Quotes About Interpretation

The problem of knowledge is that there are many more books on birds written by ornithologists than books on birds written by birds and books on ornithologists written by birds

More data means more information, but it also means more false information.

In science you need to understand the world; in business you need others to misunderstand it.

History is opaque. You see what comes out, not the script that produces events, the generator of history.

Asking science to explain life and vital matters is equivalent to asking a grammarian to explain poetry.

You view the world from within a model.

it is impossible for our brain to see anything in raw form without some interpretation. We may not even always be conscious of it.

What they call philosophy I call literature; what they call literature I call journalism; what they call journalism I call gossip; and what they call gossip I call (generously) voyeurism.

We have far too many ways to interpret past events for our own good.

Author discussed what he calls the narrative fallacy. This refers to our limited ability to look at a sequence of facts without weaving an explanation into them.

For The curse of modernity is that we are increasingly populated by a class of people who are better at explaining than understanding, or better at explaining than doing.

In the complex world, the notion of "cause" itself is suspect; it is either nearly impossible to detect or not really defined—another reason to ignore newspapers, with their constant supply of causes for things.

whenever I hear work ethics I interpret inefficient mediocrity).

First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact (unlike the bird). Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.

When the person is highly intelligent, he can astonish you with the most far-fetched, yet completely plausible interpretations of the most innocuous remark. If

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

From such examples, I derived the rule that what is called "healthy" is generally unhealthy, just as "social" networks are antisocial, and the "knowledge"-based economy is typically ignorant.

Engineers and tinkerers develop things while history books are written by academics; we will have to refine historical interpretations of growth, innovation, and many such things.

You need a story to displace a story. Metaphors and stories are far more potent (alas) than ideas; they are also easier to remember and more fun to read. If I have to go after what I call the narrative disciplines, my best tool is a narrative.

The French thinker and poet Paul Valery was surprised to listen to a commentary of his poems that found meanings that had until then escaped him (of course, it was pointed out to him that these were intended by his subconscious).

During a radio interview, when I tried explaining to the journalist the nuance and the difference between the two statements I was told that I was "too complicated"; so I simply walked out of the studio, leaving them in the lurch. The depressing part is that those people who were committing such mistakes were educated journalists entrusted to represent the world to us lay persons.

The fact that you survived is a condition that may weaken your interpretation of the properties of the survival, including the shallow notion of "cause.

do not use this argument to avoid trying to learn from history. All I am saying is that it is not so simple; be suspicious of the "because" and handle it with care—particularly in situations where you suspect silent evidence.

it is easy to see that history is truly written by losers with time on their hands and a protected academic position.