Quotes About Thinking

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

Religion isn't so much about telling man that there is one God as about preventing man from thinking that he is God.

I suspect that they put Socrates to death because there is something terribly unattractive, alienating, and nonhuman in thinking with too much clarity.

Most people fear being without audiovisual stimulation because they are too repetitive when they think and imagine things on their own.

The antifragile loves randomness and uncertainty, which also means—crucially—a love of errors, a certain class of errors. Antifragility has a singular property of allowing us to deal with the unknown, to do things without understanding them—and do them well. Let me be more aggressive: we are largely better at doing than we are at thinking, thanks to antifragility. I'd rather be dumb and antifragile than extremely smart and fragile, any time.

We have managed to transfer religious belief into gullibility for whatever can masquerade as science.

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.

Their three flaws: 1) they think in statics not dynamics, 2) they think in low, not high, dimensions, 3) they think in terms of actions, never interactions.

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.

Evidence shows that we do much less thinking than we believe we do-except, of course, when we think about it.

The error in reasoning is a bit from wishful thinking, because education is considered "good"; I wonder why people don't make the epiphenomenal association between the wealth of a country and something "bad," say, decadence, and infer that decadence, or some other disease of wealth like a high suicide rate, also generates wealth.)

Cabdrivers did not believe that they understood as much as learned people—really, they were not the experts and they knew it. Nobody knew anything, but elite thinkers thought that they knew more than the rest because they were elite thinkers, and if you're a member of the elite, you automatically know more than the nonelite.

you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple.

science is about how not to be a sucker.

domain-specific I mean that our reactions, our mode of thinking, our intuitions, depend on the context in which the matter is presented, what

but a problem in our minds, stemming from the way we look at it.

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.

Most of the examples used in this book were created with my Monte Carlo generator, which I introduce in this chapter. Yet it is far more a way of thinking than a computational method. Mathematics is principally a tool to meditate, rather than to compute.

focusing on the rationality of a belief rather than its consequences

Not only is it difficult for the journalist to think more like a historian, but it is, alas, the historian who is becoming more like the journalist.

Scorn of the abstract: favoring contextualized thinking over more abstract, though more relevant, matters. "The death of one child is a tragedy; the death of a million is a statistic.

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

We should reward people, not ridicule them, for thinking the impossible." "Injecting some confusion stabilizes the system." "This is the central illusion in life: that randomness is a risk, that it is a bad thing." "Much of modern life is preventable chronic stress injury.