We live in a world in which data convey authority. But authority has a way of descending to certitude, and certitude begets hubris.
Interpretation
Data can create a sense of authority, but this often leads to overconfidence and arrogance.
Bret Stephens suggests that in our current society, where data is often seen as the ultimate authority, there is a danger that this reliance on data can lead to an unwarranted certainty in our beliefs and decisions. This overconfidence, in turn, can breed hubris, where individuals or groups believe they are infallible due to their reliance on data, potentially leading to negative consequences.
In practice
In a business meeting discussing analytics, one could quote this to caution against overconfidence in the numbers.
I routinely interview college students, mostly from top schools, and I notice that their brains are like old maps, with lots of blank spaces for the uncharted terrain. It's not that they lack for motivation or IQ. It's that they can't connect the dots when they don't know where the dots are in the first place.
The most interesting conversation is not about why Donald Trump lies. Many public figures lie, and he's only a severe example of a common type. The interesting conversation concerns how we come to accept those lies.
The more afraid we are of the shadow of racism, the more conscious we might become of our own unsuspected biases.
The American birthright belongs, potentially, to everyone. This is unprecedented. Other countries accept migrants on the basis of economic necessity or as a humanitarian gesture. Only in America is it the direct consequence of our foundational ideals.
I prayed for the city to be cleared of people, for the gift of being aloneβa-l-o-n-e: which is the one New York prayer that rarely gets lost or delayed in channels, and in no time at all everything I touched turned to solid loneliness.
What consoles one nowadays is not repentance but pleasure. Repentance is quite out of date.
This world in which we live needs beauty in order not to sink into despair. It is beauty, like truth, which brings joy to the heart of man and is that precious fruit which resists the year and tear of time, which unites generations and makes them share things in admiration.
She supposed that houses, after all - like the lives that were lived in them - were mostly made of space. It was the spaces, in fact, which counted, rather than the bricks.
Every brain is civilized, Every nerve is analyzed, Everything is criticized when you are in need.
What is it in you that brings you to a spiritual teacher in the first place? It's not the spirit in you, since that is already enlightened, and has no need to seek. No, it is the ego in you that brings you to a teacher.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.