Quotes About Inference

Fact is what we can see or discern; truth is the larger significance we extrapolate from those facts.

B. A." Here you can infer B, no matter which

With perverse logic he inferred that to foresee a circumstantial detail is to prevent its happening. Faithful to this feeble magic, he would invent, so that they might not happen, the most atrocious particulars.

Probability theory is nothing more than common sense reduced to calculation. -1819

Je n'avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse.

Ex pede Herculem. "From his foot, [we can measure] Hercules", is a maxim of proportionality inspired by an experiment attributed to Pythagoras. In other words, one can extrapolate the whole from the part. Ex ungue leonem, "from its claw [we can know] the lion," is a similar phrase.

Nisbett and Borgida summarize the results in a memorable sentence: Subjects' unwillingness to deduce the particular from the general was matched only by their willingness to infer the general from the particular.

His observation was astute and correct: occasions on which he praised a performance were likely to be followed by a disappointing performance, and punishments were typically followed by an improvement. But the inference he had drawn about the efficacy of reward and punishment was completely off the mark.

System 1 runs ahead of the facts in constructing a rich image on the basis of scraps of evidence.

regression inevitably occurs when the correlation between two measures is less than perfect

Statistics produce many observations that appear to beg for causal explanations but do not lend themselves to such explanations.

automatic search for causes shapes our thinking

Subjects' unwillingness to deduce the particular from the general was matched only by their willingness to infer the general from the particular.

is also the case that depressed children who spend some time standing on their head or hug a cat for twenty minutes a day will also show improvement. Most readers of such headlines will automatically infer that the energy drink or the cat hugging caused an improvement, but this conclusion is completely unjustified. Depressed

WYSIATI—what you see is all there is.

anchoring effect. It occurs when people consider a particular value for an unknown quantity before estimating that quantity

System 1 operates as a machine for jumping to conclusions.

To teach students any psychology they did not know before, you must surprise them. But which surprise will do? Nisbett and Borgida found that when they presented their students with a surprising statistical fact, the students managed to learn nothing at all. But when the students were surprised by individual cases—two nice people who had not helped—they immediately made the generalization and inferred that helping is more difficult than they had thought.

Permitting statistical treatment and the hypnotic presence of numbers and decimal points to befog causal relationships is little better than superstition.

In order to be a sound argument, however, two things are necessary: The argument must be valid, and its premises must be true.

the practical utility of Formal Logic to-day lies not so much in the establishment of positive conclusions as in the prompt detection and exposure of invalid inference.

Sherlock Holmes used the process of induction—not deduction.

Occam's razor. The simplest explanation is usually the correct one.

Holmesian philosophy more apt: 'When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.