Leonard Mlodinow Quotes

Research suggests when it comes to understanding our feelings, we humans have an odd mix of low ability and high confidence.

The first step in battling the illusion of control is to be aware of if. But even then it is difficult, once we think we see a pattern, we do not easily let go of our perception.

We all understand that genius doesn’t guarantee success, but it’s seductive to assume that success must come from genius.

We unfortunately seem to be unconsciously biased against those in the society who come out on the bottom.

As the psychologist Jonathan Haidt put it, there are two ways to get at the truth: the way of the scientist and the way of the lawyer.

We judge people and initiatives by their results, and we expect events to happen for good, understandable reason. But our clear visions of inevitability are often only illusions.

Science has revealed a universe that is vast, ancient, violent, strange, and beautiful, a universe of almost infinite variety and possibility one in which time can end in a black hole, and conscious beings can evolve from a soup of minerals.

You’re wasting your time,” he said. “You don’t learn how to discover things by reading books on it. And psychology is a bunch of bullshit.

The eye that sees is not a mere physical organ but a means of perception conditioned by the tradition in which its possessor has been reared.    —RUTH BENEDICT

The cord that tethers ability to success is both loose and elastic. It is easy to see fine qualities in successful books or to see unpublished manuscripts, inexpensive vodkas, or people struggling in any field as somehow lacking. It is easy to believe that ideas that worked were good ideas, that plans that succeeded were well designed, and that ideas and plans that did not were ill conceived. And it is easy to make heroes out of the most successful and to glance with disdain at the least. But ability does not guarantee achievement, nor is achievement proportional to ability. And so it is important to always keep in mind the other term in the equation—the role of chance…What I’ve learned, above all, is to keep marching forward because the best news is that since chance does play a role, one important factor in success is under our control: the number of at bats, the number of chances taken, the number of opportunities seized.

probability is the very guide of life

Perception requires imagination because the data people encounter in their lives are never complete and always equivocal. For example, most people consider that the greatest evidence of an event one can obtain is to see it with their own eyes, and in a court of law little is held in more esteem than eyewitness testimony. Yet if you asked to display for a court a video of the same quality as the unprocessed data catptured on the retina of a human eye, the judge might wonder what you were tryig to put over. For one thing, the view will have a blind spot where the optic nerve attaches to the retina. Moreover, the only part of our field of vision with good resolution is a narrow area of about 1 degree of visual angle around the retina’s center, an area the width of our thumb as it looks when held at arm’s length. Outside that region, resolution drops off sharply. To compensate, we constantly move our eyes to bring the sharper region to bear on different portions of the scene we wish to observe. And so the pattern of raw data sent to the brain is a shaky, badly pixilated picture with a hole in it. Fortunately the brain processes the data, combining input from both eyes, filling in gaps on the assumption that the visual properties of neighboring locations are similar and interpolating. The result - at least until age, injury, disease, or an excess of mai tais takes its toll - is a happy human being suffering from the compelling illusion that his or her vision is sharp and clear. We also use our imagination and take shortcuts to fill gaps in patterns of nonvisual data. As with visual input, we draw conclusions and make judgments based on uncertain and incomplete information, and we conclude, when we are done analyzing the patterns, that out “picture” is clear and accurate. But is it?

Another mistaken notion connected with the law of large numbers is the idea that an event is more or less likely to occur because it has or has not happened recently. The idea that the odds of an event with a fixed probability increase or decrease depending on recent occurrences of the event is called the gambler's fallacy. For example, if Kerrich landed, say, 44 heads in the first 100 tosses, the coin would not develop a bias towards the tails in order to catch up! That's what is at the root of such ideas as "her luck has run out" and "He is due." That does not happen. For what it's worth, a good streak doesn't jinx you, and a bad one, unfortunately , does not mean better luck is in store.

Says Bargh: „We all hold dear idea that we´re the captain of our own sould, and we´re in charge, and it´s a very scary feeling when we are not. In fact, that´s what psychosis is – the feeling of detachment from reality and that you are not in control, and that´s a very frightening feeling for anyone.

