Rule quotes

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Jim_Baggott

The Theory Principle

“The Theory Principle. Although physical theories are constructed to describe empirical facts about reality, they are nevertheless founded on abstract mathematical (we could even say metaphysical) concepts. The process of abstraction from facts to theories is highly complex, intuitive and not subject to simple, universal rules applicable to all science for all time. In the act of scientific creation, any approach is in principle valid provided it yields a theory that works.”
  • Source: Baggott, Jim. Farewell to Reality: How Modern Physics Has Betrayed the Search for Scientific Truth (p. 17). Pegasus Books. New York, NY.

Edward_Bulwer-Lytton

Pen and Sword

"Beneath the rule of men entirely great the pen is mightier than the sword."
  • Source: A play. Written by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Entitled Richelieu; or, The Conspiracy: A Play in Five Acts. First performed in 1839. Second edition published in 1896 by {Walter H. Baker and Co.}, London, England. Online 2019-05-04 at <https://archive.org/details/richelieuorcons04lyttgoog>. Act II. Scene II. Dialog spoken by the character Cardinal Richelieu.

Octavia_E_Butler

Power Struggles

“All struggles are essentially power struggles. Who will rule, who will lead, who will define, refine, confine, design. Who will dominate. All struggles are essentially power struggles, and most are no more intellectual than two rams knocking their heads together.”
  • Source: Writen by Octavia E. Butler in her book entitled “Parable of the Sower”. Chapter 8. First published by Grand Central Publishing, New York, NY in 1993. Reprinted in 2019. ISBN-13: 978-1538732182.

Mihaly_Csikszentmihalyi

Flow Experience

“It is not easy to transform ordinary experience into flow, but almost everyone can improve his or her ability to do so...[but] attentional disorders not only interfere with learning, but effectively rule out the possibility of experiencing flow as well... People who can enjoy themselves in a variety of situations have the ability to screen out stimulation and to focus only on what they decide is relevant... The association between the ability to concentrate and flow is clear.”
  • Source: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in the book “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience“, chapter “The Autotelic Personality”, page 83. Original content published by Harper Perennial Modern Classics in 1990. Kindle edition published by Harper Collins in 2008. ISBN: 978-0061876721.

Peter_Drucker

Need to Get Together

“The rule should be to minimize the need for people to get together to accomplish anything.”
  • Source: Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices, New York: Harper & Row, 1973. p. 548.

David_Epstein

Wicked Domains

“In wicked domains, the rules of the game are often unclear or incomplete, there may or may not be repetitive patterns and they may not be obvious, and feedback is often delayed, inaccurate, or both.”
  • Source: David Epstein in the book “Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World”. Published 2019 by Riverhead Books. Chapter 1, page 21. ISBN 978-0735214484.

Murray_Gell-Mann

Curiosity

“My colleagues in elementary particle theory in many lands [and I] are driven by the usual insatiable curiosity of the scientist, and our work is a delightful game. I am frequently astonished that it so often results in correct predictions of experimental results. How can it be that writing down a few simple and elegant formulae, like short poems governed by strict rules such as those of the sonnet or the waka, can predict universal regularities of Nature?”
  • Source: Murray Gell-Mann, Nobel Banquet Speech (10 Dec 1969), in Wilhelm Odelberg (ed.),Les Prix Nobel en 1969 (1970).

Thomas_Gold

Knowledge Rules

“In no subject is there a rule, compliance with which will lead to new knowledge or better understanding. Skilful observations, ingenious ideas, cunning tricks, daring suggestions, laborious calculations, all these may be required to advance a subject. Occasionally the conventional approach in a subject has to be studiously followed; on other occasions it has to be ruthlessly disregarded. Which of these methods, or in what order they should be employed is generally unpredictable. Analogies drawn from the history of science are frequently claimed to be a guide; but, as with forecasting the next game of roulette, the existence of the best analogy to the present is no guide whatever to the future. The most valuable lesson to be learnt from the history of scientific progress is how misleading and strangling such analogies have been, and how success has come to those who ignored them.”
  • Source: Thomas Gold, 'Cosmology', in Arthur Beer (ed.), Vistas in Astronomy (1956), Vol. 2, 1722.

Yuval_Noah_Harari

Majority Dictatorship

“Supporters of strongmen often don’t see this process as antidemocratic. They are genuinely baffled when told that electoral victory doesn’t grant them unlimited power. Instead, they see any check on the power of an elected government as undemocratic. However, democracy doesn’t mean majority rule; rather, it means freedom and equality for all. Democracy is a system that guarantees everyone certain liberties, which even the majority cannot take away.”
  • 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 5 page 123. ISBN 978-0593734247.

