Nonsense Quotes

“The mind state caused by ambiguity is called uncertainty, and it’s an emotional amplifier. It makes anxiety more agonizing, and pleasure especially enjoyable. The delight of crossword puzzles, for example, comes from pondering and resolving ambiguous clues. Detective stories, among the most successful literary genres of all time, concoct their suspense by sustaining uncertainty about hints and culprits. Mind-bending modern art, the multiplicities of poetry, Lewis Carroll’s riddles, Márquez’s magical realism, Kafka’s existential satire—ambiguity saturates our art forms and masterpieces, suggesting its deeply emotional nature. Goethe once said that “what we agree with leaves us inactive, but contradiction makes us productive.” So it is with ambiguity.”
― Jamie Holmes, Nonsense: The Power of Not Knowing

“Both empathy and creativity spring from the same source: diversity. Empathy, after all, is a fundamentally creative act by which we connect previously unimagined lives to our own. The path to embracing other cultures has to traverse the imagination. That’s why studies have shown that a high need for closure hurts creativity. And it’s why reading fiction—which puts us in other people’s shoes—can both lower our need for closure and make us more empathetic. Spending time among diverse social groups has the same effect.”
― Jamie Holmes, Nonsense: The Power of Not Knowing

“What counts, then, isn’t so much success or failure but whether we stay in learning mode, continue to seek out ambiguity, and view uncertainty as the doorway to invention.”
― Jamie Holmes, Nonsense: The Power of Not Knowing

“Prejudiced people, Allport wrote in his landmark work, The Nature of Prejudice, “seem afraid to say ‘I don’t know.’ ” They have an “urge for quick and definite answers,” “cling to past solutions,” and have a preference for “order, but especially social order.” Such people “adopt concrete, if rigid, modes of thinking,” “cannot tolerate ambiguity” when making plans, “latch on to what is familiar, safe, simple, definite,” and fail “to see all relevant sides to [a] problem.”
― Jamie Holmes, Nonsense: The Power of Not Knowing

“Not knowing doesn’t leave us without a compass, in some relativist nether land. Owning our uncertainty makes us kinder, more creative, and more alive.”
― Jamie Holmes, Nonsense: The Power of Not Knowing

“The roots of prejudice can be traced to a general cognitive outlook characterized by the hunger for certainty.”
― Jamie Holmes, Nonsense: The Power of Not Knowing

“Lawrence Katz recently put it, will hinge on one question: “How well do you deal with unstructured problems, and how well do you deal with new situations?” Jobs that can be “turned into an algorithm,” in his words, won’t be coming back. “What will be rewarded,” Katz told me, “are the abilities to pick up new skills [and] remain attuned to your environment and the capacity to discover creative solutions that move beyond the standard way of doing things.”
― Jamie Holmes, Nonsense: The Power of Not Knowing

“Ambivalence is a more natural state of mind than we ordinarily assume. Wanting and not wanting the same thing at the same time is so common that we might even consider it a baseline condition of human consciousness.”
― Jamie Holmes, Nonsense: The Power of Not Knowing

“Flannery O’Connor once wrote, “is the engine that makes perception operate.” Our expectations and assumptions—whether generous or hopeful, pitiless or woebegone—constantly bend and even warp the world we see. That’s how we cope with what William James called life’s “great blooming, buzzing confusion.” We’re endlessly reducing ambiguity to certainty, and in general, the system works well. Absolut’s marketing triumph showed that the mind’s resolution urge is so powerful and innate that simply by baiting our habituated associations, by hinting at connections left out, advertisers could transform liquor ads into captivating little puzzles.”
― Jamie Holmes, Nonsense: The Power of Not Knowing

“brilliant psychologist named Arie Kruglanski, a person’s need for closure measures a particular “desire for a definite answer on some topic, any answer as opposed to confusion and ambiguity.” Like”
― Jamie Holmes, Nonsense: The Power of Not Knowing

“Miguel Escotet, a social scientist and education professor, has framed the argument well. Schools should “educate for uncertainty,” he said, simply because for many students, “it is almost impossible to know what will happen by the time they will join the job market.” For Escotet, educating for uncertainty involves helping students be flexible, self-critical, curious, and risk-embracing—”
― Jamie Holmes, Nonsense: The Power of Not Knowing