We believe that when we choose anything, judge a stranger and even fall in love, we understand the principal factors that influenced us. Very often nothing could be further from the truth. As a result, many of our most basic assumptions about ourselves, and society, are false.

People have a basic desire to feel good about themselves, and we therefore have a tendency to be unconsciously biased in favor of traits similiar to our won, even such seemingly meaningless traits as our names. Scientists have even identified a discrete area of the brain, called the dorsal striatum, as the structure that mediates much of this bias.

A dwarf standing on the shoulders of a giant may see farther than a giant himself

Kant said, there is Das Ding an sich, a thing as it is, and there is Das Ding für uns, a thing as we know it.

most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.

If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.

When we are in the grasp of illusion – or, for that matter, whenever we have a new idea – instead of searching for ways to prove our ideas wrong, we usually attempt to prove them correct. Psychologists call this the confirmation bias, and it presents a major impediment of our ability to break free from the misinterpretation of randomness.

there are two ways to get at the truth: the way of the scientist and the way of the lawyer. Scientists gather evidence, look for regularities, form theories explaining their observations, and test them. Attorneys begin with a conclusion they want to convince others of and then seek evidence that supports it, while also attempting to discredit evidence that doesn’t.

Paleolithic humans migrated often, and, like my teenagers, they followed the food.

Robert Frost wrote in 1914, “Why abandon a belief / Merely because it ceases to be true.

That’s why successful people in every field are almost universally members of a certain set—the set of people who don’t give up.

For while anyone can sit back and point to the bottom line as justification, assessing instead a person's actual knowledge and actual ability takes confidence, thought, good judgement, and, well, guts. You can't just stand up in a meeting with your colleagues and yell, "Don't fire her. She was just on the wrong end of a Bernoulli series." Nor is it likely to win you friends if you stand up and say of the gloating fellow who just sold more Toyota Camrys than anyone else in the history of the dealership, "It was just a random fluctuation.

The appeal of many conspiracy theories depends on the misunderstanding of this logic. That is, it depends on confusing the probability that a series of events would happen if it were the product of a huge conspiracy with the probability that a huge conspiracy exists if a series of events occurs.

Dershowitz may have felt justified in misleading the jury because, in his words, “the courtroom oath—‘to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth’—is applicable only to witnesses. Defense attorneys, prosecutors, and judges don’t take this oath…indeed, it is fair to say the American justice system is built on a foundation of not telling the whole truth.

the human sensory system sends the brain about eleven million bits of information each second.9 However, anyone who has ever taken care of a few children who are all trying to talk to you at once can testify that your conscious mind cannot process anywhere near that amount. The actual amount of information we can handle has been estimated to be somewhere between sixteen and fifty bits per second.

In Leipzig [in the 14th century], the university found it necessary to promulgate a rule against throwing stones at the professors. As late as 1495, a German statute explicitly forbade anyone associated with the university from drenching freshmen with urine.

People seemed to “decide” how much to eat based on box size as much as taste.

The mythical stories we tell about our heroes are always more romantic and often more palatable than the truth.

Our species had to engage in complex cooperative behavior in order to survive in the wild, and—as I keep reminding my teenage children—pointing and grunting get you only so far.

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die,

Einstein, who was then a professor in Berlin, was by chance visiting Caltech in the United States the day Hitler was appointed.

research on hunter-gatherer groups ranging from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries shows that the average nomad worked just two to four hours each day.

Though you are unaware of it, when you run cool wine over your tongue, you don’t just taste its chemical composition; you also taste its price.

true randomness sometimes produces repetition,

Your amicable words mean nothing if your body seems to be saying something different.    —JAMES BORG I

Upon learning of the young man’s interest in a physics book, Lindemann, a number theorist, abruptly ended the interview, saying, “In that case you are completely lost to mathematics.

Einstein had, for the first time connected new and measurable consequences to statistical physics. That might sound like a largely technical achievement, but on the contrary, it represented the triumph of a great principle: that much of the order we percieve in nature belies an invisible underlying disorder and hence can be understood only through the rules of randomness.