Brooks_Jackson and Kathleen_Hall_Jamieson

Psychology

“Psychology ... tells us that we rarely work through reasons and evidence in a systematic way; weighing information carefully and suspending the impulse to draw conclusions. Instead, much of the time we use mental shortcuts or rules of thumb that save us mental effort. These habits often work reasonably well, but they also can lead us to conclusions we might dismiss if we applied more thought.”
  • Source: Brooks Jackson, As co-author with Kathleen Hall Jamieson, in unSpun: Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation (2007), 70.

Steve_Jobs

Misfits

“Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”
  • Source: Steve Jobs in “Motivating Thoughts of Steve Jobs”, published by Prabhat Prakashan in 2020. ISBN: 9789351869191.

David_Kipping

Parent Reality Different

“If we concede that the possibility that our observations and understanding of physics may in fact be simulated... our knowledge of physics is wholly local to the simulation and may have no real bearing on the constraints that affect a parent reality, whose rules and limitations may be entirely different.”
  • Source: David Kipping from the paper “A Bayesian Approach to the Simulation Argument”, published 2020 in the journal ‘Universe’, volume 6, issue 8. DOI:10.3390/universe6080109. Online at https://www.mdpi.com/2218-1997/6/8/109 (2025).

Lawrence_M_Krauss

Biggest Misconception

“The biggest misconception about science is that it tells us what's true. It doesn't do that at all. It tells us what's false. And by knowing what's false, it's like Sherlock Holmes, you get rid of what's false and you hope what's left is closer to the truth. But you never know that any theory is absolutely true, and the only way to find out to make progress is to be able to rule things out. So falsifiability is very important.”
  • Source: Panel comments by Lawrence Krauss at Perimeter Institute's festival "Quantum to Cosmos: Ideas for the Future" in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, October 2009. Available online as Youtube video "Lawrence Krauss, Sean Carroll, Neil Turok & Others - Quantum to Cosmos" at https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ftH1yig-HDU (accessed 2017) at about 27 minutes into the video.

John_Stuart_Mill

Knowledge and Logic

“The distinction is that the science or knowledge of the particular subject-matter furnishes the evidence, while logic furnishes the principles and rules of the estimation of evidence.”
  • Source: John Stuart Mill, In A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive: Being a Connected View of the Principles of Evidence, and the Methods of Scientific Investigation (1843), Vol. 1, 11.

Steven_Pinker

Two Modes of Thinking

“People think in two modes. They can form fuzzy stereotypes by uninsightfully soaking up correlations among properties, taking advantage of the fact that things in the world tend to fall into clusters (things that bark also bite and lift their legs at hydrants). But people can also create systems of rules — intuitive theories — that define categories in terms of the rules that apply to them, and that treat all the members of the category equally.”
  • Source: Steven Pinker (1997). How the Mind Works. New York, NY: W. W. Norton. ISBN 978-0-393-06973-0; eISBN 978-0-393-06973-0. Chapter 2 Section: Connectoplasm.

Karl_Popper

Rule of Rules

“It is the rule which says that the other rules of scientific procedure must be designed in such a way that they do not protect any statement in science against falsification.”
  • Source: Karl Raimund Popper (1959), The Logic of Scientific Discovery: Logik Der Forschung (2002), 33.

Epistemology

“In accordance with my proposal made above, epistemology, or the logic of scientific discovery, should be identified with the theory of scientific method. The theory of method, in so far as it goes beyond the purely logical analysis of the relations between scientific statements, is concerned with the choice of methods — with decisions about the way in which scientific statements are to be dealt with. These decisions will of course depend in their turn upon the aim which we choose from among a number of possible aims. The decision here proposed for laying down suitable rules for what I call the ‘empirical method’ is closely connected with my criterion of demarcation: I propose to adopt such rules as will ensure the testability of scientific statements; which is to say, their falsifiability.”
  • Source: Chapter 2. Popper, K. R. (2005). The Logic of Scientific Discovery | 1935 (1935/Epub ed.). New York, NY: Routledge.

