Quotes About Thinking

But I feel like all of this is looking at the issue from a fairly low level. If there are going to be breakthroughs that make it either impossible or unnecessary to build catastrophes like Windows Vista, we will just need new ways of thinking about what programs are and how to put them together.

Peyton Jones: I think probably the big changes in how I think about programming have been to do with monads and type systems. Compared to the early 80s, thinking about purely functional programming with relatively simple type systems, now I think about a mixture of purely functional, imperative, and concurrent programming mediated by monads.

The world is made of Circles And we think in straight Lines

Philosophy ought to question the basic assumptions of the age. Thinking through, critically and carefully, what most of us take for granted is, I believe, the chief task of philosophy, and the task that makes philosophy a worthwhile activity.

the spirit of Heidegger's dictum that thinking and thanking belong together, so do reading and collecting. The professional reader, the scholar, or the pandit becomes the agent of a novel form of concentration: indeed, he not only collects, he turns himself into a collection, a person filled up with knowledge that moves to and fro between internal and external memories.

The disciple of philosophy must present itself, first as a way of thinking and then as a way of life.

Intellectual labor is a common technique for the avoidance of thinking.

I've told you before, Daniel: roach isn't an insult. We're the ones still standing after the mammals build their nukes, we're the ones with the stripped-down OS's so damned simple they work under almost any circumstances. We're the goddamned Kalashnikovs of thinking meat.

Nie jesteÅ›my myÅ›lÄ…cymi maszynami, jesteÅ›my czujÄ…cymi maszynami, które przypadkiem myÅ›lÄ….

The mind ought sometimes to be diverted, that it may return the better to thinking.

Like everyone else, scientists have intuitions. Indeed, hunches and flashes of insight—the sense that something is true even if you can't prove it—have been behind countless breakthroughs. The interplay between System 1 and System 2 can be subtle and creative.

This approach, built on the "wisdom of the crowd" concept, has been called "the crowd within." The billionaire financier George Soros exemplifies it. A key part of his success, he has often said, is his mental habit of stepping back from himself so he can judge his own thinking and offer a different perspective—to himself.

Foresight isn't a mysterious gift bestowed at birth. It is the product of particular ways of thinking, of gathering information, of updating beliefs.

Need for cognition" is the psychological term for the tendency to engage in and enjoy hard mental slogs. [...] superforecasters score high in need-for-cognition tests.

members of any small cohesive group tend to maintain esprit de corps by unconsciously developing a number of shared illusions and related norms that interfere with critical thinking and reality testing.

As ideologically diverse as they were, they were united by the fact that their thinking was so ideological. They sought to squeeze complex problems into the preferred cause-effect templates and treated what did not fit as irrelevant distractions

If there's one thing more ridiculous than the idea of a policeman who's thinking, it's a policeman saying he expects something important to come of it.

Natural as such thinking may be, it is problematic. Lay out the tangled chain of reasoning in a straight line and you see this: "The probability that I would meet the love of my life was tiny. But it happened. So it was meant to be. Therefore the probability that it would happen was 100%." This is beyond dubious. It's incoherent. Logic and psycho-logic are in tension.

what makes these superforecasters so good. It's not really who they are. It is what they do. Foresight isn't a mysterious gift bestowed at birth. It is the product of particular ways of thinking, of gathering information, of updating beliefs. These habits of thought can be learned and cultivated

it is only the unthinking mind that finds anything unthinkable. To use the word is just to show your membership card in the society of morons.

Nietzsche's subtle, poetic, and entirely unsystemic attacks on academic style and thinking were predestined to be quoted out of context, and his pithy and often sarcastic observations could be put in the service of a wider assault on rationality itself.

Those with no problems must find them to use the worry parts of their brains.

And just as it is common to hear how, when one is in love, anything one sees reminds one of that love—our feelings remake the world in a secular equivalent of the faith that sees the hand of God in everything—so I began to find that when one is thinking on a theme, everything seems to reflect on it. Suddenly, everything I saw or read, in this girlish city of temples, seemed to take me back to the theme of the lady and the monk.

I, too, head for the Baths of Caracalla, thinking—with my old, magnificent privilege of thinking… (And let there still be a god in me that thinks, lost, weak, and childish, yet whose voice is so human it is almost a song.) Oh, to leave this prison of poverty! To be free of the yearning that makes these ancient nights so splendid! He who knows yearning, and he who does not, have something in common: man's desires are humble.