Quotes About Illusion

by creating bureaucracies, we put civil servants in a position to make decisions based on abstract and theoretical matters, with the illusion that they will be making them in a rational, accountable way.

perception of causation has a biological foundation.

the studious examination of the past in the greatest of detail does not teach you much about the mind of History; it only gives you the illusion of understanding it.

illusion of local causal chains—that is, confusing catalysts for causes and assuming that one can know which catalyst will produce which effect.

80 to 90% of people think that they are above the average (and the median) in many things.

When you spend time of the bridge of a ship or in a coxswain's station with a large compass in front, you can easily develop the impression that the compass is directing the ship rather than merely reflecting its direction.

The appearance of busyness reinforces the perception of causality, of the link between results and one's role in them.

Nero, seu otário. Não se deixe iludir pelo dinheiro. São apenas números. Ser dono do próprio nariz é um estado de espírito".

the best way to mitigate interventionism is to ration the supply of information, as naturalistically as possible. This is hard to accept in the age of the Internet. It has been very hard for me to explain that the more data you get, the less you know what's going on, and the more iatrogenics you will cause. People are still under the illusion that "science" means more data.

When we think of tomorrow, we just project it as another yesterday.

one is more likely to be drinking poison in a golden cup than an ordinary one.

Randomness, in the end, is just unknowledge. The world is opaque and appearances fool us.

Platonicity is what makes us think that we understand more than we actually do.

what is called "healthy" is generally unhealthy, just as "social" networks are antisocial, and the "knowledge"-based economy is typically ignorant.

Recall that the Platonic fold is where our representation of reality ceases to apply—but we do not know it.

It struck me, a belief that has never left me since, that we are just a great machine for looking backward, and that humans are great at self-delusion.

So we are living in a more and more fragile world, while thinking it is more and more understandable.

than others at whatever we do for a living. Ninety-four percent of Swedes believe that their driving skills put them in the top 50 percent of Swedish drivers; 84 percent of Frenchmen feel that their lovemaking abilities put them in the top half of French lovers.

It took us a while to discover that we do effectively think, but that we more readily narrate backward in order to give ourselves the illusion of understanding, and give a cover to our past actions.

We have to accept the fuzziness of the familiar "because" no matter how queasy it makes us feel (and it does makes us queasy to remove the analgesic illusion of causality).

To Nero, a system built on illusions of understanding probability is bound to collapse.

Realism can be punishing. Probabilistic skepticism is worse. It is difficult to go about life wearing probabilistic glasses, as one starts seeing fools of randomness all around, in a variety of situations—obdurate in their perceptional illusion. To start, it is impossible to read a historian's analysis without questioning the inferences:

We have the illusion that the world functions thanks to programmed design, university research, and bureaucratic funding, but there is compelling—very compelling—evidence to show that this is an illusion, the illusion I call lecturing birds how to fly.

gravest of all manifestations of silent evidence, the illusion of stability. The