“The mind state caused by ambiguity is called uncertainty, and it’s an emotional amplifier. It makes anxiety more agonizing, and pleasure especially enjoyable. The delight of crossword puzzles, for example, comes from pondering and resolving ambiguous clues.”
― Jamie Holmes, Nonsense: The Power of Not Knowing

“Having an open mind doesn’t imply having no opinion. It often implies having both opinions. It means not denying the supposed contradiction that victims can be victimizers and vice versa, a simple truth that dogmatists refuse to accept. Such contradictions fuel . . . art. The open-minded person, likewise, cultivates those tensions.”
― Jamie Holmes, Nonsense: The Power of Not Knowing

“Lasting knowledge earns its keep by allowing itself to be persistently questioned. In any field, we gain true confidence when we allow our ideas and successes to be continuously challenged.”
― Jamie Holmes, Nonsense: The Power of Not Knowing

“pathologists identifying tissue samples as either normal, cancerous, or precancerous got it wrong up to nearly 12 percent of the time. In yet another study, radiologists judging chest X-rays disagreed with one another 20 percent of the time. Worse, when one of the radiologists reexamined the same X-rays later on, he contradicted himself up to 10 percent of the time.”
― Jamie Holmes, Nonsense: The Power of Not Knowing

“For better or for worse—although often for the worse—what human nature craves in the face of psychologically acute threats like the 2008 economic meltdown, ISIS, or Ebola is decisiveness. That’s partly why the approval of George W. Bush, who famously bragged, “I don’t do nuance,” jumped more than 30 percentage points after 9/11. Americans found closure in expressing increased trust in a self-convinced government. Bush’s popularity tracked up and down with the Department of Homeland Security’s color-coded threat warning.”
― Jamie Holmes, Nonsense: The Power of Not Knowing

“The present age seems likely—through both acute events like 9/11 and chronic cultural and economic instability—to continue to intensify people’s appetite for absolutes. And the explanations that we hold on to can do permanent harm, compounding the problem.”
― Jamie Holmes, Nonsense: The Power of Not Knowing

“Along the way, I’ll hope to convince you of a simple claim: in an increasingly complex, unpredictable world, what matters most isn’t IQ, willpower, or confidence in what we know. It’s how we deal with what we don’t understand.”
― Jamie Holmes, Nonsense: The Power of Not Knowing

“That, in fact, is what Kruglanski and other researchers discovered. Our need to conquer the unresolved, as we’ll see, is essential to our ability to function in the world. But like any mental trait, this need can be exaggerated in some people and heightened in certain circumstances. As Kruglanski told me, “the situation you’re in, your culture, your social environment—change any of these factors, and you’re going to change someone’s need for closure.” Aversion to uncertainty can be contagious, picked up subconsciously from those around us. In stressful situations, we trust people in our social groups more and trust outsiders less. Fatigue heightens our appetite for order. So does time pressure. When our need for closure is high, we tend to revert to stereotypes, jump to conclusions, and deny contradictions. We may stubbornly insist, like Rudolf Schelkmann, that the dog is still a dog and not a cat.”
― Jamie Holmes, Nonsense: The Power of Not Knowing

“THIS BOOK LOOKS at how we make sense of the world. It’s about what happens when we’re confused and the path forward isn’t obvious. Of course, most of the challenges of daily life are perfectly straightforward. When it’s snowing, we know to put on a jacket before venturing out. When the phone rings, we pick it up. A red stoplight means we should brake. At the other end of the spectrum, vast stores of knowledge completely confound most of us. Stare at Babylonian cuneiform or listen to particle physicists debate, and if you’re like me, your mind will draw a blank. We can’t be confused without some foothold in knowledge. Instead of feeling uneasy because we half understand, we’re as calmly certain in our ignorance as we are assured in our everyday rituals. This book examines the hazy middle ground between these two extremes, when the information we need to make sense of an experience seems to be missing, too complex, or contradictory.”
― Jamie Holmes, Nonsense: The Power of Not Knowing