Commonly Misinterpreted Quotes

the real world, people are not completely rational, they don’t have common knowledge, they misinterpret one another, and they certainly don’t start with the same priors

It is a common misinterpretation of Islamic intellectual history to say that Muslim scholars made scientific discoveries but then failed to follow up on them, so the torch of learning passed to the West. This is to read the empirical methodology and practical goals of modern science back into the intellectual methods and spiritual goals of the wisdom tradition. The goal was not to establish a fund of transmitted knowledge which other scientists could imitate and build upon and from which technologists could draw for practical ends. The goal was to discover the truth for oneself.

Thomas Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions has probably been more widely read—and more widely misinterpreted—than any other book in the recent philosophy of science. The broad circulation of his views has generated a popular caricature of Kuhn’s position. According to this popular caricature, scientists working in a field belong to a club. All club members are required to agree on main points of doctrine. Indeed, the price of admission is several years of graduate education, during which the chief dogmas are inculcated. The views of outsiders are ignored. Now I want to emphasize that this is a hopeless caricature, both of the practice of scientists and of Kuhn’s analysis of the practice. Nevertheless, the caricature has become commonly accepted as a faithful representation, thereby lending support to the Creationists’ claims that their views are arrogantly disregarded.

Six years later the lead scientist, pharmacologist Kenneth Blum, published a much more subdued assessment: Unfortunately it was erroneously reported that [we] had found the “alcoholism gene,” implying that there was a one-to-one relation between a gene and a specific behavior. Such misinterpretations are common— readers may recall accounts of an “obesity gene,” or a “personality gene.” Needless to say, there is no such thing as a specific gene for alcoholism, obesity, or a particular type of personality.… Rather the issue at hand is to understand how certain genes and behavioral traits are connected.

The passage that he had found in the book had been riddled with ambiguities and contradictions only reserved for those most valiant in overriding their legalistic forbearance into a necessary frenzy that would allow them to suitably work up a case for one side or the other on how the Law, without the possibility of misinterpretation, states If ABC, then DEF—or for the sake of acknowledging the counterargument first as a courtroom tactic, the case might also be made that the Law states the antithesis of the aforementioned If ABC, then DEF, but gives allowance within reasonable parameters for a provisional XYZ to be granted in exceptional cases. And thus, it was a matter not so much of making one’s case in a clear and logical sense, but one for the lawyers to battle out in the arena of pathos, as it was clearly the emotional pleas that could evoke a sense of sympathy in the courtroom and overturn otherwise painstaking endeavors at using the tools at hand to make pleas based upon incontrovertible facts.

You have heard me call for philosophers to place themselves beyond good and evil, - to rise above the illusion of moral judgment. This call is the result of an insight that I was the first to formulate: there are absolutely no moral facts. What moral and religious judgments have in common is the belief in things that are not real. Morality is just an interpretation of certain phenomena or (more accurately) a mis-interpretation. Moral judgments, like religious ones, presuppose a level of ignorance in which even the concept of reality is missing and there is no distinction between the real and the imaginary; a level where 'truth' is the name for the very things that we now call 'illusions'. That is why moral judgments should never be taken literally: on their own, they are just absurdities. But semiotically, they are invaluable: if you know what to look for, moral judgments reveal the most valuable realities of the cultures and interiorities that did not know enough to 'understand' themselves. Morality is just a sign language, just a symptomatology: you have to know what it means in order to take advantage of it.

Family members can find their siblings incomprehensible because they assume that given their genetic and environmental commonality their siblings should comport themselves in a similar manner. Although we each know all the key events of one another lives, being siblings still allows for a chasm of unknown, misinterpretation, and misunderstanding. We all need a degree of privacy and that we only share with other people including esteemed family members select parts of ourselves. We each hold back revealing part of ourselves, but most of us are uncomfortable if we think other people and especially our spouses or close family members harbor furtive thoughts.

Painful Misinterpretations of ADHD Symptoms and Motives Good communication isn’t just a matter of saying the right words or starting your assumptions in the same places. Correct interpretation is critical, and in this realm couples dealing with ADHD may fail miserably for two basic reasons: An ADHD symptom is lurking that they don’t realize is influencing their interaction (and subsequent interpretation of the interaction). They “live in the world” so differently that they incorrectly assume they understand the motives that are influencing frustrating behaviors. One of the most common misinterpretations is feeling as if an ADHD spouse doesn’t love his partner anymore because he isn’t paying attention to her.

