Inspect every piece of pseudoscience and you will find a security blanket, a thumb to suck, a skirt to hold. What have we to offer in exchange? Uncertainty! Insecurity! – Isaac Asimov.
Uncertainty is the only certainty there is, and knowing how to live with insecurity is the only security.
In listening to stories we tend to suspend disbelief in order to be entertained, whereas in evaluating statistics we generally have an opposite inclination to suspend belief in order not to be beguiled.
When asked why he doesn’t believe in astrology, the logician Raymond Smullyan responds that he’s a Gemini and Geminis never believe in astrology.
Data, data everywhere, but not a thought to think.
Mathematicians are a bit like the laconic Vermonter who, when asked if he’s lived in the state his whole life, replies, “Not yet.”
Innumeracy and pseudoscience are often associated, in part because of the ease with which mathematical certainty can be invoked, to bludgeon the innumerate into a dumb acquiescence.
I think, therefore I laugh.
Mathematics is no more computation than typing is literature.
So many see themselves as aggrieved; so few see themselves as aggrievers.
Defined broadly enough, mathematics encompasses everything.
The once-surprising existence of non-Euclidean models of Euclid’s first four axioms can be seen as a sort of mathematical joke.
The fashion pages have always baffled me. In my opinion, the articles appear to be full of gobbledygook as to make the astrology column seem factual by comparison.
Certainty a strange Ferris wheel of a statement!
The Internet is the world’s largest library. It’s just that all the books are on the floor.
The simple equations that generate the convoluted Mandelbrot fractal have been called the wittiest remarks ever made.
For example, knowing that it takes only about eleven and a half days for a million seconds to tick away, whereas almost thirty-two years are required for a billion seconds to pass, gives one a better grasp of the relative magnitudes of these two common numbers.
First, take a deep breath. Assume Shakespeare’s account is accurate and Julius Caesar gasped “You too, Brutus” before breathing his last. What are the chances you just inhaled a molecule which Caesar exhaled in his dying breath? The surprising answer is that, with probability better than 99 percent, you did just inhale such a molecule.
This tendency to personalize is, as we’ll see, a characteristic of many people who suffer from innumeracy. Equally typical is a tendency to equate the risk from some obscure and exotic malady with the chances of suffering from heart and circulatory disease, from which about 12,000 Americans die each week.
The paradoxical conclusion is that it would be very unlikely for unlikely events not to occur.