether it would have made the event predictable in advance.

Narrative fallacies arise inevitably from our continuous attempt to make sense of the world.

our mind is strongly biased toward causal explanations and does not deal well with "mere statistics." When our attention is called to an event, associative memory will look for its cause—more precisely, activation will automatically spread to any cause that is already stored in memory.

As we noted in chapter 12, our normal way of thinking is causal. We naturally attend to the particular, following and creating causally coherent stories about individual cases, in which failures are often attributed to errors, and errors to biases. The ease with which bad judgments can be explained leaves no space for noise in our accounts of errors.

She has a coherent story that explains all she knows, and the coherence makes her feel good.

If you come upon an observation that does not seem to fit the model, you assume that there must be a perfectly good explanation that you are somehow missing. You give the theory the benefit of the doubt, trusting the community of experts who have accepted it.

The Illusions of Pundits The idea that the future is unpredictable is undermined every day by the ease with which the past is explained

counties are different from other counties for a reason, that there must be a cause that explains this difference. As we shall see, however

Amos was more conservative than I was about hunches, and he cor- rectly pointed out that appealing to suggestion did not help us understand anchoring, because we did not know how to explain suggestion.

Statisticamente tutto si spiega, personalmente tutto si complica.

There's something about death that gets our attention. When it's close—in the family or shared by the community—it sends us back to our most basic understanding of things. Back to our presuppositions you might say. Death requires of us an explanation. Some invoke the periodic table, some the human condition, and some go back to church—at least for a while.

When there is a gap—between your face and your race, between the baby and the mother, between your body and yourself—you are expected, everywhere you go, to explain the gap.

Traditionally economics has ignored politics, but understanding politics is crucial for explaining world inequality.

This is because, second, sometimes the winners won for reasons other than the mere

Joel Cairo: You always have a very smooth explanation ready. Sam Spade: What do you want me to do, learn to stutter?

If wishes were horses, there would be an easy explanation for all this horseshit

There is absolutely nothing certain in this world, Noah, other than the truth you see directly in front of your eyes at a given moment. Truth has a habit of mutating itself; it is always possible that, no matter what the evidence in front of you might suggest, there can be another explanation for any event you can imagine.

There is absolutely nothing certain in this world, Noah, other than the truth you see directly in front of your eyes at a given moment. Truth has a habit of mutating itself; it is always possible that, no matter what the evidence in front of you might suggest, there can be another explanation for any event you can imagine. All