Let’s find out where your shame came from by taking a look at your past. But before we do that, I want to address a common misconception people have about looking at their past. I have heard many people misinterpret the apostle Paul’s words: I am focusing all my energies on this one thing: Forgetting the past and looking forward to what lies ahead…Philippians 3:13 People use this verse to teach that a person should never reflect on their past to resolve their present problems. They think looking to your past is a sign of doubt and weak faith. “Good Christians” should forget about their past, they say, and focus on who they are as a believer in Jesus. That might sound good, but I couldn't disagree more. That kind of thinking is both unbiblical and illogical. It is unbiblical because Paul wasn’t telling people to forget past problems. He was simply referring to his former life when he sought to please God through religious works like praying, giving money, or fasting. He boasted about these religious habits as if they got him closer to God. But he stopped that kind of foolish thinking when he came to learn what Jesus had done for him. Paul wasn’t making an all-inclusive statement telling people to forget everything about their past. He was simply telling his personal story and encouraging people to find their acceptance from God based on his love, not on their good works. To read more into his words is to twist the meaning.

As part of his long-winded bullshit, Baby fell into a genre trope that he had avoided in his first two novels. He started inventing new words. This was a common habit amongst Science Fiction writers. They couldn’t help themselves. They were always inventing new words. Perhaps the most famous example of a Science Fiction writer inventing a new word occurs in Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. Part of Heinlein’s vision of horny decentralized alien sex involves the Martian word grok. To grok something is to comprehend that something with effortless and infinite intuition. When you grok something, that something becomes a part of you and you become a part of that something without any troublesome Earthling attempts at knowing. A good example of groking something is the way that members of the social construct of the White race had groked their own piglet pink. They’d groked their skin color so much that it became invisible. It had become part of them and they had become part of it. That was groking. People in the San Francisco Bay Area, especially those who worked in technology like Erik Willems, loved to talk about groking. With time, their overusage stripped away the original meaning and grok became synonymous with simple knowledge of a thing. In a weird way, people in the Bay Area who used the word grok did not grok the word grok. Baby had always been popular with people on the Internet, which was a wonderful place to deny climate change, willfully misinterpret the Bible, and denounce Darwin’s theory of evolution. Now that Baby had coined nonsense neologisms, he had become more than popular. He had become quotable.

The situation gets still more concerning. As Chapter Six argues, two important factors that are frequently assumed to be constants in the traditional security dilemma models are in fact variables in cybersecurity. In most other security dilemma discussions, each actor sees the moves of its potential adversaries and must determine the intentions behind those moves. In cybersecurity, the distribution of information is vastly more asymmetric, which increases risk and uncertainty for decision-makers. With proper tradecraft, many actions, including the development of powerful capabilities and the launching of significant intrusions, often remain out of view to others. Thus, unlike in many historical and theoretical textbook cases, in cyber operations not only must states potentially fear what they see, but they must potentially fear what they do not see as well. Defensive-minded intrusions that resolve this uncertainty thus seem still more appealing. Similarly, in the traditional security dilemma model there is almost always some status quo of shared expectations. This implicit or formal consensus of behavior provides significant guidance about which activities the involved parties consider normal and non-threatening. The potential for escalation in this model occurs only when this shared vision of normalcy breaks. In cybersecurity, however, there is only a nascent status quo. Without a common conception of appropriate national behavior, the probability of dangerous misinterpretation increases. Building on these five steps to the argument, the final two chapters of the book are somewhat different in kind. Chapter Seven pauses to consider three objections to the cybersecurity dilemma logic and how they might constrain the argument.

