Quotes About Observation

Our propensity to impose meaning and concepts blocks our awareness of the details making up the concept.

When you look at the past, the past will always be deterministic, since only one single observation took place.

How can we logically go from specific instances to reach general conclusions? How do we know what we know? How do we know that what we have observed from given objects and events suffices to enable us to figure out their other properties? There

An observation that people who live permanently in an adoptive country tend to progressively generalize the bad and particularize the good, that is, attribute the bad traits in people they encounter to the national trait of the natives, and the good things to the individual. This holds equally well for French people living in the U.S. as it does for Americans living in France.

One single observation can invalidate a general statement derived from millennia of confirmatory sightings of millions of white swans.

I've looked in history for heroes who became heroes for what they did not do, but it is hard to observe nonaction; I could not easily find any.

central problem is that birds rarely write more than ornithologists—Combining

One single observation can invalidate a general statement derived from millennia of confirmatory sightings of

naïve empiricism, we have a natural tendency to look for instances that confirm our story and our vision of the world—these instances are always easy to find. Alas

a series of corroborative facts is not necessarily evidence. Seeing

Learning from the Mistakes of Others

the wealthiest are to be found among those less suspected to be wealthy.

This, perhaps, is true self-confidence: the ability to look at the world without the need to find signs that stroke one's ego.*

Mistaking a naïve observation of the past as something definitive or representative of the future is the one and only cause of our inability to understand the Black Swan.

If you believe that witnessing an additional white swan will bring confirmation that there are no black swans, then you should also accept the statement, on purely logical grounds, that the sighting of a red Mini Cooper should confirm that there are no black swans.

Popper expuso el mecanismo de las conjeturas y las refutaciones, que funciona como sigue: se formula una conjetura (osada) y se empieza a buscar la observación que demostraría que estamos en un error. Ésta es la alternativa a nuestra búsqueda de casos confirmatorios. Si pensamos que la tarea es fácil, quedaremos decepcionados: pocos seres humanos tienen la habilidad natural de hacerlo.

In Extremistan, inequalities are such that one single observation can disproportionately impact the aggregate, or the total.

George Soros, cuando hace una apuesta financiera, no deja de buscar ejemplos que demuestren que su teoría inicial es falsa. Tal vez sea esto la auténtica confianza en uno mismo: la capacidad de observar el mundo sin necesidad de encontrar signos que halaguen el propio ego.*

Getting rich results in his seeing flaws in the goods and services he buys.

Popper introduced the mechanism of conjectures and refutations, which works as follows: you formulate a (bold) conjecture and you start looking for the observation that would prove you wrong. This is the alternative to our search for confirmatory instances.

You can test a given rule either directly, by looking at instances where it works, or indirectly, by focusing on where it does not work. As we saw earlier, disconfirming instances are far more powerful in establishing truth. Yet we tend to not be aware of this property.

No single observation can meaningfully affect the aggregate.

our preference for the anecdotal over the empirical.

how we tend to generalize from what we see.