Judgment quotes

From Motley Bytes Wiki
Jump to: navigation, search

Marcus_Aurelius

Mend A Fault

“To retract or mend a fault at the admonition of a friend in no way hurts your liberty, for it is still your own activity which by means of your own impulse and judgment, and by your own mind, makes you see your mistake.”

Warren_Buffett

Money Versus Business

“So as a practical matter we need management with the businesses that we buy and three times out of four thereabouts the manager is the owner and is receiving tens of millions maybe hundreds of millions of dollars so they don't have to work and we have to decide in that time when we meet them whether they love the business or love money... I'm not making a moral judgment about whether it's better to love the business or love money but it's very important for me to know which which of the two is the primary motivator with them... so all all we have to do is avoid anything that on our part that diminishes that love of the business or makes other conditions so intolerable that they overcome that love of the business. We have a number of people working for us that have no financial need to work at all and they probably outwork 95 percent or more of the people in the world and they do it because they just they love smacking the ball.”

Edward_Bulwer-Lytton

The Few and the Many

"In science, address the few; in literature, the many. In science, the few must dictate opinion to the many; in literature, the many, sooner or later, force their judgment on the few. But the few and the many are not necessarily the few and the many of the passing time: for discoverers in science have not un-often, in their own day, had the few against them; and writers the most permanently popular not unfrequently found, in their own day, a frigid reception from the many. By the few, I mean those who must ever remain the few, from whose dieta we, the multitude, take fame upon trust; by the many, I mean those who constitute the multitude in the long-run. We take the fame of a Harvey or a Newton upon trust, from the verdict of the few in successive generations; but the few could never persuade us to take poets and novelists on trust. We, the many, judge for ourselves of Shakespeare and Cervantes."
  • Source: Earl Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Caxtoniana: A Series of Essays on Life, Literature, and Manners (1863), Vol. 2, 329- 30.

Dwight_D_Eisenhower

Crises and Balance

“Crises there will continue to be. In meeting them, whether foreign or domestic, great or small, there is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties. A huge increase in newer elements of our defenses; development of unrealistic programs to cure every ill in agriculture; a dramatic expansion in basic and applied research -- these and many other possibilities, each possibly promising in itself, may be suggested as the only way to the road we wish to travel. But each proposal must be weighed in the light of a broader consideration: the need to maintain balance in and among national programs, balance between the private and the public economy, balance between the cost and hoped for advantages, balance between the clearly necessary and the comfortably desirable, balance between our essential requirements as a nation and the duties imposed by the nation upon the individual, balance between actions of the moment and the national welfare of the future. Good judgment seeks balance and progress. Lack of it eventually finds imbalance and frustration.”
  • Source: Dwight D. Eisenhower, Farewell address (17 January 1961).

Michael_Faraday

Self-Correction

“Among those points of self-education which take up the form of mental discipline, there is one of great importance, and, moreover, difficult to deal with, because it involves an internal conflict, and equally touches our vanity and our ease. It consists in the tendency to deceive ourselves regarding all we wish for, and the necessity of resistance to these desires. It is impossible for any one who has not been constrained, by the course of his occupation and thoughts, to a habit of continual self-correction, to be aware of the amount of error in relation to judgment arising from this tendency. The force of the temptation which urges us to seek for such evidence and appearances as are in favour of our desires, and to disregard those which oppose them, is wonderfully great. In this respect we are all, more or less, active promoters of error. In place of practising wholesome self-abnegation, we ever make the wish the father to the thought: we receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us; whereas the very reverse is required by every dictate of common sense.”
  • Source: Michael Faraday. Royal Institution Lecture On Mental Education (6 May 1854), as reprinted in Experimental Researches in Chemistry and Physics, by Michael Faraday, 1859, pp 474-475.

Eugene_Grace

Initiative

“The man who has in him the stuff of which success is made is never afraid to accept responsibilities; then, when he gets responsibility, he doesn't regard it lightly; nor does he ever seek to shirk the consequences or attempt to blame anyone else when anything goes wrong. My chief difficulty in building up our huge organization is to find men able and willing to take and discharge responsibilities. So many men can only go to the point of doing routine duties; when given tasks requiring initiative and readiness to shoulder responsibility, they continually run to the boss to get instructions. I am constantly on the lookout for fellows who are not afraid to use their own judgment, and, although they may make quite a few mistakes, yet they at least show executive potentialities... Of course there must be more than willingness to accept responsibility and to exercise initiative; willingness must be accompanied by ability, knowledge, and the judgment which can come only from having thoroughly mastered one's business.”

Yuval_Noah_Harari

Wisdom Depends

“Wisdom is commonly understood to mean ‘making right decisions,’ but what ‘right’ means depends on value judgments that differ among diverse people, cultures, and ideologies.”
  • 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. Prologue page XVI. ISBN 978-0593734247.