Dr. LeVay conducted a study of hypothalamic structures in men, which supposedly confirmed innate brain differences between homosexuals and heterosexuals, but he warned against misinterpreting his findings in a 1994 interview: “It’s important to stress what I didn’t find. I did not prove that homosexuality is genetic, or find a genetic cause for being gay. I didn’t show that gay men are born that way, the most common mistake people make in interpreting my work. Nor did I locate a gay center in the brain.”29

Is the Bible a “source”? Is a commonly accepted scientific fallacy and misinterpretation a “source”? The “sources” once said that the earth was flat, that the earth was at the center of the universe, and that God created the earth as his special project. Why would we take “sources” seriously? All we take seriously are reason, logic, and mathematics. Sources that are in contradiction of these – and nearly all sources are – are worse than useless. What kind of pathetic human being, what kind of intellectual cripple, has to appeal to sources and authorities? Use your reason and logic … then you will end your dependency on “sources”, i.e. authorities.

Some said that rather than making piecemeal amendments to the Constitution, a committee should be constituted to suggest comprehensive changes to be made to the Constitution once and for all. Citing a paper published by a senior researcher at the Indian Law Institute, H.N. Mukherjee said that words like 'sovereignty' and 'integrity' were vague and were susceptible to being misinterpreted by courts. H.V. Kamath cited the example of the Scottish Home Rule Party which was permitted to contest elections for seats in the House of Commons, and said that only speech which amounts to incitement ought to be outlawed.

Self-Talk and Prayer: When you audible the first and correctly interpret, the white coats correct you in a nuthouse. When you audible the second and misinterpret, the dinner coats swear you to an oath in The White House. Does this make you nuts too? The outfit your sanity seeking political asylum at my house.

As I’ve argued previously, there is no rule that says we need to allow self-defeating prophecies in our picture of precognition. The common assumption that people could (and would) “use” precognitive information to create an alternative future flies in the face of the way precognition seems to work in the real world. It is largely unconscious (thus evades our “free will”), and it is oblique and invariably misrecognized or misinterpreted until after events have made sense of it.

As I’ve argued previously, there is no rule that says we need to allow self-defeating prophecies in our picture of precognition. The common assumption that people could (and would) “use” precognitive information to create an alternative future flies in the face of the way precognition seems to work in the real world. It is largely unconscious (thus evades our “free will”), and it is oblique and invariably misrecognized or misinterpreted until after events have made sense of it. Laius and his son both fulfill the dark prophecies about them in their attempts to evade what was foretold; their attempts backfire precisely because of things they don’t know (Laius, that his wife failed to kill his son, as ordered; Oedipus, that his adopted family in Corinth was not his real family). The Greeks called these obliquely foreseen outcomes, unavoidable because of our self-ignorance, our fate. Any mention of Oedipus naturally calls to mind Sigmund Freud, whom I am recruiting as a kind of ambivalent guide in my examination of the time-looping structure of human fate. Making a central place for Freud in a book on precognition may perplex readers given (a) his reputed disinterest in psychic phenomena, and (b) the fact that psychological science long since tossed psychoanalysis and its founder into the dustbin. In fact, (a) is a myth, as we’ll see, and (b) partly reflects the “unreason” of psychological science around questions of meaning. Although deeply flawed and occasionally off-the-mark, the psychoanalytic tradition—including numerous course-corrections by later thinkers who tweaked and nuanced Freud’s core insights—represents a sincere and sustained effort to bring the objective and subjective into suspension, to include the knower in the known without reducing either pole to the other. More to the point, it was Freud, more than probably any other thinker of the modern age, who took seriously and mapped precisely the forms of self-deception and self-ignorance that make precognition possible in a post-selected universe. The obliquity of the unconscious—the rules Freud assigned to what he called “primary process” thinking—reflect the associative and indirect way in which information from the future has to reach us. We couldn’t just appear to ourselves bearing explicit messages from the future; those messages can only be obscure, hinting, and rich in metaphor, more like a game of charades, and they will almost always lack a clear origin—like unsigned postcards or letters with no return address. Their import, or their meaning, will never be fully grasped, or will be wrongly interpreted, until events come to pass that reveal how the experiencer, perhaps inadvertently, fulfilled the premonition. It may be no coincidence that Freud’s theory maps so well onto an understanding of precognition if the unconscious is really, as I suggested, something like consciousness displaced in time.

Thank you again, Mr. Brooks.” Ms. Fisher tilted her head. She’d graduated to using Kyle’s last name, signaling it was time for him to shut up. “As helpful as you’re being today, I’m gonna say no. Not quite. But that’s a common misinterpretation. Freedom of speech protects you from government retaliation for expressing personal views or just generally dissenting opinions. It’s a much more specific context than many people think. For example, it will not protect my son from my wrath when he’s a back-talking teenager.

