Quotes About Explanation

These may seem irrational to an outsider who defines rationality in terms of what he can explain.

narrative fallacy addresses our limited ability to look at sequences of facts without weaving an explanation into them, or, equivalently, forcing a logical link, an arrow of relationship, upon them. Explanations

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

La maldición de la modernidad es que cada vez estamos más colonizados por una clase de personas cuya capacidad para explicar las cosas supera a su capacidad de comprensión. O cuya capacidad explicativa supera a sus acciones.

It is hard to explain to naive data-driven people that risk is in the future, not in the past.

that the Black Swan has three attributes: unpredictability, consequences, and retrospective explainability. Let

The narrative fallacy addresses our limited ability to look at sequences of facts without weaving an explanation into them, or, equivalently, forcing a logical link, an arrow of relationship, upon them.

Rationality does not depend on explicit verbalistic explanatory factors; it is only what aids survival, what avoids ruin.

I developed the governing impression that our minds are wonderful explanation machines, capable of making sense out of almost anything, capable of mounting explanations for all manner of phenomena, and generally incapable of accepting the idea of unpredictability

He dicho que el Cisne Negro tiene tres atributos: la impredecibilidad, las consecuencias y la explicabilidad retrospectiva. Examinemos eso de la impredecibilidad.*

The implication is that we feel emotions (limbic brain) then find an explanation (neocortex). As

The curse of modernity is that we are increasingly populated by a class of people who are better at explaining than understanding

we can be drawn not to the most logical explanation of our behavior but to the most damaging, to that which puts us in the worst light morally.

Así pues el señor G., al haberse impuesto la tarea de buscar y explicar la belleza de la modernidad, representa mujeres muy arregladas y embellecidas por todas las pompas artificiales, cualquiera que sea el estrato social al que pertenecen.

I'm going to call the police!" Cindy said. "Hold it," I said, "I can explain everything!" "It better be good," said Cindy. "It better," said Celine. I couldn't think of anything. I just stood there.

É muito fácil esconder nossa ignorância debaixo de expressões como plano de criação, unidade de padrão, etc., e pensar que explicamos um fato apenas por reafirmá-lo.

It is so easy to hide our ignorance under such expressions as the plan of creation or unity of design, etc., and to think that we give an explanation when we only restate a fact.

Esto demuestra lo necesario que es el que todo nuevo punto de vista se explique con una extensión considerable, con el fin de despertar la atención del público.

Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence or overwork?

History is written by the survivors, a narrative they compose to explain events to themselves. So the historicity of journals like this one—their accuracy and authenticity—is a function of the reliability of the narrator

I've suffered for what I know, so I'm not going to let you off the hook with a simple one-liner. I think you deserve a detailed explanation.

And then the colossal success of modern natural science and the associated technology can lead us to feel that it unlocks all mysteries, that it will ultimately explain everything, that human science must be developed on the same basic plan, or even ultimately reduced to physics, or at least organic chemistry. And

This distinction between correlation and causation is crucial to the proper interpretation of statistical results.

Statistics cannot prove anything with certainty. Instead, the power of statistical inference derives from observing some pattern or outcome and then using probability to determine the most likely explanation for that outcome.