To gain a true understanding of human experience, we must understand both our conscious and our unconscious selves, and how they interact. Our subliminal brain is invisible to us, yet it influences our conscious experience of the world in the most fundamental of ways: how we view ourselves and others, the meanings we attach to the everyday events of our lives, our ability to make the quick judgment calls and decisions that can sometimes mean the difference between life and death, and the actions we engage in as a result of all these instinctual experiences.

paleontological evidence suggests that the early farmers had more spinal issues, worse teeth, and more anemia and vitamin deficiencies—and died younger—than the populations of human foragers who preceded them.

Leonard Mlodinow, in his excellent book Subliminal, writes, “We usually assume that what distinguishes us [from other species] is IQ. But it is our social IQ that ought to be the principal quality that differentiates us.

if events are random, we are not in control, and if we are in control of events, they are not random. There is therefore a fundamental clash between our need to feel we are in control and our ability to recognize randomness.

In his theory Perrow recognized that modern systems are made up of thousands of parts, including fallible human decision makers, which interrelate in ways that are, like Laplace´s atoms, impossible to track and anticipate individually. Yet one can bet on the fact that just as atoms executing a drunkard´s walk will eventually get somewhere, so too will accidents eventually occur. Called normal accident theory, Perrow´s doctrine describes how that happens – how accidents can occur without clear causes, without those glaring errors and incompetent villains sought by corporate or government commission.

Deep within our brains, as in theirs, our shadowy unconscious mind is continuously applying the lessons of our past experience to predict the consequences of our current circumstances. In fact, one way to characterize a brain is as a prediction machine.

Why is the human need to be in control relevant to a discussion of random patterns? Because if events are random, we are not in control, and if we are in control of events, they are not random, there is therefore a fundamental clash between our need to feel we are in control and our ability to recognize randomness. That clash is one of the principal reasons we misinterpret random events. In fact, inducing people to mistake luck for skills, or pointless actions for control, is one of the easiest enterprises a research psychologist can engage in ask people to control flashing lights by pressing a dummy button, and they will believe they are succeeding even though the lights are flashing at random. Show people a circle of lights that flash at random and tell them that by concentrating they can cause the flashing to move in clockwise direction, and they will astonish themselves with their ability to make it happen.

Strange is our situation here on earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to a divine purpose. From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: that we are here for the sake of others.    —ALBERT EINSTEIN I

I have stressed this distinction because it is an important one. It defines the fundamental difference between probability and statistics: the former concerns predictions based on fixed probabilities; the latter concerns the inference of those probabilities based on observed data.

Well, I have been working on my own theory for twelve years,” and then he proceeded to describe it in excruciating detail. When he was finished, Feynman turned to me and said, in front of the man who had just proudly described his work, “That’s exactly what I mean about wasting your time.

The difficulty in making sense of even simple speech is well appreciated by computer scientists who struggle to create machines that can respond to natural language. Their frustration is illustrated by a possibly apocryphal story of the early computer that was given the task of translating the homily „The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.“ into Russian and then back to English. According to the story, it came out: „The vodka is strong but the meat is rotten.

In fact, when some wedding guest inevitably complains about the seating arrangements, you might point out how long it would have taken you to consider every possibility: assuming you spent one second considering each one, it would come to more than half a million years. The unhappy guest will assume, of course, that you are being histrionic.

Believing in what you desire to be true and then seeking evidence to justify it doesn’t seem to be the best approach to everyday decisions.

Thomas Edison is often said to have advised, “To have a great idea, have a lot of them.

The normal distribution describes the manner in which many phenomena vary around a central value that represents their most probable outcome;

along with our responses to them, determine

Instead, like Heisenberg, his priority seemed to be to preserve as much of German science as possible, while complying with all Nazi laws and regulations.

a thousand years without a bath.