Lo and behold, while many believed confidently and with fanatical certainty that the procession would end the plague, the death toll went up the next day, in every social class and in every part of the city. It rose so suddenly and so steeply that no one could mistake the cause, or the occasion, for anything other than the procession itself. But, oh, the incredible deadly power of a common prejudice! The assembly of so many people, and for so long, was not blamed. Nor was the infinite multiplication of casual contacts. The blame was laid squarely on the ease with which the anointers had been able to carry out their evil plan on a large scale. The rumor was that they had mingled with the crowd, infecting as many people as possible with their unguent. But that did not seem an adequate or appropriate explanation for the death of so many people, across every social class. Apparently not even the eyes most keen on identifying suspicious behavior (and misinterpreting it) had caught a glimpse of unguent smears or stains of any kind on the walls or anywhere else. So to explain this turn of events, they had to fall back on the other venerable myth of poisonous malignant powders that the scientific community of Europe believed in those days. Rumor had it that these powders had been sprinkled along the streets and especially at the places where the procession stopped, thus sticking to the hems of clothing and to the bare feet of those who had walked in the crowd that day. “Hence on the same day of the procession, piety could be seen clashing with evil, perfidy with honesty, and loss with gain,” according to one contemporary writer.[*4] In truth, it was feeble human intellect clashing with its own delusions.

Often we misinterpret a student’s self-doubt or negative mindset as a lack of engagement or motivation when we see him exhibiting those common symptoms—zoning out, acting up, or shutting down in class. We then focus on trying to increase engagement with high energy starters such as call and response that aren’t connected to deeper learning, hoping that it flips some internal switch for the student, leading to a more positive academic mindset, which will in turn transform their academic performance. In reality, we have it backward. What we believe about belonging, effort, and value of the task leads to engagement and motivation.

It will be noted that the specific duties assigned to the new agency (CIA) specifically itemized most of the standard tasks of Intelligence, with the exception of “collection.” It would seem that a Congress that had debated the subject so long and so thoroughly would not have overlooked the function of collection. It is more likely that Congress fully intended what it stated—that the task of the CIA was that of “coordinating” intelligence. The duties of the CIA were set forth in the law as follows: to advise the National Security Council in matters concerning such intelligence activities of the government departments and agencies as relate to national security; to make recommendations to the NSC for the coordination of such intelligence activities. . . .; to correlate and evaluate intelligence relating to the national security, and provide for the appropriate dissemination of such intelligence within the government . . . provided that the Agency shall have no police, subpoena, law-enforcement powers, or internal security functions. . . .; to perform, for the benefit of the existing intelligence agencies, such additional services of common concern as the NSC determines can be more efficiently accomplished centrally; to perform such other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security as the NSC may from time to time direct. For those familiar with that language used in legislative writing, it should be very clear that Congress knew exactly what it was doing when it set up a central authority to coordinate intelligence and when it further delineated the responsibilities into those five brief and explicit paragraphs shown above. Yet few such uncomplicated and simple lines defining the law of the land have ever been subject to so much misinterpretation, intentional and accidental, as have these.

The great quantity of pepper used here was common in medieval meat preparations, where a protein was crusted in expensive spices—including “sweet” spices like cinnamon and cloves. As I read it, I recalled the grade-school myth that heavy spicing hid the taste of spoiled meat. But as spices were costly in the middle ages, the story can’t be true—someone who could afford to cook with these spices could also afford fresh meat. Instead, the old legend might simply be misinterpreted. The antimicrobial properties of the spices used in recipes like Washington’s—as well as the salt and lemon juice, two other powerful antimicrobials—would have helped to preserve the meat and keep it fresh longer. Lemon-Pepper

Triqui and other Latin American native languages are commonly referred to as dialects. (...) Instead of understanding them as languages that were spoken in the area long before the Spanish conquest, calling them dialects implies that they developed as derivatives of the real language, Spanish. This misinterpretation supports the prevalent attitude that indigenous Mexicans are less important, even less Mexican , than mestizo Mexicans