Ignorance quotes

From Motley Bytes Wiki
Jump to: navigation, search

Marcus_Aurelius

Fame

“The most lasting fame will stretch but to a sorry extent; for, alas! poor transitory mortals who hand it down know little even of themselves, much less of those who died long before their time.”

Robert_N_Britcher

Consciousness

“Consciousness is a word created by humans, in this case English-speaking humans, to describe something humans know nothing about.”
  • Source: Britcher, Robert N. (1999). The Limits of Software: People, Projects, and Perspectives. Reading, MA: Addison Wesley. ISBN 0-201-43323-0. Page 28.

Did Not Know

“What I didn't know then was that I didn't know what I was doing.”
  • Source: Britcher, Robert N. (1999). The Limits of Software: People, Projects, and Perspectives. Reading, MA: Addison Wesley. ISBN 0-201-43323-0. Page 59.

Keywords: Ignorance_quotes Knowledge_quotes Do_quotes

William_Kingdon_Clifford

Insufficient Evidence

"To sum up: it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence. If a man, holding a belief which he was taught in childhood or persuaded of afterwards, keeps down and pushes away any doubts which arise about it in his mind, purposely avoids the reading of books and the company of men that call into question or discuss it, and regards as impious those questions which cannot easily be asked without disturbing it-- the life of that man is one long sin against mankind."

Edward_Emil_David

Information Overload

"One has to avoid flooding people with so much information that they ignore it all."

Max_Ehrmann

Desiderata

Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons.
Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even to the dull and the ignorant; they too have their story.
Avoid loud and aggressive persons; they are vexatious to the spirit. If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter, for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.
Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. Keep interested in your own career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.
Exercise caution in your business affairs, for the world is full of trickery. But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals, and everywhere life is full of heroism.
Be yourself. Especially do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment, it is as perennial as the grass.
Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth.
Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.
Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be. And whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul. With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.
  • Source: Max Ehrmann [Poem/Author]; 2022/1948/1933/1927 [Dates];
    • 2022 [Book/Version/Date]; “Desiderata” [Title]; Samantha Seebeck [Editor]; Independent [Publisher]; 979-8420409275 [ISBN];
    • 1948 [Book/Version/Date]; Bertha K. Ehrmann [Editor]; Bruce Humphries, Inc. [Publisher/Name]; Boston, MA [Publisher/Location]; First [Edition]; “Desiderata” [Book/Section/Title];
    • 1933-04-05 [Magazine/Version/Date]; “Desiderata” [Title]; Michigan Tradesman [Magazine/Name]; Cover [Magazine/Placement];
    • 1927 [Copyright/Date];
    • 1927/2023 [URL/Version]; WikiSource Desiderate 1927 Version at https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Desiderata [URL/Link]; 2023 [URL/Retrieved/Date]

Albert_Einstein

Great Spirits

“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. The mediocre mind is incapable of understanding the man who refuses to bow blindly to conventional prejudices and chooses instead to express his opinions courageously and honestly.”
  • Source: Letter to Morris Raphael Cohen, professor emeritus of philosophy at the College of the City of New York, defending the appointment of Bertrand Russell to a teaching position (19 March 1940)."

Richard_Feynman

Cargo Cult

“...there have been many experiments running rats through all kinds of mazes, and so on — with little clear result. But in 1937 a man named Young did a very interesting one. He had a long corridor with doors all along one side where the rats came in, and doors along the other side where the food was. He wanted to see if he could train rats to go to the third door down from wherever he started them off. No. The rats went immediately to the door where the food had been the time before. The question was, how did the rats know, because the corridor was so beautifully built and so uniform, that this was the same door as before? Obviously there was something about the door that was different from the other doors. So he painted the doors very carefully, arranging the textures on the faces of the doors exactly the same. Still the rats could tell. Then he thought maybe they were smelling the food, so he used chemicals to change the smell after each run. Still the rats could tell. Then he realized the rats might be able to tell by seeing the lights and the arrangement in the laboratory like any commonsense person. So he covered the corridor, and still the rats could tell. He finally found that they could tell by the way the floor sounded when they ran over it. And he could only fix that by putting his corridor in sand. So he covered one after another of all possible clues and finally was able to fool the rats so that they had to learn to go to the third door. If he relaxed any of his conditions, the rats could tell. Now, from a scientific standpoint, that is an A-number-one experiment. That is the experiment that makes rat-running experiments sensible, because it uncovers the clues that the rat is really using — not what you think it's using. And that is the experiment that tells exactly what conditions you have to use in order to be careful and control everything in an experiment with rat-running. I looked into the subsequent history of this research. The next experiment, and the one after that, never referred to Mr. Young. They never used any of his criteria of putting the corridor on sand, or of being very careful. They just went right on running rats in the same old way, and paid no attention to the great discoveries of Mr. Young, and his papers are not referred to, because he didn't discover anything about rats. In fact, he discovered all the things you have to do to discover something about rats. But not paying attention to experiments like that is a characteristic of cargo cult science.”
  • Source: "Cargo Cult Science", adapted from a 1974 Caltech commencement address; also published in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, p. 345.
    • Feynman, R. P. (1974). In Feynman, R. P. (1974, June). Cargo Cult Science. Science and Engineering.

