Quotes About Comprehension

The only simplicity for which I would give a straw is that which is on the other side of the complex—not that which never has divined it. —OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, JR. There

F. Scott Fitzgerald said, "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.

taking in information is only distantly related to real learning. It would be nonsensical to say, "I just read a great book about bicycle riding—I've now learned that.

Reading builds a scaffold of vocabulary and word associations that facilitate learning new information. It improves your brain processing speed for text because you have more rapid comprehension.

Norvig: I think one of the most important things is being able to keep everything in your head at once. If you can do that you have a much better chance of being successful. That makes a small program easier. For a bigger program, you need extra tools to be able to handle that.

On the fourth hand, one reason I don't like IDEs quite so much is that they can make it hard to know when you've actually seen everything. Walking around in a graph, it's hard to know you've touched all the parts. Whereas if you've got some linear order, it's guaranteed to take you through everything.

I think the primary limitation on software is not the speed of computers but our ability to get our heads around what it's supposed to do.

Seibel: How do you read code you didn't write? Crockford: By cleaning it. I'll throw it in a text editor and I'll start fixing it. First thing I'll do is make the punctuation conform; get the indentation right; do all that stuff. I have programs that can do that for me, but I find doing that myself is more efficient in the long run because it gets me more acquainted with the code.

As long as no more than a small minority are capable of reading and writing, universal alphabetization seems like a messianic project. Only once everyone has this ability does one notice the catastrophe that almost no one can do it properly.

Ein Philosoph ist ein Mann, der in Ermangelung einer Frau die ganze Welt umarmt.

You ever try holding, say, even a single chapter of a novel in your head? Consciously? All at once?

He's smarter than all of us put together, but sometimes he talks like he's got a fifty-word vocabulary." A soft snort. "It's not like it'd kill him to use an adverb once in a while.

So much more aware, so much less perceptive. An automaton could do better.

The AIs claimed to have worked it out, then announced they couldn't explain it to us. Gödel was right after all: No system can fully understand itself.

when a lemur makes a human, it doesn't matter how many lemur chains and lemur rules and lemur constraints she imposes. She's simply, computationally incapable of seeing all the angles that her smarter creation can take in at a glance.

But pattern-matching doesn't equal comprehension.

To learn, you must understand what you do not know. It is not enough to know you do not understand.

The psychological term for this process is "construal," which refers to the way that each of us understands and explains the world. Once

Know a man's faith, and you knew at least half the man. Know his wife, and you knew the other half.

a writing in the sand which all may read but few understand." - Philip Jose Farmer in 'Riders of the Purple Wage

Poetry is an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are.

On me your voice falls as they say love should, Like an enormous yes. My Crescent City Is where your speech alone is understood

He smiled faintly, like somebody who had never seen a smile, but had read a book on how to do it.

All that we don't know is astonishing. Even more astonishing is what passes for knowing.