33 Quotations Found

Statistics often tell us more about collection procedures than they do about the phenomenon they are supposed to reflect.

Author: Andrew Hopkins | Source: The Atlantic | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Facts | Bias, Math & Science

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time – when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost … [ Read more ]

Author: Carl Sagan | Source: Goodreads | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Math & Science, Politics & Public Policy

The public has a distorted view of science because children are taught in school that science is a collection of firmly established truths. In fact, science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries.

Author: Freeman Dyson | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Math & Science

Surprises alert you to flawed thinking. When results are not what you expected. When facts disagree with you. When someone does something unexpected. “What surprise tells you,” my friend Adam Robinson says, “is that your model of the world is incorrect.” And when your model of the world is incorrect, you need to figure out why.

Authors: Adam Robinson, Shane Parrish | Source: Farnam Street | Subjects: Concepts, Education | Scholarship, Math & Science, Personal Improvement, Truth | Right | Wrong

[I tried] whenever a published fact, a new observation or thought came across me, which was opposed to my general results, to make a memorandum of it without fail and at once; for I had found by experience that such facts and thoughts were far more apt to escape from memory than favorable ones.

Author: Charles Darwin | Subjects: Concepts, Math & Science, Personal Improvement, Truth | Right | Wrong

The culture of science is changing. The ultimate tool in most fields, once the powerful equation, is now the powerful computer, and this change describes a shift from the quest for powerful abstract formulas to a more open-ended willingness to plug in the data and see what happens. It is a shift from a culture of powerful explanations to a culture of powerful descriptions.

Author: David Berreby | Source: strategy+business | Subject: Math & Science

The seeker after the truth… is not he who studies the writings of the ancients and… puts his trust in them, but rather the one who suspects his faith in them and questions what he gathers from them, the one who submits to argument and demonstration, and not to the sayings of a human being whose nature is fraught with all kinds of imperfection and … [ Read more ]

Author: Ḥasan Ibn al-Haytham | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Math & Science, Personal Improvement, Thought | Inquiry

Some inventions result from theorizing how something should work and then building it. Others result from building something that works before understanding it.

Author: George Dyson | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Creativity and Innovation, Math & Science

Scientific findings do not fall on blank minds that get made up as a result. Science engages with busy minds that have strong views about how things are and ought to be.

Author: Michael Marmot | Source: The Atlantic | Subject: Math & Science

In the world of science, we endeavor to uncover fundamental laws and elemental truths indifferent to our opinions of them — those selfsame truths and laws that made us and govern the electrical impulses coursing through our cortices at 100 meters per second to forge the thought-patterns of opinion. But in the human world where we live, we swirl in the movable host of human … [ Read more ]

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Education | Scholarship, Ethics | Integrity | Morality, Life & Society, Math & Science, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior, Sociology | Anthropology

The main difficulty that faces us in the development of a scientific knowledge of the world lies not in the outside world but in our own emotional life. It is the desire to retain beliefs to which we are emotionally attached for some reason or other. It is the tendency to make the wish father to the thought. .. If we are to be scientific … [ Read more ]

Author: John Macmurray | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge, Math & Science, Thought | Inquiry

It is undeniable that a large part of science and literature has been produced in a somnambulistic trance; that is to say, by creatures who are not at all intelligent… Science and literature, as such, do not imply perspicacity; but, undoubtedly, their cultivation is a stimulant which favors the awakening of the mind and preserves it in that luminous state of alertness which constitutes intelligence. … [ Read more ]

Author: José Ortega y Gasset | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge, Math & Science

Science is an inherent contradiction — systematic wonder — applied to the natural world. In its mundane form, the methodical instinct prevails and the result, an orderly procession of papers, advances the perimeter of knowledge, step by laborious step. Great scientific minds partake of that daily discipline and can also suspend it, yielding to the sheer love of allowing the mental engine to spin free. … [ Read more ]

Authors: Fari Amini, Richard Lannon, Thomas Lewis | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Math & Science

The first rule in science is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.

Author: Richard Feynman | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Math & Science

Every step forward in technological progress […] effectively transfers our dependence upon other human beings to dependence upon machines and, therefore, unavoidably constricts yet further the direct flow of understanding and sympathy between people.

Author: E.J. Mishan | Subjects: Communication, Life & Society, Math & Science

Thoroughly conscious ignorance is the prelude to every real advance in science.

Author: James Clerk Maxwell | Subject: Math & Science

The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you. It doesn’t give a rat’s ass how your five senses interact with this world. […] We have competent people thinking about this stuff. We’re not just making shit up. One paper is not what makes a scientific truth. It has to be verified by competing groups, people that design experiments differently. Only if all … [ Read more ]

Author: Neil deGrasse Tyson | Subject: Math & Science

Some of us imbue probability with emotion. It becomes luck: chance that has suddenly acquired a valence, positive or negative, fortuitous or unfortunate. Good or bad luck. A lucky or unlucky break. Some of us invest luck with meaning, direction, and intent. It becomes fate, karma, kismet — chance with an agenda. It was meant to be. Some even go a step further: predestination. It … [ Read more ]

Author: Maria Konnikova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Math & Science, Psychology | Behavior

A basic shortcoming of our neural wiring is that we can’t quite grasp probabilities. Statistics are completely counterintuitive: our brains are simply not cut out, evolutionarily, to understand that inherent uncertainty. There were no numbers or calculations in our early environment — just personal experience and anecdote. We didn’t learn to deal with information presented in an abstract fashion, such as tigers are incredibly rare … [ Read more ]

Author: Maria Konnikova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Math & Science, Psychology | Behavior

Step by step, as science has developed, the impulse of love which gave it birth has been increasingly thwarted, while the impulse of power, which was at first a mere camp-follower, has gradually usurped command in virtue of its unforeseen success. The lover of nature has been baffled, the tyrant over nature has been rewarded.

Author: Bertrand Russell | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Math & Science