Hans_Reichenbach

Picture of Scientific Method

“The picture of scientific method drafted by modern philosophy is very different from traditional conceptions. Gone is the ideal of a universe whose course follows strict rules, a predetermined cosmos that unwinds itself like an unwinding clock. Gone is the ideal of the scientist who knows the absolute truth. The happenings of nature are like rolling dice rather than like revolving stars; they are controlled by probability laws, not by causality, and the scientist resembles a gambler more than a prophet. He can tell you only his best posits — he never knows beforehand whether they will come true. He is a better gambler, though, than the man at the green table, because his statistical methods are superior. And his goal is staked higher — the goal of foretelling the rolling dice of the cosmos. If he is asked why he follows his methods, with what title he makes his predictions, he cannot answer that he has an irrefutable knowledge of the future; he can only lay his best bets. But he can prove that they are best bets, that making them is the best he can do — and if a man does his best, what else can you ask of him?”
  • Source: Hans Reichenbach, The Rise of Scientific Philosophy (1951, 1973), 248-9. Collected in James Louis Jarrett and Sterling M. McMurrin (eds.), Contemporary Philosophy: A Book of Readings (1954), 376.

Bertrand_Russell

Pure Mathematics

“Pure mathematics consists entirely of assertions to the effect that, if such and such a proposition is true of anything, then such and such another proposition is true of that thing. It is essential not to discuss whether the first proposition is really true, and not to mention what the anything is, of which it is supposed to be true. Both these points would belong to applied mathematics. We start, in pure mathematics, from certain rules of inference, by which we can infer that if one proposition is true, then so is some other proposition. These rules of inference constitute the major part of the principles of formal logic. We then take any hypothesis that seems amusing and deduce its consequences. If our hypothesis is about anything, and not about some one or more particular things, then our deductions constitute mathematics. Thus mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true. People who have been puzzled by the beginnings of mathematics will, I hope, find comfort in this definition, and will probably agree that it is accurate.”
  • Source: “Recent Work on the Principles of Mathematics”, published in 1901 within International Monthly, Vol. 4. later published as the essay “Mathematics and the Metaphysicians” within the book “Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays” by Bertrand Russell published in 1917 by George Allen & Unwin, London, England.

Carl_Sagan

Science Is Not Perfect

“[Science] is not perfect. It can be misused. It is only a tool. But it is by far the best tool we have, self-correcting, ongoing, applicable to everything. It has two rules. First: there are no sacred truths; all assumptions must be critically examined; arguments from authority are worthless. Second: whatever is inconsistent with the facts must be discarded or revised. ... The obvious is sometimes false; the unexpected is sometimes true.”
  • Source: Carl Sagan, Cosmos (1985), 277

Herbert_Simon

Artificial Intelligence Satisfice

“The alternative methods provided by AI, most often in the form of heuristic search (selective search using rules of thumb), find decisions that are 'good enough', that satisfice.”

Max_Tegmark

Computer Game

“If I were a character in a computer game, I would also discover eventually that the rules seemed completely rigid and mathematical. That just reflects the computer code in which it was written.”
  • Source: Max Tegmark and John Archibald Wheeler; Scientific American, February 2001

JRR_Tolkien

One Ring

“One Ring to rule them all,
 One Ring to find them,
 One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.”
  • Source: From the book “The Fellowship Of The Ring: Being the First Part of The Lord of the Rings”, written by {J. R. R. Tolkien}, first published by {George Allen and Unwin} in 1954. E-book edition published by Harper Collins in 2022. ISBN 978-0547952017. Words inscribed on the ring. Book One, chapter 2, page 93.

Gerald_Weinberg

Multiple Programmer Productivity

“As a rough rule, three programmers organized into a team can do only twice the work of a single programmer of the same ability — because of time spent on coordination problems. Moreover, three groups of three programmers can do only twice the work of a single group.”
  • Source: Book Entitled: The Psychology of Computer Programming (Silver anniversary edition). Edition: Silver anniversary. Written By: Gerald Weinberg. Published originally: 1971. Republished: 2011. Chapter: 5.

Small Teams More Efficient

“In any case, the basic rule for size and composition of programming teams would seem to be this — for the best programming at the least cost, give the best possible programmers you can find sufficient time so you need the smallest number of them. When you have to work faster, or with less experienced people, costs and uncertainties will rise. In any case, the worst way to do a programming project is to hire a horde of trainees and put them to work under pressure and without supervision — although this is the most common practice today.”
  • Source: Chapter 5. Weinberg, G. M. (2011). The Psychology of Computer Programming (Silver anniversary edition) | 1971. Weinberg & Weinberg.

