Great Throughts Treasury

"Information is a measure of uncertainty reduced."

"It is difficult to discern where you end and the remainder of the world begins."

"It?s an illusion to believe that you can be happy when no one else is. Or that other people will not be affected by your unhappiness."

"It is more important to have beauty in one?s equations than to have them fit experiment."

"New England has lower background radiation, Colorado is much higher,"

"New ideas take over a vacuum formerly occupied by no well-articulated idea at all. That happens for either of two reasons: new ideas responding to new information made possible by new measurements, or else responding to new outlooks. (Among historians of science, the term used rather than the inadequate English term outlook is the German Fragestellung?literally, the posing of a question, but more broadly meaning a worldview from which that question can arise.)"

"Kakonomics (from the Greek, the economics of the worst) describes cases wherein people not only have the standard preference for receiving high-quality goods and delivering low-quality goods (the standard sucker?s payoff) but actually prefer to deliver a low-quality product and receive a low-quality one: that is, they connive on a low-low exchange."

"It?s natural to worry about physical stuff like weaponry and resources. What we should really worry about is psychological stuff like ideologies and norms. As the UNESCO slogan puts it, since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed."

"Karl Popper famously suggested the criterion of falsifiability: A theory is scientific if it makes clear predictions that can be unambiguously falsified."

"Mark Twain said: What gets us into trouble is not what we don?t know, it?s what we know for sure that just ain?t so."

"It?s simply not the case that secular liberalism, grounded in materialist utilitarianism, is the inevitable and default worldview of anyone who isn?t stupid, brainwashed, or uneducated;"

"Missouri Republican Senate candidate Todd Akin: If it?s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down)."

"Max Planck observed, revolutions in science sometimes have to wait for funerals."

"Mischel refers to this skill as the strategic allocation of attention, and he argues that it?s the skill underlying self-control. Too often, we assume that willpower is about having strong moral fiber. But that?s wrong. Willpower is really about properly directing the spotlight of attention, learning how to control that short list of thoughts in working memory. It?s about realizing that if we?re thinking about the marshmallow, we?re going to eat it, which is why we need to look away."

"Part of what makes a theory elegant is its power to explain much while assuming little."

"People view tainted altruism as worse than no altruism at all."

"Philosophers are premature ejaculators who decant too soon, spilling their seminal genius to no effect."

"New scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."

"People readily accept credit when told they have succeeded, attributing it to their ability and effort. Yet they attribute failure to such external factors as bad luck or the problem?s impossibility. When we win at Scrabble, it?s because of our verbal dexterity. When we lose, it?s because I was stuck with a Q but no U."

"People judge people as less moral when they act altruistically and gain in the process than when they gain from clearly non-altruistic behavior."

"Optimization under constraints, and many Nobel prizes have been awarded in this area. Using the concept of bounded rationality"

"Psychological well-being is not determined by the presence of one type of emotion but by a diversity of emotions, both positive and negative. Whether or not an emotion is good or bad seems to have surprisingly little to do with the emotion itself but rather with how mindfully we ride the ebbing and flowing tides of our rich emotional life."

"People are sheep?cowardly, deplorable sheep."

"Plus, where would the universe retire to? Florida isn?t big enough."

"Psychologists are too polite with one another?s ideas."

"Really tapping into our inner vision and inner child might not make us happier or better adjusted, but it might make us appreciate just how smart we really are."

"Science is not a practice so much as an ideology."

"Space, time, and objects might just be aspects of a sensory desktop specific to Homo sapiens. They might not be deep insights into objective truths, just convenient conventions that have evolved to allow us to survive in our niche."

"Since string theorists have failed to propose any way to confirm string theory experimentally, string theory should be retired,"

"Publication bias is the tendency to not publish negative, or non-confirmatory, results."

"Some places in the world, such as Ramsar, Iran, have a tenfold higher background radiation,"

"Science itself is learning how to better exploit negative results."

"Sometimes science fiction does become scientific discovery."

"Seminary students in a rush were far less likely to help a stranger than were seminary students who weren?t late, in the experiment performed by John M. Darley and Dan Batson)."

"The black expanse over our heads promise places where our industries can use resource extraction, zero-gravity manufacturing, better communications, perhaps even energy harvested in great solar farms and sent down to Earth. Companies are already planning to do so: Bigelow Aerospace (orbital hotels), Virgin Galactic (low Earth orbit tourism), Orbital Technologies (a commercial manufacturing space station), and Planetary Resources, whose goal is to develop a robotic asteroid mining industry."

"The history of the object is more relevant than the object itself, if we want to pinpoint what is interesting to us."

"The most important scientific concept is that an assertion is often an empirical question, settled by collecting evidence. The plural of anecdote is not data, and the plural of opinion is not facts. Quality peer-reviewed scientific evidence accumulates into knowledge. People?s stories are stories, and fiction keeps us going. But science should settle policy."

"The universe consists primarily of dark matter. We can?t see it, but it has an enormous gravitational force. The conscious mind?much like the visible aspect of the universe?is only a small fraction of the mental world. The dark matter of the mind, the unconscious, has the greatest psychic gravity. Disregard the dark matter of the universe and anomalies appear. Ignore the dark matter of the mind and our irrationality is inexplicable."

"The idea that we can systematically understand certain aspects of the world and make predictions based on what we?ve learned, while appreciating and categorizing the extent and limitations of what we know, plays a big role in how we think."

"There is a widely held notion that does plenty of damage: the notion of scientifically proved. Nearly an oxymoron. The very foundation of science is to keep the door open to doubt. Precisely because we keep questioning everything, especially our own premises, we are always ready to improve our knowledge. Therefore a good scientist is never certain. Lack of certainty is precisely what makes conclusions more reliable than the conclusions of those who are certain, because the good scientist will be ready to shift to a different point of view if better evidence or novel arguments emerge. Therefore certainty is not only something of no use but is also in fact damaging, if we value reliability."

"The story emerging from these studies is not yet complete, but it has already led to fascinating insights. Thanks to its microbes, a baby can better digest its mother?s milk. And your ability to digest carbohydrates relies to a significant extent on enzymes that can be made only by genes present not in you but in your microbiome."

"There are two kinds of fools: one who says this is old and therefore good, and the other who says this is new and therefore better."

"The science of morality requires us to, in the end, get beyond the myth of a perfectly objective scientific morality."

"The threat to good collective outcomes doesn?t come only from free riders and predators, as mainstream social sciences teach us, but also from well-organized norms of kakonomics, which regulate exchanges for the worse."

"Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot."

"Throughout history, only a small number of people have done the serious thinking for everybody."

"Traditional American intellectuals are, in a sense, increasingly reactionary, and quite often proudly (and perversely) ignorant of many of the truly significant intellectual accomplishments of our time."

"Twain said: What gets us into trouble is not what we don?t know, it?s what we know for sure that just ain?t so."

"Uncertainty is intrinsic to the process of finding out what you don?t know, not a weakness to avoid."

"twice as many people in India have access to cell phones as to latrines."