Edwin_Hubble

Scientific Judgments

“Science deals with judgments on which it is possible to obtain universal agreement. These judgments do not concern individual facts and events, but the invariable association of facts and events known as the laws of science. Agreement is secured by observation and experiment — impartial courts of appeal to which all men must submit if they wish to survive. The laws are grouped and explained by theories of ever increasing generality. The theories at first are ex post facto — merely plausible interpretations of existing bodies of data. However, they frequently lead to predictions that can be tested by experiments and observations in new fields, and, if the interpretations are verified, the theories are accepted as working hypotheses until they prove untenable. The essential requirements are agreement on the subject matter and the verification of predictions. These features insure a body of positive knowledge that can be transmitted from person to person, and that accumulates from generation to generation.”
  • Source: Edwin Powell Hubble. From manuscript on English Science in the Renaissance (1937), Edwin Hubble collection, Box 2, Huntington Library, San Marino, California. As cited by Norriss S. Hetherington in 'Philosophical Values and Observation in Edwin Hubble's Choice of a Model of the Universe', Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences (1982), 13, No. 1, 41. (Hetherington comments parenthetically that the references to court, judgment and appeal may be attributable to his prior experiences as a Rhodes Scholar reading Roman law at Oxford, and to a year's practice as an attorney in Louisville, Kentucky.)

Carl_Jung

Lost Soul

“I did not consider that my soul cannot be the object of my judgment and knowledge; much more are my judgment and knowledge the objects of my soul... I had to become aware that I had lost my soul.”
  • Source: Written by Carl G. Jung in ‘The Red Book’, also known as ‘Liber Novus’, which was originally written from 1914 to 1930. It was first published in 2009 by W. W. Norton in a facsimile edition, complete with an English translation. The edition used here is the book ‘The Red Book: Liber Novus: A Reader's Edition’, written by C. G. Jung, edited with an introduction by Sonu Shamdasani, translated by Mark Kyburz, John Peck, and Sonu Shamdasani; published by W. W. Norton in 2012; ISBN 978-0393089080; Page 128.

Daniel_Kahneman

Who Can We Trust

“We often interact with professionals who exercise their judgment with evident confidence, sometimes priding themselves on the power of their intuition. In a world rife with illusions of validity and skill, can we trust them? How do we distinguish the justified confidence of experts from the sincere overconfidence of professionals who do not know they are out of their depth? We can believe an expert who admits uncertainty but cannot take expressions of high confidence at face value. As I first learned on the obstacle field, people come up with coherent stories and confident predictions even when they know little or nothing. Overconfidence arises because people are often blind to their own blindness.”
  • Source: "Don’t Blink! The Hazards of Confidence". New York Times. October 19, 2011.

George_Miller

Magic Seven

“What about the magical number seven? What about the seven wonders of the world, the seven seas, the seven deadly sins, the seven daughters of Atlas in the Pleiades, the seven ages of man, the seven levels of hell, the seven primary colors, the seven notes of the musical scale, and the seven days of the week? What about the seven-point rating scale, the seven categories for absolute judgment, the seven objects in the span of attention, and the seven digits in the span of immediate memory? ... Perhaps there is something deep and profound behind all these sevens, something just calling out for us to discover it.”
  • Source: George A. Miller in the article ‘The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing Information’. Psychological Review, 63, 81-97. Also online at https://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Miller/ .

Michael_Polanyi

Vast Knowledge First and Second Hand

“Nobody knows more than a tiny fragment of science well enough to judge its validity and value at first hand. For the rest he has to rely on views accepted at second hand on the authority of a community of people accredited as scientists. But this accrediting depends in its turn on a complex organization. For each member of the community can judge at first hand only a small number of his fellow members, and yet eventually each is accredited by all. What happens is that each recognizes as scientists a number of others by whom he is recognized as such in return, and these relations form chains which transmit these mutual recognitions at second hand through the whole community. This is how each member becomes directly or indirectly accredited by all. The system extends into the past. Its members recognize the same set of persons as their masters and derive from this allegiance a common tradition, of which each carries on a particular strand.”
  • Source: Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge (1958), 163.

Herbert_Simon

Artificial Intelligence Judgment

“So-called judgment" turns out to be mainly a non-numerical heuristic search that draws upon information stored in large expert memories.”

Baruch_Spinoza

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.

Gerald_Weinberg

Measuring Performance

“One consequence of the size of a large project is that performance becomes more difficult to measure. Part of this difficulty stems from the scale of things, which makes it impossible for a single mind to be making the judgment of all the parts.”
  • Source: Chapter 6. Weinberg, G. M. (2011). The Psychology of Computer Programming (Silver anniversary edition) | 1971. Weinberg & Weinberg.

Shoshana_Zuboff

Advent of the Smart Machine

“Should the advent of the smart machine be taken as an invitation to relax the demands upon human comprehension and critical judgment? Does the massive diffusion of computer technology throughout our workplaces necessarily entail an equally dramatic loss of meaningful employment opportunities? Must the new electronic milieu engender a world in which individuals have lost control over their daily work lives?”
  • Source: Zuboff, S. (1988). In The Age Of The Smart Machine: The Future Of Work And Power. New York, NY: Basic Books, p. 5 (Introduction). ISBN:0465032125.