Science

“When I disagree with a rational man, I let reality be our final arbiter; if I am right, he will learn; if I am wrong, I will; one of us will win, but both will profit.”

-Ayn Rand

“Science never tells a man how he should act; it merely shows how a man must act if he wants to attain definite ends.”

-Ludwig von Mises

“Since time immemorial men have been eager to know the prime mover, the cause of all being and of all change, the ultimate substance from which everything stems and which is the cause of itself. Science is more modest. It is aware of the limits of the human mind and of the human search for knowledge. It aims at tracing back every phenomenon to its cause. But it realizes that these endeavors must necessarily strike against insurmountable walls. There are phenomena which cannot be analyzed and traced back to other phenomena. They are the ultimate given. The progress of scientific research may succeed in demonstrating that something previously considered as an ultimate given can be reduced to components. But there will always be some irreducible and unanalyzable phenomena, some ultimate given.”

-Ludwig von Mises

“Contrary to the rules of philosophers of science, who advise testing hypotheses by trying to refute them, people (and scientists, quite often) seek data that are likely to be compatible with the beliefs they currently hold.”

-Daniel Kahneman

“It is by logic that we prove, but by intuition we that we discover.”

-Jules Henri Poincaré

“In science complexity is considered a cost, which must be justified by a sufficiently rich set of new and (preferably) interesting predictions of facts that the existing theory cannot explain.”

-Daniel Kahneman

“Randomness is what we don’t know; to invoke randomness is to plead ignorance.”

-Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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