WIST Quotations

Taleb, Nassim Nicholas -- Fooled by Randomness, Prologue (2001)

Dave — Mon, 24 Feb 2025 18:10:26 +0000

Delivering advice assumes that our cognitive apparatus rather than our emotional machinery exerts some meaningful control over our actions.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (b. 1960) Lebanese-American essayist, statistician, risk analyst, aphorist
Fooled by Randomness, Prologue (2001)
(Source)

Taleb, Nassim Nicholas -- The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms, “Postface” (2010)

Dave — Mon, 27 Jan 2025 17:48:20 +0000

Because our minds need to reduce information, we are more likely to try to squeeze a phenomenon into the Procrustean bed of a crisp and known category (amputating the unknown), rather than suspend categorization, and make it tangible. Thanks to our detections of false patterns, along with real ones, what is random will appear less random and more certain — our overactive brains are more likely to impose the wrong, simplistic, narrative than no narrative at all.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (b. 1960) Lebanese-American essayist, statistician, risk analyst, aphorist
The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms, “Postface” (2010)
(Source)

Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Sr. -- Article (1857-11), “The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table,” Atlantic Monthly

Dave — Thu, 29 Feb 2024 18:17:11 +0000

A thought is often original, though you have uttered it a hundred times. It has come to you over a new route, by a new and express train of associations.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809-1894) American poet, essayist, scholar
Article (1857-11), “The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table,” Atlantic Monthly
(Source)

Collected in The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, ch. 1 (1858).

Gaiman, Neil -- “This Much I Know,” The Guardian (2017-08-05)

Dave — Mon, 11 Sep 2017 23:57:50 +0000

I miss what I had in terms of the speed of memory access. If I needed a word or a fact it was already at my fingertips and now it’s like an arthritic and elderly gentleman has to sit up and go down many, many flights of stairs very slowly and go and rummage in dusty drawers. Eventually he will return four days later, normally at about 1:30 in the morning, and I will sit up and go, “Oh yes! ‘Crepuscular.’ That was the word I was looking for.”

Neil Gaiman (b. 1960) British author, screenwriter, fabulist
“This Much I Know,” The Guardian (2017-08-05)
(Source)

Reynolds, Joshua -- “Discourse Eleven” (10 Dec 1782)

Dave — Thu, 15 Jan 2015 13:10:07 +0000

The great business of study is to form a mind adapted and adequate to all times and all occasions; to which all nature is then laid open, and which may be said to possess the key of her inexhaustible riches.

Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792) British painter, critic
“Discourse Eleven” (10 Dec 1782)

Bierce, Ambrose -- “Brain,” The Cynic’s Word Book (1906)

Dave — Sun, 01 Feb 2004 18:00:00 +0000

BRAIN, n. An apparatus with which we think that we think.

Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?) American writer and journalist
“Brain,” The Cynic’s Word Book (1906)
(Source)

Included in The Devil's Dictionary (1911).