Quotes About Logic

I keep hearing that love isn't a logical emotion. Should I worry about that?

You are a full of beautiful madness, an unreasonable reason, but you make sense in all things senseless.

It's only in the mysterious equations of love that any logical reasons can be found.

look first for the most logical motive they may use to influence the buyer's thinking and decision.

The rationalist imagines an imbecile-free society; the empiricist and imbecile-proof one, or even better, a rationalist-proof one.

An idea stats to be interesting when you get scared of taking it to its logical conclusion.

Increasingly, data can only truly deliver via negativa–style knowledge—it can be effectively used to debunk, not confirm.

A mathematician thinks in numbers, a lawyer in laws, and an idiot thinks in words.

In his Treatise on Human Nature, the Scots philosopher David Hume posed the issue in the following way (as rephrased in the now famous black swan problem by John Stuart Mill): 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.

companies trying to misrepresent the product they sell by playing with our cognitive biases, our unconscious associations, and that's sneaky. The latter is done by, say, showing a poetic picture of a sunset with a cowboy smoking and forcing an association between great romantic moments and some given product that, logically, has no possible connection to it. You seek a romantic moment and what you get is cancer.

We can get closer to the truth by negative instances, not by verification! It

probability is principally a branch of applied skepticism

Locke's definition of a madman: someone "reasoning correctly from erroneous premises.

Mathematics is not just a numbers game, it is a way of thinking.

Mother Nature did not attend high school geometry courses or read the books of Euclid of Alexandria. Her geometry is jagged, but with a logic of its own and one that is easy to understand.

It is the same logic reversal we saw earlier with the value of what we don't know; everybody knows that you need more prevention than treatment, but few reward acts of prevention.

Using, as an excuse, others' failure of common sense is in itself a failure of common sense.

The consequences are not trivial: It means that rational thinking has little, very little, to do with risk avoidance. Much of what rational thinking seems to do is rationalize one's actions by fitting some logic to them.

minds are in the business of turning history into something smooth and linear, which makes us underestimate randomness. But when we see it, we fear it and overreact. Because of this fear and thirst for order, some human systems, by disrupting the invisible or not so visible logic of things, tend to be exposed to harm from Black Swans and almost never get any benefit. You get pseudo-order when you seek order; you only get a measure of order and control when you embrace randomness.

I am also realizing the nonlinear effect behind success in anything: It is better to have a handful of enthusiastic advocates than hordes of people who appreciate your work—better to be loved by a dozen than liked by the hundreds. This applies to the sales of books, the spread of ideas, and success in general and runs counter to conventional logic. The information age is worsening this effect.

How can we logically go from specific instances to reach general conclusions? How do we know what we know? How do we know that what we have observed from given objects and events suffices to enable us to figure out their other properties? There

behavioral problem; we like to emit logical and rational ideas but we do not necessarily enjoy this execution. Strange as it sounds, this point has only been discovered very recently (we will see that we are not genetically fit to be rational and act rationally; we are merely fit for the maximum probability of transmitting our genes in some given unsophisticated environment).

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

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