Quotes About Observation

Not only is it difficult for the journalist to think more like a historian, but it is, alas, the historian who is becoming more like the journalist.

This, perhaps, is true self-confidence: the ability to look at the world without the need to find signs that stroke one's ego.fn3

It illustrates a severe limitation to our learning from observations or experience and the fragility of our knowledge.

I don't particularly care about the usual. If you want to get an idea of a friend's temperament, ethics, and personal elegance, you need to look at him under the tests of severe circumstances, not under the regular rosy glow of daily life.

That second is not in itself significant enough for someone to draw conclusions.

Si veo a una mujer embarazada, el sexo del niño que lleva en su seno es para mí una cuestión puramente aleatoria (un 50% para cada sexo); pero no para el ginecólogo, que podría haber hecho una ecografía. En la práctica, la aleatoriedad es fundamentalmente información incompleta.

There are traps built into any kind of knowledge gained from observation

I believe that risk aversion does not exist: what we observe is, simply, a residual of ergodicity. People are, simply, trying to avoid financial suicide and take a certain attitude to tail risks.

Since one small observation can disprove a statement, while millions can hardly confirm it, disconfirmation is more rigorous than confirmation.

But to do things right, they ought to learn to keep silent in the absence of news of significance.

which requires day-to-day monitoring.

And of course you learn from the errors of others. You may never know what type of person someone is unless they are given opportunities to violate moral or ethical codes.

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. If you think the task is easy, you will be disappointed—few humans have a natural ability to do this. I confess that I am not one of them; it does not come naturally to me.fn2

El arte es una conversación unilateral con lo no observado.

Extremistan, you will have trouble figuring out the average from any sample since it can depend so much on one single observation. The idea is not more difficult than that. In Extremistan, one unit can easily affect the total in a disproportionate way. In this world, you should always be suspicious of the knowledge you derive from data. This is a very simple test of uncertainty that allows you to distinguish between the two kinds of randomness. Capish?

The scientific association with a big idea, the "brand name," goes to the one who connects the dots, not the one who makes a casual observation—even Charles Darwin, who uncultured scientists claim "invented" the survival of the fittest, was not the first to mention it.

El lector podrá observar en esta falacia del viaje de ida y vuelta la injusticia de los estereotipos;

Cygnus Atratus In his Treatise on Human Nature, the Scots philosopher David Hume posed the issue in the following way (as rephrased in the now famous black swan problem by John Stuart Mill): No amount of observations of white swans can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion.

These people are the ones to watch out for

Theories that have not yet been known to be wrong, not falsified yet, but are exposed to be proved wrong. Why is a theory never right? Because we will never know if all the swans are white

The floor of the Parthenon is curved in reality so we can see it as straight.

Develops intuitions from practice, goes from observations to books

But he said that all men made you sorry for them if you looked at them closely, and that in fact one ought to guard against that excess of compassion which arose suddenly, from looking closely at people.

Nuevo astro que surge», decía mi padre cada vez que nombrábamos a la señora Ghiran. «Nuevo astro que surge» o sólo «nuevo astro» era siempre su ironía cada vez que nosotros nos entusiasmábamos con alguien.