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Quotes About Observation

He felt lonely. His solitude was thrown into relief by being observed.
~ Michael Frayn
Children dawdle to look at what adults hurry past. They take time because they have time. They see the world through fresh eyes. Maybe this is why artists who push us to look more carefully at simple things may also strike a slightly melancholic note. They remind us of a childlike condition of wonderment that we abandoned once we became adults and that we need art to highlight occasionally, if only to recall for us what we have given up.
~ Michael Kimmelman
good science is to see what everyone else can see but think what no one else has ever said.
~ Michael Lewis
One absolutely cannot tell, by watching, the difference between a .300 hitter and a .275 hitter. The difference is one hit every two weeks.
~ Michael Lewis
It shouldn't be the Centers for Disease Control. It should be the Centers for Disease Observation and Reporting. That's what they do well.
~ Michael Lewis
a tourist can't help but have a distorted opinion of a place: he meets unrepresentative people, has unrepresentative experiences, and runs around imposing upon the place the fantastic mental pictures he had in his head when he got there.
~ Michael Lewis
Men in general judge more by the sense of sight than by the sense of touch, because everyone can see but only a few can test by feeling. Everyone sees what you seem to be, few know what you really are; and those few do not dare take a stand against the general opinion. —Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince
~ Michael Lewis
Walking through the ruins, she saw all over again what she had seen so many times: how much better Americans were at responding to a disaster than preventing it.
~ Michael Lewis
The human mind was just bad at seeing things it did not expect to see, and a bit too eager to see what it expected to see.
~ Michael Lewis
Don't worry. You gave him the right answer." Actually, Michael was after something more important than the fate of his Briarcrest teammate. "I wanted to see what type of person he was," he said later. "If he's pulling scholarships that they'd promised kids, would you want to play for that kind of person? Be around that kind of person?" Coach O wasn't that kind of person, he decided; more interestingly, Coach
~ Michael Lewis
By changing the context in which two things are compared, you submerge certain features and force others to the surface. "It
~ Michael Lewis
Even as late as the summer of 2006, as home prices began to fall, it took a certain kind of person to see the ugly facts and react to them—to discern, in the profile of the beautiful young lady, the face of an old witch. Each of these people told you something about the state of the financial system, in the same way that people who survive a plane crash told you something about the accident, and also about the nature of people who survive accidents.
~ Michael Lewis
I share your feeling that such behavior is, in some sense, unwise or erroneous, but this does not mean that it does not occur,' Amos wrote to an American economist who complained about the description of human nature implied by 'Value Theory.' 'A theory of vision cannot be faulted for predicting optical illusions. Similarly, a descriptive theory of choice cannot be rejected on the grounds that it predicts 'irrational behavior' if the behavior in question is in fact observed.
~ Michael Lewis
Once, he got himself invited to a meeting with the CEO of Bank of America, Ken Lewis. "I was sitting there listening to him. I had an epiphany. I said to myself, 'Oh my God, he's dumb!' A lightbulb went off. The guy running one of the biggest banks in the world is dumb!
~ Michael Lewis
In my entire life I never saw a sell-side guy come in and say, 'Short my market
~ Michael Lewis
I thought, Holy shit, who is paying attention?" Thus
~ Michael Lewis
Passing one tableau of blood and guts and moving on to the next, I caught myself glancing over my shoulder to make sure some Viking wasn't following me with a battle-ax. The effect was so disorienting that when I reached the end and found a Japanese woman immobile and reading on a bench, I had to poke her on the shoulder to make sure she was real.
~ Michael Lewis
supernatural gift, but it was a matter as much of his limitations as of his strengths. He could see human society in ways that most businessmen could not, because he was not very much a part of it. And consciously or not, by retiring to his floating island, he preserved this precious limitation.
~ Michael Lewis
No one ever asked Friedberg the question: If my knowledge is no longer useful, who needs me? But it was a good question. "There is stuff the farmer picks up on that we haven't got data on yet," he said. "For example, are there bugs in the field? But over time
~ Michael Lewis
that'll go to zero. Everything will be observed. Everything will be predicted.
~ Michael Lewis
Cambiando el contexto en que se comparan dos cosas se ocultan ciertos rasgos y emergen otros a la superficie
~ Michael Lewis
It confirmed Biederman's sense that "most advances in science come not from eureka moments but from 'hmmm, that's funny.
~ Michael Lewis
It's easy to have no observable health effects when you never look," the medical director of the Lawrence Livermore lab said, back in the 1980s, after seeing how the private contractors who ran Hanford studied the matter. In her jaw-dropping 2013 book Plutopia, University of Maryland historian Kate Brown compares and contrasts American plutonium production at Hanford and its Soviet twin, Ozersk.
~ Michael Lewis
They really should just change the name," she said. "It shouldn't be the Centers for Disease Control. It should be the Centers for Disease Observation and Reporting. That's what they do well.
~ Michael Lewis