Mindware Quotes

“Chinese dialectical reasoning had an impact on the physicist Niels Bohr, who was highly knowledgeable about Eastern thought. He attributed his development of quantum theory in part to the metaphysics of the East. There had been a centuries-long debate in the West about whether light consists of particles or waves. Belief in one was assumed to contradict and render impossible belief in the other. Bohr’s solution was to say that light can be thought of in both ways. In quantum theory, light can be viewed either as a particle or as a wave. Just never both at the same time.”
― Richard E. Nisbett, Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking

“What nature hath joined together, multiple regression analysis cannot put asunder.”
― Richard E. Nisbett, Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking

“Whether you’re heroic or heartless may depend on a contextual factor whose impact is far greater than we would tend to assume.”
― Richard E. Nisbett, Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking

“Behind many a successful person lies a string of lucky breaks that we have no inkling about.”
― Richard E. Nisbett, Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking

“we see patterns in the world where there are none because we don’t understand just how un-random-looking random sequences can be.”
― Richard E. Nisbett, Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking

“Important influences can be hidden, but even when powerful situational determinants of behavior are staring us in the face, we can be oblivious to their impact.”
― Richard E. Nisbett, Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking

“Aristotle got tired of hearing lousy arguments in the marketplace and the assembly. So he decided to develop reasoning templates to apply to arguments in order to analyze them for validity.”
― Richard E. Nisbett, Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking

“14. Song and Schwarz, “If It’s Hard to Read, It’s Hard to Do.”
― Richard E. Nisbett, Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking

“Every belief about every aspect of the world is based on countless inferences we make via mental processes we can’t observe.”
― Richard E. Nisbett, Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking

“But social class is only one of an unlimited number of potential confounds present in MRA studies. Almost anything that’s correlated with both the predictor variable and the outcome variable in such studies becomes a candidate for explaining the correlation between the two.”
― Richard E. Nisbett, Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking