I can usually find my own way out of whatever dicey literary or linguistic situations I wander into, but I have to work much harder at the science.

The miracle of your mind isn't that you can see the world as it is. It's that you can see the world as it isn't.

without being sure of something, we can not begin to think about everything elses

Unlike earlier thinkers, who had sought to improve their accuracy by getting rid of error, Laplace realized that you should try to get more error: aggregate enough flawed data, and you get a glimpse of the truth. "The genius of statistics, as Laplace defined it, was that it did not ignore errors; it quantified them," the writer Louis Menand observed. "...The right answer is, in a sense, a function of the mistakes.

Wow. I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong.

If it is sweet to be right, then - let's not deny it - it is downright savory to point out that someone else is wrong.

I can usually find my own way out of whatever dicey literary or linguistic situations I wander into, but I have to work much harder at the science.