Samuel_C_Florman

Engineer Thinking

“They felt that they were improving the world, not only by their deeds, but also by their way of thinking. If engineers could solve problems by being open-minded and free of preconceptions and prejudices — by applying scientific methods — could not all men learn to think in this mode, and then would not ignorance, superstition and bigotry vanish?”
  • Source: From the book “The Existential Pleasures of Engineering” by {Samuel C. Florman}. Second edition published in 1994 by {St. Martin's Press}, New York, NY. First edition published in 1976. Kindle edition published in 2023. E-book ISBN 978-1466842366. Chapter 1, page 7.

Mistakes

“Human error, lack of imagination, and blind ignorance. The practice of engineering is in large measure a continuing struggle to avoid making mistakes for these reasons.”
  • Source: From the book “The Existential Pleasures of Engineering” by {Samuel C. Florman}. Second edition published in 1994 by {St. Martin's Press}, New York, NY. First edition published in 1976. Kindle edition published in 2023. E-book ISBN 978-1466842366. Chapter 3, page 33.

Benjamin_Franklin

Blockhead

“A learned blockhead is a greater blockhead than an ignorant one.”
  • Source: Benjamin Franklin, In Poor Richard's Almanack (Nov. 1734).

Yuval_Noah_Harari

Discovery of Ignorance

“The scientific revolution was launched by the discovery of ignorance... The scientific project starts by rejecting the fantasy of infallibility and proceeding to construct an information network that takes error to be inescapable.”
  • Source: Yuval Noah Harari writing in his book ‘Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI’. Published in 2024 by Random House. Kindle edition. Chapter 4 page 103. ISBN 978-0593734247.

Heraclitus

Conceal Ignorance

“It is better to conceal ignorance, but it is hard to do so in relaxation and over wine.”
  • Source: Heraclitus from the book “The Fragments of the work of Heraclitus of Ephesus on Nature” translated by G. T. W. Patrick, published in 1889 by N. Murray of Baltimore, Maryland. Fragment CVIII. Page 109. Fragment originally written by Heraclitus circa 475 BCE.

Tony_Hoare

All Problems Technical

“Basically, all problems are technical. If you know what you want to do and you have the necessary technical background, there is no point in making a great management problem out of it. Obviously, a certain amount of resource control and personnel work has to go on but that’s all. On the other hand, you might have a task which is difficult in that you don’t know what you have to do, and that even if you did you wouldn’t know how to do it. Since this is a very difficult task you can start out with the hypothesis that it will take a great number of people. Following down this slippery slope of reasoning, as soon as you have a very large number of people you have a very large management problem. But it all originated out of the fact that you didn’t know what you were doing, or how to do it.”
  • Source: C.A.R.Hoare in Ercoli, P., Bauer, F. L., Aron, J. D., & Hoare, C. A. R. (1970). Software Engineering Techniques: Report on a Conference Sponsored by the NATO Science Committee, Rome, Italy, 27th to 31 October 1969. (J. N. Buxton & B. Randell, Eds.). Retrieved from http://homepages.cs.ncl.ac.uk/brian.randell/NATO/nato1969.PDF.

Aldous_Huxley

Protect Our Minds

“We protect our minds by an elaborate system of abstractions, ambiguities, metaphors and similes from the reality we do not wish to know too clearly; we lie to ourselves, in order that we may still have the excuse of ignorance, the alibi of stupidity and incomprehension, possessing which we can continue with a good conscience to commit and tolerate the most monstrous crimes.”
  • Source: Aldous Huxley (1936). An essay entitled Words and Behavior within the book The Olive Tree and Other Essays, published by Harper and Brothers, ASIN: B08VNTBLY4.

Daniel_Kahneman

World Sense

“Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.”

Pierre-Simon_Laplace

System of Nature

“The present state of the system of nature is evidently a consequence of what it was in the preceding moment, and if we conceive of an intelligence that at a given instant comprehends all the relations of the entities of this universe, it could state the respective position, motions, and general affects of all these entities at any time in the past or future. Physical astronomy, the branch of knowledge that does the greatest honor to the human mind, gives us an idea, albeit imperfect, of what such an intelligence would be. The simplicity of the law by which the celestial bodies move, and the relations of their masses and distances, permit analysis to follow their motions up to a certain point; and in order to determine the state of the system of these great bodies in past or future centuries, it suffices for the mathematician that their position and their velocity be given by observation for any moment in time. Man owes that advantage to the power of the instrument he employs, and to the small number of relations that it embraces in its calculations. But ignorance of the different causes involved in the production of events, as well as their complexity, taken together with the imperfection of analysis, prevents our reaching the same certainty about the vast majority of phenomena. Thus there are things that are uncertain for us, things more or less probable, and we seek to compensate for the impossibility of knowing them by determining their different degrees of likelihood. So it was that we owe to the weakness of the human mind one of the most delicate and ingenious of mathematical theories, the science of chance or probability.”
  • Source: Pierre-Simon Laplace, 'Recherches, 1º, sur l'Intégration des Équations Différentielles aux Différences Finies, et sur leur Usage dans la Théorie des Hasards' (1773, published 1776). In Oeuvres complètes de Laplace, 14 Vols. (1843-1912), Vol. 8, 144-5, trans. Charles Coulston Gillispie, Pierre-Simon Laplace 1749-1827: A Life in Exact Science (1997), 26.

