Quotes About Interpretation

history belongs to those who can write about it (whether winners or losers)

It is also naïve empiricism to provide, in support of some argument, series of eloquent confirmatory quotes by dead authorities. By searching, you can always find someone who made a well-sounding statement that confirms your point of view—and, on every topic, it is possible to find another dead thinker who said the exact opposite. Almost all of my non–Yogi Berra quotes are from people I disagree with.

Cualquier reducción del mundo que nos rodea puede tener unas consecuencias explosivas, ya que descarta algunas fuentes de incertidumbre, y nos empuja a malinterpretar el tejido del mundo.

The neglect of silent evidence is endemic to the way we study comparative talent, particularly in activities that are plagued with winner-take-all attributes. We may enjoy what we see, but there is no point reading too much into success stories because we do not see the full picture.

The problem is that our ideas are sticky: once we produce a theory, we are not likely to change our minds—so those who delay developing their theories are better off. When you develop your opinions on the basis of weak evidence, you will have difficulty interpreting subsequent information that contradicts these opinions, even if this new information is obviously more accurate.

We cannot teach people to withhold judgment; judgments are embedded in the way we view objects.

so she could read it in the original.

Likewise, it is not possible to hold a situation in one's head without some element of bias.

Our inferential machinery, that which we use in daily life, is not made for a complicated environment in which a statement changes markedly when its wording is slightly modified.

Some readers may see it as an appendix; others may consider it the heart of the book.

Hume came to warn us against such knowledge, and to stress the need for some rigor in the gathering and interpretation of knowledge

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

Unless something moves by more than its usual daily percentage change, the event is deemed to be noise. Percentage moves are the size of the headlines. In addition, the interpretation is not linear; a 2% move is not twice as significant an event as 1%, it is rather like four to ten times. A 7% move can be several billion times more relevant than a 1% move!

So not only can the past be misleading, but there are also many degrees of freedom in our interpretation of past events.

A distortion is meant to bring about an enhancement for your aesthetic experience.

The floor of the Parthenon is curved in reality so we can see it as straight.

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

without reading him, using his ideas in a self-serving selective manner—ideas that he most certainly did not endorse in the form they are presented.

We are talking about preventing our students from reading Huckleberry Finn! And why? Because it offends some people. Show me a book that offends no one, and i will show you a book that no one, in the whole history of the world, has ever willingly read.

I have two goals. First, that readers be interested, drawn by a historical account, amused by its comic aspects, saddened by the tragic elements, captured by the possibilities of the past; and second, that readers be aware that there could be another way of looking at things besides the one I offer. I'm not giving a lesson or a sermon, I'm offering a dialogue, as I said before.

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

To live consciously, I need to be sensitive to these distinctions. What I perceive, what I interpret it to mean, and how I feel about it are three separate questions. If I do not distinguish among them, my grounding in reality becomes the first casualty.

The book, if you would see anything in it, requires to be read in the clear, brown, twilight atmosphere in which it was written; if opened in the sunshine, it is apt to look exceedingly like a volume of blank pages.

Thus I did with Susan as with most other things in my earlier days, dipping her image into my mind and coloring it of a thousand fantastic hues, before I could see her as she really was.