Thesis Defense Quotes

My main thesis is narrower and, I think, more defensible: understanding reality, in the sense of being able to use what we know to predict what we don’t, is best achieved using the tools of science, and is never achieved using the methods of faith.

Many existential thinkers hypothesize that the fear of death is greater in people who do not live up to their potential than in those who fulfill themselves (Yalom, 1980). This thesis leads to the conclusion that therapeutic interventions which free patients from their repressions, so that they will be better able to actualize themselves, will also reduce their fears about dying.

When in 1863 Thomas Huxley coined the phrase 'Man's Place in Nature,' it was to name a short collection of his essays applying to man Darwin's theory of evolution. The Origin of Species had been published only four years before, and the thesis that man was literally a part of nature, rather than an earthy vessel charged with some sublimer stuff, was so novel and so offensive to current metaphysics that it needed the most vigorous defense. Half the civilized world was rudely shocked, the other half skeptically amused. Nearly a century has passed since the Origin shattered the complacency of the Victorian world and initiated what may be called the Darwinian revolution, an upheaval of man's ideas comparable to and probably exceeding in significance the revolution that issued from Copernicus's demonstration that the earth moves around the sun. The theory of evolution was but one of many factors contributing to the destruction of the ancient beliefs; it only toppled over what had already been weakened by centuries of decay, rendered suspect by the assaults of many intellectual disciplines; but it marked the beginning of the end of the era of faith.

Colonialism demands history begin past the point of colonization precisely because, under those narrative conditions, the colonist’s every action is necessarily one of self-defense. The story begins not when the wagons arrive, but only after they are circled. In this telling, fear is the exclusive property of only one people, and the notion that the occupied might fear the doing of their occupier is as fantastical as the notion that barbarians might be afraid of the gate. Any population on whom this asymmetry is imposed will always be the instigators, the cause of what is and, simultaneously, the justification for what will be. The savage outside does, the civilized center must respond. How does one finish the sentence: 'It is unfortunate that tens of thousands of children are dead, but …' Ignore for a moment that the number is an approximation. Ignore the many more children mutilated, orphaned, left to scream under the rubble. Ignore the construction of the sentence itself, its dark similarities to the language of every abuser—You made me do this. Ignore all of this and think about how you would finish this sentence that has now been uttered in one “tence that has now been uttered in one form or another by so many otherwise deeply empathetic Western liberals. How to finish it and still be able to sleep at night. Surely, many people have, and their answers might relate to terrorists or revenge or an all-encompassing right to self-defense. But trimmed to its most basic language, every proposed conclusion to that sentence is some variant of the same basic thesis: They would have killed more of ours. What does unlimited fear cost? What will sate it?

There is no reason at all for thinking that the average intelligent investor, even with much devoted effort, can derive better results over the years from the purchase of growth stocks than the investment companies specializing in this area. Surely these organizations have more brains and better research facilities at their disposal than you do. Consequently we should advise against the usual type of growth-stock commitment for the enterprising investor.* This is one in which the excellent prospects are fully recognized in the market and already reflected in a current price-earnings ratio of, say, higher than 20. (For the defensive investor we suggested an upper limit of purchase price at 25 times average earnings of the past seven years. The two criteria would be about equivalent in most cases.)† The striking thing about growth stocks as a class is their tendency toward wide swings in market price. This is true of the largest and longest-established companies—such as General Electric and International Business Machines—and even more so of newer and smaller successful companies. They illustrate our thesis that the main characteristic of the stock market since 1949 has been the injection of a highly speculative element into the shares of companies which have scored the most brilliant successes, and which themselves would be entitled to a high investment rating. (Their credit standing is of the best, and they pay the lowest interest rates on their borrowings.) The investment caliber of such a company may not change over a long span of years, but the risk characteristics of its stock will depend on what happens to it in the stock market. The more enthusiastic the public grows about it, and the faster its advance as compared with the actual growth in its earnings, the riskier a proposition it becomes.

The erroneous belief that science eventually leads to the certainty of a definitive explanation carries with it the implication that it is a grave scientific mis- demeanour to have published some hypothesis that eventually is falsified. As a consequence scientists have often been loath to admit the falsification of such an hypothesis, and their lives may be wasted in defending the no longer defensible. Whereas according to Popper, falsification in whole or in part is the anticipated fate of all hypotheses, and we should even rejoice in the falsification of an hypo thesis that we have cherished as our brain-child.

It is a major thesis of this book that the fantasy bond in the traditional family causes a tremendous amount of innocent, unnecessary suffering. Denying primitive hunger and pain and pretending connections that, in fact, do not exist, lead to fundamental distortions of each person’s sense of reality. It is a great burden on everyone to play this game of “let’s pretend.

Defense mechanisms are everywhere and with every organisms to protect themselves from predators and other environmental or ecological stimulus, even music is a defense mechanism, even coding is defense mechanism, AI/ML is to understand defense mechanisms,/ But for me when i figure out Biological/ environmental/ecological stimuli responsible for specific reactions i e physiological dynamics, i observe, study, research and finally defend on thesis presentation or viva voce or laude ., Aspiring Biologist / Env/ecologist

Critics such as Slavoj Žižek accuse him of being a poster child for the cultural excesses of postmodern capitalism (“Ongoing ‘Soft Revolution’”). A recent round of denunciations underwritten by a mix of wonderment and red-baiting exclaim, “The founder of BuzzFeed wrote his senior thesis on the Marxism of Deleuze and Guattari!,” adding to a long list of guilty associations—“the Israeli Defense Force reads A Thousand Plateaus!,” “Deleuze spouts the fashionable nonsense of pseudoscience!” Deleuze’s defenders are correct to dismiss such criticisms as either incomplete or outright spurious. Yet there is a kernel of truth that goes back to an old joke—a communist is someone who reads Das Kapital; a capitalist is someone who reads Das Kapital and understands it.