Alan_Perlis

Useful Software Systems

“We recognize that a practical problem of considerable difficulty and importance has arisen: The successful design, production and maintenance of useful software systems. The importance is obvious and the more so since we see only greater growth in demands and requirements in the future. The consequences of poor performance, poor design, instability and mismatching of promise and performance are not going to be limited to the computing fraternity, or even their nearest neighbors, but will affect considerable sections of our society whose ability to forgive is inversely proportional to their ignorance of the difficulties we face. The source of difficulty is distributed through the whole problem, easy to identify, and yet its cure is hard to pinpoint so that systematic improvement can be gotten.”

Will_Rogers

Everyone is Ignorant

"You know everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects."
  • Source: Will Rogers. From Nuts To The Soup (31 August 1924); published in The New York Times.

Douglas_T_Ross

Requirements Prespecification

“The most deadly thing in software is the concept, which almost universally seems to be followed, that you are going to specify what you are going to do, and then do it. And that is where most of our troubles come from. The projects that are called successful, have met their specifications. But those specifications were based upon the designers’ ignorance before they started the job.”

Carl_Sagan

Technology Understanding

“... we've arranged the society based on science and technology in which nobody understands anything about science and technology. And this combustible mixture of ignorance and power sooner or later is gonna blow up in our faces.”
  • Source: Carl Sagen speaking in an video entitled 'CARL SAGEN - A Way of Thinking' posted on YouTube at https://youtu.be/J1cNaFG1VII , at 00:01:05 in video. Retrieved 2021-02-09.

Herbert_Simon

Markets and Voting

“We ordinarily describe capitalist societies as depending mostly on markets for coordination and socialist societies as depending mostly on hierarchic organizations and planning, but this is a gross oversimplification, for it ignores the uses of voting in democratic societies of either kind, and it ignores the great importance of large organizations in modern 'market' societies.”

Baruch_Spinoza

Free Will and Hidden Causes

“Herefrom it follows, first, that men think themselves free inasmuch as they are conscious of their volitions and desires, and never even dream, in their ignorance, of the causes which have disposed them so to wish and desire. Secondly, that men do all things for an end, namely, for that which is useful to them, and which they seek.”

Good and Evil

“Experience day by day protested and showed by infinite examples, that good and evil fortunes fall to the lot of pious and impious alike; still they would not abandon their inveterate prejudice, for it was more easy for them to class such contradictions among other unknown things of whose use they were ignorant, and thus to retain their actual and innate condition of ignorance, than to destroy the whole fabric of their reasoning and start afresh. They therefore laid down as an axiom, that God's judgments far transcend human understanding. Such a doctrine might well have sufficed to conceal the truth from the human race for all eternity, if mathematics had not furnished another standard of verity in considering solely the essence and properties of figures without regard to their final causes.”
  • Source: A book. Entitled Ethics. Also entitled Ethica. Written by Baruch Spinoza. Originally published 1677. Translated from Latin by R. H. M. Elwes. Part I, Appendix.

Frederick_Winslow_Taylor

Systematic Soldiering

“The greater part of the systematic soldiering, however, is done by the men with the deliberate object of keeping their employers ignorant of how fast work can be done. So universal is soldiering for this purpose, or under any of the ordinary systems of compensating labor, who does not devote a considerable part of his time to studying just how slowly he can work and still convince his employer that he is going at a good pace.”
  • Source: F.W. Taylor (1903) "Shop management; a paper read before the American society of mechanical engineers, " in: Transactions of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers 24: 1337-1480. p. 1351.

Workman Soldiering

“After a workman has had the price per piece of the work he is doing lowered two or three times as a result of his having worked harder and increased his output, he is likely to entirely lose sight of his employer's side of the case and to become imbued with a grim determination to have no more cuts if soldiering can prevent it.”
  • Source: F.W. Taylor (1903) "Shop management; a paper read before the American society of mechanical engineers, " in: Transactions of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers 24: 1337-1480. p. 1352.

John_Archibald_Wheeler

Sea of Ignorance

“We live on an island surrounded by a sea of ignorance. As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.”
  • Source: John Archibald Wheeler as quoted by author John Horgan in the article "The New Challenges" in Scientific American (1992), Volume 267, Number 6, page 20.