Pauli turned to the audience and argued, “Yes, my theory is crazy enough!” Then Bohr insisted, “No, your theory is not crazy enough!

in 1904 he applied for a promotion from patent clerk third class to patent clerk second class and was turned down.

the invention of mummification. This was believed to be the key to a happy afterlife; certainly there were no disgruntled customers coming back to say otherwise.

I wouldn’t have to drop out of academia and take a more lucrative position waiting tables at the faculty club.

They required three thousand Jews, the man said, and the line had apparently held 3,004.

the destination was the local cemetery, where everyone was ordered to dig a mass grave and then was shot dead and buried in it.

Heisenberg, who was attempting to hold German physics together, resented Schrödinger’s departure, “since he was neither Jewish nor otherwise endangered.

The Nazis confiscated his personal property, burned his works on relativity, and put a five-thousand-dollar bounty on his head.

Newton was “not finally reducible to the criteria by which we comprehend our fellow human beings.

(Your own species ends up with a name like that when you get to choose it

A dwarf on a giant’s shoulders sees farther of the two

A pygmy upon a gyants shoulder may see farther than the [giant] himself.

theory produces a good deal but hardly brings us closer to the secret of the Old One. I am at all events convinced that He does not play dice.

My father had drawn number 3,004 in a death lottery in which German precision trumped Nazi brutality.

they left for California, Einstein had told his wife to take a good look at their house. “You will never see it again,” he told her.

Born, barred from teaching and worried about the ongoing harassment of his children, also immediately sought to leave Germany.

1943 Bohr was tipped off by the Swedish ambassador in Copenhagen that he faced immediate arrest as part of the plan to deport all of Denmark’s Jews.

One end of the spectrum of fantastical thinking is labeled “crackpot,” and the other “visionary.

Stephen Hawking once told me that there was a sense in which he was glad to be paralyzed, because it allowed him to focus much more intensely on his work.

Not too long ago, the man who was then the president of Iran was quoted as saying that Jews descended from monkeys and pigs.

I saw two rare beetles & seized one in each hand; then I saw a third & new kind, which I could not bear to lose, so I popped the one which I held in my right hand into my mouth.

regulations allow for up to ten insect fragments per thirty-one-gram serving.

Meanwhile, a serving of broccoli may contain sixty aphids and/or mites,

while a jar of ground cinnamon may contain four hundred insect fragments.

Today we call our subspecies Homo sapiens sapiens, or “Wise, Wise Man.

German authorities saw the need for a statute explicitly forbidding anyone associated with the university from drenching freshmen with urine,

Leipzig that the university had to pass a rule against throwing stones at professors.

if a lecture was not interesting or proceeded too slowly or too quickly, they would jeer and become rowdy.

Chemicals were easier to procure than friends, and when I wanted to play with them they never said they had to stay home to wash their hair or, less politely, that they didn’t associate with weirdos.

The answer lies in a phenomenon called regression toward the mean. That is, in any series of random events an extraordinary event is most likely to be followed, due purely to chance, by a more ordinary one.

We miss the effects of randomness in life because when we assess the world, we tend to see what we expect to see. We in effect define degree of talent by degree of success and then reinforce our feelings of causality by noting the correlation. That’s why although there is sometimes little difference in ability between a wildly successful person and one who is not as successful, there is usually a big difference in how they are viewed.

volatile green lion in the central salt of Venus and distill. This spirit is the green lion the blood of the green lion Venus, the Babylonian Dragon that kills everything with its poison, but conquered by being assuaged by the Doves of Diana, it is the Bond of Mercury.

Michael Jordan once said, “I’ve missed more than nine thousand shots in my career. I’ve lost almost three hundred games. Twenty-six times, I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.

few people would engage in extended activity if they believed that there were a random connection between what they did and the rewards they received,”15 Lerner concluded that “for the sake of their own sanity,” people overestimate the degree to which ability can be inferred from success.

medieval scholars made surprising progress, despite living in an age in which people routinely judged the truth of statements not according to empirical evidence but by how well they fit into their preexisting system of religion-based beliefs—a culture that is inimical to science as we know it today.

