„Social science means inventing a certain brand of human we can understand.“
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb Lebanese-American essayist, scholar, statistician, former trader and risk analyst 1960
p. 95
„We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand.“
— Eric Hoffer, Context: We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand. A doctrine that is understood is shorn of its strength.
Section 57
Eric Hoffer4
1902 - 1983Reklama
Podobne cytaty
„Only if we understand can we care. Only if we care will we help. Only if we help shall they be saved.“
— Jane Goodall, Jane Goodall: 40 Years at Gombe
Reported in Patti Denys, Mary Holmes, Animal Magnetism: At Home With Celebrities & Their Animal Companions (1998), p. 106
Reklama
„In reality, there is no such thing as “absolute truth”. Everything within the capacity of human understanding contains a degree of error, and everything men know to be true is only true to a degree. Everyone is inevitably wrong about something somewhere. We don’t know everything about everything. We don’t know everything about anything! And what we do know, we don’t know accurately on all points nor completely in every detail. Honest men admit this. Anyone claiming to know the absolute truth is not being honest, especially not when they claim to know anything about things which can only be believed on faith. Even if men were given genuine revelations by truly omniscient beings, they must still be filtered and interpreted by weaker minds influenced by our limitations, biases, and misimpressions, as well as linguistic and cultural barriers.“
— Aron Ra 1962
"3rd Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnj7PlqmJ5o, Youtube (December 10, 2007)
„In the end one cannot avoid the conclusion that AIDS unites certain human themes — homosexuality, sexual disease, and death — about which society actively resists enlightenment. These are things that we are unwilling to address or even think about. We don't want to understand them. We would rather fear them.“
— Martin Amis Welsh novelist 1949
"Making Sense of AIDS" (1985)
„We need to understand what we can do and how. Otherwise we will never do it.“
— Constantinos Apostolou Doxiadis Greek architect 1914 - 1975
Preface, p. x
„Our dignity is not in what we do, but in what we understand. The whole world is doing things.“
— George Santayana 20th-century Spanish-American philosopher associated with Pragmatism 1863 - 1952
p. 199
„The strange thing about the theory of evolution is that everyone thinks he understands it. But we do not. A biosphere, or an econosphere, self-consistently coconstructs itself according to principles we do not yet fathom.“
— Stuart Kauffman American biophysicist 1939
Attributed to Kauffman in: Jared Lobdell (2004) This Strange Illness: Alcholism and Bill W.. p.123
„We understand many things about particles and their interactions, but this and other mysteries make it very clear that we are nowhere close to a full understanding.“
— Martinus J. G. Veltman Dutch physicist 1931
[Martinus Veltman, Facts and mysteries in elementary particle physics, World Scientific, 2003, 981238149X, 3, https://books.google.com/books?id=CNCHDIobj0IC&pg=PA3]
„The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand.“
— Freeman Dyson theoretical physicist and mathematician 1923
Context: My first heresy says that all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated. Here I am opposing the holy brotherhood of climate model experts and the crowd of deluded citizens who believe the numbers predicted by the computer models. Of course, they say, I have no degree in meteorology and I am therefore not qualified to speak. But I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing their own models.
"Heretical Thoughts about Science and Society", in Edge (8 August 2007) http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge219.html#dysonf
„There are many things that we can understand, but in the end it is a case of 'anything is possible'. “
— David Icke English writer and public speaker 1952
„It's difficult to be rigorous about whether a machine really 'knows', 'thinks', etc., because we're hard put to define these things. We understand human mental processes only slightly better than a fish understands swimming.“
— John McCarthy American computer scientist and cognitive scientist 1927 - 2011
" The Little Thoughts of Thinking Machines http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/little.html", Psychology Today, December 1983, pp. 46–49. Reprinted in Formalizing Common Sense: Papers By John McCarthy, 1990, ISBN 0893915351
„I would query about what do you mean in terms of civil liberties. … Do we exchange information in ways we did not before? Absolutely. You can say that that is a -- to the extent that you exchange information between CIA, FBI, NSA and the like -- you could characterize that as somehow giving up liberties. But the fact of the matter is, it's understandable and absolutely necessary if you want to protect the security of the United States.“
— Robert Mueller Sixth director of the FBI; American attorney 1944
