#lacy

it seems that once again people engage in a search for evidence that is biased toward confirmation. Asked to assess the similarity of two entities, people pay more attention to the ways in which they are similar than to the ways in which they differ. Asked to assess dissimilarity, they become more concerned with differences than with similarities. In other words, when testing a hypothesis of similarity, people look for evidence of similarity rather than dissimilarity, and when testing a hypothesis of dissimilarity, they do the opposite. The relationship one perceives between two entities, then, can vary with the precise form of the question that is asked ↗

— Thomas Gilovich

#fallacy #human-behavior #logic #mind #psychology

Most people have some appreciation of mathematics, just as most people can enjoy a pleasant tune; and there are probably more people really interested in mathematics than in music. Appearances suggest the contrary, but there are easy explanations. Music can be used to stimulate mass emotion, while mathematics cannot; and musical incapacity is recognized (no doubt rightly) as mildly discreditable, whereas most people are so frightened of the name of mathematics that they are ready, quite unaffectedly, to exaggerate their own mathematical stupidity ↗

— G.H. Hardy

#math #mathematics #music #stupidity #music

Science is simply common sense at its best, that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic. ↗

— Thomas Huxley

#accurate #best #common #common sense #fallacy

[...] a familiar art historical narrative [...] celebrates the triumph of the expressive individual over the collective, of innovation over tradition, and autonomy over interdependence. [...] In fact, a common trope within the modernist tradition of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries involved the attempt to reconstruct or recover the lost ideal of an art that is integrated with, rather than alienated from, the social. By and large, however, the dominant model of avant-garde art during the modern period assumes that shared or collective values and systems of meaning are necessarily repressive and incapable of generating new insight or grounding creative praxis. ↗

— Grant H. Kester

#art-history #assumptions #avant-garde #fallacy #meaning

That fallacy flies in the face of studies that show, every day, in every way, things are getting a little worse for America's minorities relative to the progress made by those in the top percentiles of assets and income. ↗

— Harold Washington

#assets #day #every #every day #face

When examining evidence relevant to a given belief, people are inclined to see what they expect to see, and conclude what they expect to conclude. Information that is consistent with our pre-existing beliefs is often accepted at face value, whereas evidence that contradicts them is critically scrutinized and discounted. Our beliefs may thus be less responsive than they should to the implications of new information ↗

— Thomas Gilovich

#human-behavior #logic #mind #psychology #life

The third fallacy is that affirmative action doesn't work. ↗

— Harold Washington

#affirmative #affirmative action #fallacy #third #work

Many people tend to look at programming styles and languages like religions: if you belong to one, you cannot belong to others. But this analogy is another fallacy. ↗

— Niklaus Wirth

#another #belong #cannot #fallacy #languages

The idea that a war can be won by standing on the defensive and waiting for the enemy to attack is a dangerous fallacy, which owes its inception to the desire to evade the price of victory. ↗

— Douglas Haig

#dangerous #defensive #desire #enemy #evade

You can't recover memories of a missing event. That's a fallacy. ↗

— Betty Hill

#fallacy #memories #missing #recover #you