Albert Einstein wrote, “One of the strongest motives that leads men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness.… Each makes this cosmos and its construction the pivot of his emotional life in order to find in this way the peace and security which he cannot find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience.

What can you prove about space? How do you know where you are? Can space be curved? How many dimensions are there? How does geometry explain the natural order and unity of the cosmos? These are the questions behind the five geometric revolutions of world history. It started with a little scheme hatched by Pythagoras: to employ mathematics as the abstract system of rules that can model the physical universe.

Fewer than eight hundred Americans earn a Ph.D. in physics each year. Worldwide, the number is probably in the thousands. And yet from this small pool comes the discovery and innovation that shapes the way we live and think. From X-rays, lasers, radio waves, transistors, atomic energy—and atomic weapons—to our view of space and time, and the nature of the universe, all this has arisen from this dedicated pool of individuals. To be a physicist is to have an enormous potential to change the world.

Rosenthal went on to study precisely that – what expectation mean for our children. In one line of research he showed that teachers´ expectations greatly affect their students´ academic performance, even when the teachers try to treat them impartially. For example, he and a colleague asked schoolkids in eighteen classrooms to complete an IQ test. The teachers, but not students, were given results. The researchers told the teachers that the test would indicate which children had unusually high intellectual potential. What the teachers didn’t know was that the kids named as gifted did not really score higher than average on the IQ test – they actually had average scores. Shortly afterwards, the teachers rated those not labeled gifted as less curious and less interested than the gifted students – and the students´ subsequent grades reflected that. But what is really shocking – and sobering – is the result of another IQ test, given eight months later. When you administer IQ test a second time, you expect that each child´s score will vary some. In general, about half of the children´s scores should go up and half down, as a result of changes in the individual’s intellectual development in relation to his peers or simply random variations. When Rosenthal administered the second test, he indeed found that about half the kids labeled “normal” showed a gain in IQ. But among those who´d been singled out as brilliant, he obtained a different result; about 80 % had an increase of at least 10 points. What´s more, about 20 % of the “gifted” group gained 30 or more IQ points, while only 5 % of the other children gained that many. Labeling children as gifted had proved to be a powerful self-fulfilling prophecy.

Twenty-four centuries ago, a Greek man stood at the sea’s edge watching ships disappear in the distance. Aristotle must have passed much time there, quietly observing many vessels, for eventually he was struck by a peculiar thought. All ships seemed to vanish hull first, then masts and sails. He wondered, how could that be? On a flat earth, ships should dwindle evenly until they disappear as a tiny featureless dot. That the masts and sails vanish first, Aristotle saw in a flash of genius, is a sign that the earth is curved. To observe the large-scale structure of our planet, Aristotle had looked through the window of geometry.

To understand my doctor’s error, let’s employ Bayes’s method. The first step is to define the sample space. We could include everyone who has ever taken an HIV test, but we’ll get a more accurate result if we employ a bit of additional relevant information about me and consider only heterosexual non-IV-drug-abusing white male Americans who have taken the test. (We’ll see later what kind of difference this makes.) Now that we know whom to include in the sample space, let’s classify the members of the space. Instead of boy and girl, here the relevant classes are those who tested positive and are HIV-positive (true positives), those who tested positive but are not positive (false positives), those who tested negative and are HIV-negative (true negatives), and those who tested negative but are HIV-positive (false negatives). Finally, we ask, how many people are there in each of these classes? Suppose we consider an initial population of 10,000. We can estimate, employing statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, that in 1989 about 1 in those 10,000 heterosexual non-IV-drug-abusing white male Americans who got tested were infected with HIV.6 Assuming that the false-negative rate is near 0, that means that about 1 person out of every 10,000 will test positive due to the presence of the infection. In addition, since the rate of false positives is, as my doctor had quoted, 1 in 1,000, there will be about 10 others who are not infected with HIV but will test positive anyway. The other 9,989 of the 10,000 men in the sample space will test negative. Now let’s prune the sample space to include only those who tested positive. We end up with 10 people who are false positives and 1 true positive. In other words, only 1 in 11 people who test positive are really infected with HIV.