Quotes About Logic

If you believe that witnessing an additional white swan will bring confirmation that there are no black swans, then you should also accept the statement, on purely logical grounds, that the sighting of a red Mini Cooper should confirm that there are no black swans.

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.

narrative fallacy addresses our limited ability to look at sequences of facts without weaving an explanation into them, or, equivalently, forcing a logical link, an arrow of relationship, upon them. Explanations

Antifragile shows how people confuse risk of ruin with variations and fluctuations—a simplification that violates a deeper, more rigorous logic of things.

Option = asymmetry + rationality

Mother of all harmful mistakes - mistaking absence of evidence for evidence of absence.

focusing on the rationality of a belief rather than its consequences

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. We glorify those who left their names in history books at the expense of those contributors about whom our books are silent. We humans are not just a superficial race (this may be curable to some extent); we are a very unfair one.

our actions are not quite guided by the parts of our brain that dictate rationality. We think with our emotions and there is no way around it.

Anything that hinders one's survival at an individual, collective, tribal, or general level is, to me, irrational.

I am convinced of that after spending almost all my adult and professional years in a fierce fight between my brain (not Fooled by Randomness) and my emotions (completely Fooled by Randomness) in which the only success I've had is in going around my emotions rather than rationalizing them.

Mathematics is not just a "numbers game," it is a way of thinking. We will see that probability is a qualitative subject.

This subtle but extremely consequential property of scalable randomness is unusually counterintuitive. We misunderstand the logic of large deviations from the norm.

I consider straw man no different from theft.

And one needs to be rational in not making trial and error completely random.

mistaking what we don't see for the nonexistent, a sibling to mistaking absence of evidence for evidence of absence.

In a famous argument, the logician W. V. Quine showed that there exist families of logically consistent interpretations and theories that can match a given series of facts. Such insight should warn us that mere absence of nonsense may not be sufficient to make something true.

Cygnus Atratus 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.

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

which does not require knowledge or intelligence, merely rationality in choice.

This is the same error as mistaking absence of evidence for evidence of absence

mistaking absence of evidence (of harm) for evidence of absence

Remember from the logic of the barbell that it is necessary to first remove fragilities.

There is only one reality - the reality knowable to reason. And if man does not choose to perceive it, there is nothing else for him to perceive; if it is not of this world that he is conscious, then he is not conscious at all