Take away the ability of an intelligent, principled, hard-working mind to get it wrong, and you take away the whole thing.

both doubt and certainty are as contagious as the common cold

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.

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.

Thirty-three percent of all of our regrets pertain to decisions we made about education.

First, philosophy concerns itself with all kinds of issues that don't get much airtime in day-to-day life. What's the nature of reality? Can we ever truly know anything, and if so, how? What does it mean to be a moral agent? And while we're at it, is there any such thing as agency anyway?

doubt is a skill. credulity ,by contrast, appears to be something very like an instinct