Epistemology

“As far as the theorems of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.”

-Albert Einstein

“Effective knowledge is professionalised knowledge, supported by a restricted acquaintance with useful subjects subservient to it. This situation has its dangers. It produces minds in a groove. Each profession makes progress, but it is progress in its own groove. Now to be mentally in a groove is to live in contemplating a given set of abstractions. The groove prevents straying across country, and the abstraction abstracts from something to which no further attention is paid. But there is no groove of abstractions which is adequate for the comprehension of human life. Thus in the modern world, the celibacy of the medieval learned class has been replaced by a celibacy of the intellect which is divorced from the concrete contemplation of the complete facts.”

-Alfred North Whitehead

“It is better to approximately right than precisely wrong.”

-Warren E. Buffett

“We know: of course, with regard to the market and similar social structures, a great many facts which we cannot measure and on which indeed we have only some very imprecise and general information. And because the effects of these facts in any particular instance cannot be confirmed by quantitative evidence, they are simply disregarded by those sworn to admit only what they regard as scientific evidence: they thereupon happily proceed on the fiction that the factors which they can measure are the only ones that are relevant…On this standard there may thus well exist better ‘scientific’ evidence for a false theory, which will be accepted because it is more ‘scientific’, than for a valid explanation, which is rejected because there is no sufficient quantitative evidence for it…I prefer true but imperfect knowledge, even if it leaves much indetermined and unpredictable, to a pretence of exact knowledge that is likely to be false.”

-F.A. Hayek

“Complicated equations do not tend to cohabit happily with clarity of mind.”

-Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterward.”

-Arthur Koestler

“Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced—Even a proverb is no proverb to you till your Life has illustrated it.”

-John Keats

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