You don’t need to be an expert to think that experts are right, but you do need to be an expert to think that they are wrong.
Author: Fallacy Man | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge, Personal Improvement, Thought | Inquiry
Humility isn’t a lack of confidence but an earned confidence. The confidence to say that you might not be right, but you’ve done the diligence, and you’ve put in the work. Humility keeps you wondering what you’re missing or if someone is working harder than you. And yet when pride and arrogance take over, humility flees and so does our ability to learn, adapt, and … [ Read more ]
Author: Shane Parrish | Source: Farnam Street | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge, Learning, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior
In a certain sense the suspicious Tories and militant philistines are right: intellect is dangerous. Left free, there is nothing it will not reconsider, analyze, throw into question.
Author: Richard Hofstadter | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge, Thought | Inquiry
We understand our world less through reasoned deliberation of facts, and more through stories and symbols and metaphors.
Author: Stephen Duncombe | Source: Vox | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Facts | Bias, Intelligence | Knowledge, Learning, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior
The trouble is that most people want to be right. The very best people, however, want to know if they’re right.
Author: John Cleese | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge, Personal Improvement
The process of gathering knowledge does not lead to knowing. A child’s world spreads only a little beyond his understanding while that of a great scientist thrusts outward immeasurably. An answer is invariably the parent of a great family of new questions. So we draw worlds and fit them like tracings against the world about us, and crumple them when they do not fit and … [ Read more ]
Author: John Steinbeck | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge
The human brain is a prediction machine that evolved to render reality as a composite of sensory input and prior expectation, but by continually and consciously testing our predictions against reality, we get to construct our lived experience — largely the product of how the brain handles its natural prediction errors.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge, Thought | Inquiry
You are just as likely to solve a problem by being unconventional and determined as by being brilliant.
Author: James Dyson | Subjects: Concepts, Creativity and Innovation, Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge, Personal Improvement, Success / Failure
We all are learning, modifying, or destroying ideas all the time. Rapid destruction of your ideas when the time is right is one of the most valuable qualities you can acquire. You must force yourself to consider arguments on the other side.
Author: Charlie Munger | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge, Personal Improvement, Thought | Inquiry
True curiosity is an open wonderment at what something is and how it works without emotional attachment to the outcome of observation and experiment. It is only when we cede emotional attachment that we can be truly free from judgment, for all judgment is feeling — usually some species of fear — masquerading as thought. And when we judge, we cannot understand.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge, Personal Improvement
The best definition of intelligence — artificial or human — that I’ve found is goal-directed adaptive behavior.
Author: Daniel Hulme | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge
Rather than being a tool to further exploit the planet and one another, artificial intelligence is an opening to other minds, a chance to fully recognize a truth that has been hidden from us for so long. Everything is intelligent, and therefore — along with many other reasons — is worthy of our care and conscious attention.
Author: James Bridle | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge, IT | Technology
To define intelligence simply as what humans do is the narrowest way we could possibly think about it — and it is ultimately to narrow ourselves, and lessen its possible meaning. Rather, by expanding our definition of intelligence, and the chorus of minds which manifest it, we might allow our own intelligence to flower into new forms and new emergent ways of being and relating. … [ Read more ]
Author: James Bridle | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge
Most geniuses—especially those who lead others—prosper not by deconstructing intricate complexities but by exploiting unrecognized simplicities.
Author: Andy Benoit | Source: Farnam Street | Subjects: Concepts, Creativity and Innovation, Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge, Personal Improvement
The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already.
Author: Leo Tolstoy | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge, Learning
We all instinctively try to simplify the data that we receive, but there are better and worse simplifications. Better simplifications arise from a deeper knowledge of the environment along with a deeper understanding of the organization and its capabilities. That knowledge and understanding develops when people attend to more things, entertain a greater variety of interpretations, differentiate their ideas, argue, listen to one another, work … [ Read more ]
Author: Karl E. Weick | Source: Fast Company | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Information, Intelligence | Knowledge, Thought | Inquiry
Assumptions can be malleable. Change the assumptions and the outcomes will change as well. Generally speaking, assumptions come into play when we are dealing with unknown or incomplete information situations, so it’s good to change the underlying assumptions and see how things would play out. Of course, if you are making assumptions, especially incorrect ones, in known situations, you need to correct that.
Author: Jeff Blum | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge, Personal Improvement, Prejudice and Stereotype, Psychology | Behavior, Thought | Inquiry
Writing is the process by which you realize that you do not understand what you are talking about. Importantly, writing is also the process by which you figure it out.
Author: Shane Parrish | Source: Farnam Street | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge, Reading | Writing
It is both a terror and a mercy that we know ourselves only incompletely and each other hardly at all — because, somewhere in that lacuna of mystery, in that opaque space beyond absolute knowledge and absolute empathy (which assumes knowledge of another’s experience), some of the most magical things in life come abloom. Those are the places we grow, and grow into — the … [ Read more ]
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge, Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior
It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent.
Author: Charlie Munger | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge, Life & Society, Personal Improvement