Listen, three eyes," he said, "don't you try to outweird me, I get stranger things than you free with my breakfast cereal.
Douglas AdamsRead
See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise you will only see what you were expecting. Most scientists forget that.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of observation and open-mindedness in scientific inquiry.
Douglas Adams highlights the crucial step of observing phenomena before forming expectations or conclusions. He warns that if scientists merely look for what they expect to see, they risk missing important insights, thus encouraging a more exploratory and less biased approach to understanding the world.
In practice
This quote can be used in a lecture about the scientific method to stress the importance of observation.
Listen, three eyes," he said, "don't you try to outweird me, I get stranger things than you free with my breakfast cereal.
"What's so unpleasant about being drunk?" "Ask a glass of water."
Protect me from knowing what I don't need to know. Protect me from even knowing that there are things to know that I don't know. Protect me from knowing that I decided not to know about the things that I decided not to know about. Amen. [...] Lord, lord, lord. Protect me from the consequences of the above prayer.
Computers are still technology because we are still wrestling with it: it's still being invented; we're still trying to work out how it works. There's a world of game interaction to come that you or I wouldn't recognise. It's time for the machines to disappear. The computer's got to disappear into all of the things we use.
What the computer in virtual reality enables us to do is to recalibrate ourselves so that we can start seeing those pieces of information that are invisible to us but have become important for us to understand.
We are stuck with technology when all we really want is just stuff that works. How do you recognize something that is still technology? A good clue is if it comes with a manual.
In the attempt to make scientific discoveries, every problem is an opportunity β and the more difficult the problem, the greater will be the importance of its solution.
A very great deal more truth can become known than can be proven.
I love science fiction. There are ways in which this community kept me and my partner alive through some very, very bad years, and I will always acknowledge that.
A single neuron in the brain is an incredibly complex machine that even today we don't understand. A single 'neuron' in a neural network is an incredibly simple mathematical function that captures a minuscule fraction of the complexity of a biological neuron.
Thousands of years ago, humans domesticated every possible large wild mammal species fulfilling all those criteria and worth domesticating, with the result that there have been no valuable additions of domestic animals in recent times, despite the efforts of modern science.
If such a thing had happened once, it must surely have happened many times in this galaxy of a hundred billion suns.
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