Quotes About Inference

Taleb likes to invoke Popper: '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.

The participants in all conditions grossly overestimated their surprise expressivity," Schützwohl wrote. Why? They "inferred their likely facial expressions to the surprising event from…folk-psychological beliefs about emotion-face associations." Folk psychology is the kind of crude psychology we glean from cultural sources such as sitcoms.

Where Annie came from, one assumed the worst and worked backwards from there.

For example, if every time you eat popcorn, one hour later you fart so hard that it inflates your socks, you can reasonably assume popcorn makes you gassy.

information available from the retina and other sensory organs is not sufficient to reconstruct the world. Size, distance, and other properties need to be inferred from uncertain cues, which in turn have to be learned by experience. Based on this experience, the brain draws unconscious inferences about what a sensation means. In other words, perception is a kind of bet about what's really out there.

Nothing is more wonderful about human beings than their ability to abstract, infer, calculate, and produce rules, algorithms, and tables that enable them to work marvels.

Reasoning by analogy is like filling balloons with liquid helium. It won't fly.

When he would have Jonah cast into the sea, God sent a wind by stirring up a whirlwind [Jonah 1:4]. Those who do not think that God controls the government of the universe will say that this was outside the common course. Yet from it I infer that no wind ever arises or increases except by God's express command. Otherwise

There is a world of difference between inference and conjecture, and imagination must not roam at the cost of authenticity. Paul

Human science is an uncertain guess.

There is no reasoning, no process of inference or comparison there is no thinking about things, no putting two and two together there are no ideas - the animal does not think of the box or of the food or of the act he is to perform.

No matter how well you argue from premises to conclusion, your conclusion will be weak if your premises are weak.

noscitur a sociis

Intuition,' he answered with a shrug. 'It is the only tool left to the mathematician in the absence of proof.

The reason why men enjoy seeing a likeness is, that in contemplating it they find themselves learning or inferring, and saying perhaps, "Ah, that is he." For if you happen not to have seen the original, the pleasure will be due not to the imitation as such, but to the execution, the coloring, or some such other cause.

All proofs rest on premises.

Of inference, all are capable; of judgment, only a few.

Publicly, defense lawyers cling to the text book theory that the defendant has no burden of proof and that no negative inference should ever be taken when a defendant doesn't defend himself on the witness stand.

Statistics: the mathematical theory of ignorance.

The existence of dark matter and dark energy are inferred from observations! They are not theoretical constructs. Though invisible, both reveal their presence through the effects that they exert on motions of celestial bodies and in the case of dark matter - the bending of light as well.

It is common error to infer that things which are consecutive in order of time have necessarily the relation of cause and effect.

Don't put it into words. Let us leave some things to be understood, not said.

The population of an inference is thus equivalent to the breadth or scope of an argument.

There is no fire without some smoke.