Quotes About Interpretation

you can always mention Wittgenstein since he is vague enough to always seem relevant

Wittgenstein is occasionally mentioned (you can always mention Wittgenstein since he is vague enough to always seem relevant).

In this world, you should always be suspicious of the knowledge you derive from data.

central problem is that birds rarely write more than ornithologists—Combining

We react to a piece of information not on its logical merit, but on the basis of which framework surrounds it, and how it registers with our social-emotional system. Logical

You can replace lies with truth; but myth is only displaced with a narrative.

I can find confirmation for just about anything, the

Per il robusto un errore è informazione, per il debole un errore è solo un errore

So we can learn a lot from data—but not as much as we expect. Sometimes a lot of data can be meaningless; at other times one single piece of information can be very meaningful. It

but a problem in our minds, stemming from the way we look at it.

One of the methods, called sortes virgilianae (fate as decided by the epic poet Virgil), involved opening Virgil's Aeneid at random and interpreting the line that presented itself as direction for the course of action. You should use such method for every sticky business decision. I will repeat until I get hoarse: the ancients evolved hidden and sophisticated ways and tricks to exploit randomness. For

is neither meaningful nor relevant.

With novelists, names and dates are wrong, the rest is true. With historians, names and dates are correct, the rest is false.

but there is no point reading too much into success stories because we do not see the full picture.

The more information you give someone, the more hypotheses they will formulate along the way, and the worse off they will be. They see more random noise and mistake it for information.

how we tend to generalize from what we see.

Reverse-engineering problem: It is easier to predict how an ice cube would melt into a puddle than, looking at a puddle, to guess the shape of the ice cube that may have caused it. This "inverse problem" makes narrative disciplines and accounts (such as histories) suspicious.

There is no absolute measure of good or bad. It is not what you are telling people, it is how you are saying it.

When constrained systems, those hungry for natural disorder, collapse, as they are eventually bound to, since they are fragile, failure is never seen as the result of fragility. Rather, such failure is interpreted as the product of poor forecasting.

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

Give me a few lines written by any man and I will find enough to get him hung

the difference between noise and signal. Noise is what you are supposed to ignore, signal what you need to heed.

The more frequently you look at data, the more noise you are disproportionally likely to get (rather than the valuable part, called the signal);

Once your mind is inhabited with a certain view of the world, you will tend to only consider instances proving you to be right. Paradoxically, the more information you have, the more justified you will feel in your views.