William_Whewell

Hypothesis Should Foretell

“The hypotheses which we accept ought to explain phenomena which we have observed. But they ought to do more than this; our hypotheses ought to foretell phenomena which have not yet been observed; ... because if the rule prevails, it includes all cases; and will determine them all, if we can only calculate its real consequences. Hence it will predict the results of new combinations, as well as explain the appearances which have occurred in old ones. And that it does this with certainty and correctness, is one mode in which the hypothesis is to be verified as right and useful.”

Prediction of Facts

“We have here spoken of the prediction of facts of the same kind as those from which our rule was collected. But the evidence in favour of our induction is of a much higher and more forcible character when it enables us to explain and determine cases of a kind different from those which were contemplated in the formation of our hypothesis. The instances in which this has occurred, indeed, impress us with a conviction that the truth of our hypothesis is certain. No accident could give rise to such an extraordinary coincidence. No false supposition could, after being adjusted to one class of phenomena, so exactly represent a different class, when the agreement was unforeseen and contemplated. That rules springing from remote and unconnected quarters should thus leap to the same point, can only arise from that being where truth resides.”

E_O_Wilson

Knowledge is the Ultimate Emancipator

“Pure knowledge is the ultimate emancipator. It equalizes people and sovereign states, erodes the archaic barriers of superstition and promises to lift the trajectory of cultural evolution. But I do not believe that it can change the ground rules of human behavior or alter the main course of history's predictable trajectory.”
  • Source: Chapter 4 (Emergence). On Human Nature (1978). On Human Nature; written by Edward O. Wilson; first edition; published in 1978 by Cambridge University Press; ISBN 0674634411.

Stephen_Wolfram

Time

“Time is the inexorable progress of computation. If we think about things in the world as being governed by rules, then what happens in the course of time is those rules get applied... The thing that changes through time is that we've applied these rules more and more and more times.”
  • Source: Spoken by Stephen Wolfram in a video interview with Brian Keating recorded in the YouTube video ‘Stephen Wolfram | My Discovery Changes Everything’ published on channel ‘Dr. Brian Keating’ on 2024-01-19. Video offset 15:16. Online at https://youtu.be/c-RO3vM10Ok?si=i-XspeEtzqA3jPl9 retrieved 2024.

Computation

“Computation is just the following of rules...”
  • Source: Spoken by Stephen Wolfram in a video interview with Brian Keating recorded in the YouTube video ‘Stephen Wolfram | My Discovery Changes Everything’ published on channel ‘Dr. Brian Keating’ on 2024-01-19. Video offset 20:38. Online at https://youtu.be/c-RO3vM10Ok?si=i-XspeEtzqA3jPl9 retrieved 2024.

Keywords: Computation_quotes Follow_quotes Rule_quotes

Shoshana_Zuboff

Time Study Expert

“The time-study expert became the new focus of workers' antagonisms. Informal production quotas persisted and, in many cases, took on an overtly anti-management spirit. The union contract became the most important means for institutionalizing workers' instincts for self-preservation, as rationalization routed out the ordinary graces with which the workday had been laced. Concern over wages and hours, work rules, and working conditions began to replace the craftworker's culturally embedded practices of effort regulation. Overall, the purification of effort meant a heightened standard of labor discipline, and as such it widened the gulf between those who gave of their bodies in the service of production and those who did not.”
  • Source: Zuboff, S. (1988). In The Age Of The Smart Machine: The Future Of Work And Power. New York, NY: Basic Books, p. 46. ISBN:0465032125.

Technology Change

“To fully grasp the way in which a major new technology can change the world... it is necessary to consider both the manner in which it creates intrinsically new qualities of experience and the way in which new possibilities are engaged by the often-conflicting demands of social, political, and economic interests in order to produce a 'choice.' To concentrate only on intrinsic change and the texture of an emergent mentality is to ignore the real weight of history and the diversity of interests that pervade collective behavior. However, to narrow all discussion of technological change to the play of these interests overlooks the essential power of technology to reorder the rules of the game and thus our experience as players. Moreover, these two dimensions of technological change, the intrinsic and the contingent, need to be understood, not separately, but in relation to one another. The same innovation that abstracts work and increases its intellectual content, thus enhancing the learning of lower level employees... can also, within the context of the choices by which it is adapted, be experienced as a new source of divisiveness and control.”
  • Source: Zuboff, S. (1988). In The Age Of The Smart Machine: The Future Of Work And Power. New York, NY: Basic Books, p. 389. ISBN:0465032125.