An expert is a person who avoids the small errors while sweeping on to the grand fallacy.
Interpretation
Experts may overlook minor mistakes while focusing on larger misconceptions.
This quote highlights the paradox of expertise, suggesting that while experts are skilled at avoiding trivial errors, they may simultaneously be blind to larger, more significant faults or misconceptions, leading to potentially severe consequences. It serves as a reminder that having expertise does not automatically equate to understanding the broader picture or questioning oneβs assumptions.
In practice
This quote can be shared during a seminar on critical thinking to emphasize the importance of questioning what we think we know.
It was one time when people thought the value of the fine structure constant was important. Now of course it's still important, of course, as a practical matter,but we now know that the value it has is a function, that in any fundamental theory you derive the fine structure constant as a function of all sorts of mass ratios and so on and it's not really that fundamental.
Americans swept away the instruments of English hereditary inequality - entails and titles of nobility - even before we had a constitution.
It's very difficult to convince other countries that they shouldn't pursue nuclear weapons programs if we ourselves are actively developing a component of a strategic defense system.
[Science] is corrosive of religious belief, and it's a good thing too.
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
I'm offended by the kind of smarmy religiosity that's all around us, perhaps more in America than in Europe, and not really that harmful because it's not really that intense or even that serious, but just... you know after a while you get tired of hearing clergymen giving the invocation at various public celebrations and you feel, haven't we outgrown all this? Do we have to listen to this?
I've always felt that a person's intelligence is directly reflected by the number of conflicting points of view he can entertain simultaneously on the same topic.
I haven't a particle of confidence in a man who has no redeeming petty vices whatsoever.
Remembering a wrong is like carrying a burden on the mind.
You can't study the darkness by flooding it with light.
I get irritated, I get upset. Especially when I'm in a hurry. But I see it all as part of our training. To get irritated is to lose our way in life.
There is a thing called knowledge of the world, which people do not have until they are middle-aged. It is something which cannot be taught to younger people, because it is not logical and does not obey laws which are constant. It has no rules. Only, in the long years which bring women to the middle of life, a sense of balance develops...when she is beginning to hate her used body, she suddenly finds that she can do it. She can go on living.
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