Quotes About Analysis

Investment advisory services, earnings forecasts, and chart patterns are useless.

I'm following it perfectly. Although, if this were a novel, I'd take the trouble to reread the last paragraph as carefully as possible.

A religion can be judged only on the basis of another religion.

The western mind makes definitions; it draws lines.

But literature is unique. To understand literature, you read it with your head, but you interpret it with your heart. The two are forced to work together-and, quite frankly, they often don't get along.

Because the floor numbers were listed next to the names and phone extensions of committee personnel, it was possible to calculate roughly who worked in proximity to whom. And by transposing telephone extensions from the roster and listing them in sequence, it was even possible to determine who worked for whom.

The innards of Ping's G5 were supposedly computer-engineered with a process called "finite-element analysis," a term that for all I know was stolen from an old Star Trek episode.

But I try not to think with my gut. If I'm serious about understanding the world, thinking with anything besides my brain, as tempting as that might be, is likely to get me into trouble.

Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep thoughts can be winnowed from deep nonsense.

We tend not to be especially critical when presented with evidence that seems to confirm our prejudices.

Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking.

the lack is not in intelligence, which is in plentiful supply; rather, the scarce commodity is systematic training in critical thinking.

Skepticism does not sell well.

In a way, science might be described as paranoid thinking applied to Nature: we are looking for natural conspiracies, for connections among apparently disparate data. Our objective is to abstract patterns from Nature (right-hemisphere thinking), but many proposed patterns do not in fact correspond to the data. Thus all proposed patterns must be subjected to the sieve of critical analysis (left-hemisphere thinking).

But the brain does much more than just recollect it inter-compares, it synthesizes, it analyzes, it generates abstractions. The simplest thought like the concept of the number one has an elaborate logical underpinning. The brain has its own language for testing the structure and consistency of the world.

Especially where the implications of what we think we are seeing seem to be profound, we may not exercise adequate self-discipline and self-criticism.

The lure of the marvelous blunts our critical faculties.

All science asks is to employ the same levels of skepticism we use in buying a used car or in judging the quality of analgesics or beer from their television commercials.

I try not to think with my gut. If I'm serious about understanding the world, thinking with anything besides my brain, as tempting as that might be, is likely to get me into trouble. Really, it's okay to reserve judgement until the evidence is in.

La búsqueda de configuraciones sin análisis crítico y la ostentación de un rígido escepticismo sin la búsqueda de configuraciones son las antípodas de una ciencia incompleta. La búsqueda efectiva del saber requiere la concurrencia de ambas funciones.

This is one of the fallacies in the baloney detection kit, the enumeration of favorable circumstances. We

Major scientific insights are characteristically intuitive, and equally characteristically described in scientific papers by linear analytical arguments. There is no anomaly in this: it is, rather, just as it should be. The creative act has major right-hemisphere components. But arguments on the validity of the result are largely left-hemisphere functions.

En cierto modo, la ciencia puede ser definida como el pensamiento paranoide aplicado a la naturaleza. En efecto, andamos a la búsqueda de conspiraciones naturales, de nexos entre hechos aparentemente dispares.

I try not to think with my gut. If I'm serious about understanding the world, thinking with anything besides my brain, as tempting as that might be, is likely to get me in trouble. Really, it's okay to reserve judgment until the evidence is in.