Dennis Lindley Quotes

The statistician cannot excuse himself from the duty of getting his head clear on the principles of scientific inference, but equally no other thinking man can avoid a like obligation.

Now this principle of induction cannot be a purely logical truth like a tautology or an analytic statement. . . .

Following Korzybski, I put things in probabilities, not absolutes... My only originality lies in applying this zetetic attitude outside the hardest of the hard sciences, physics, to softer sciences and then to non-sciences like politics, ideology, jury verdicts and, of course, conspiracy theory.

How can you think about the world without factoring in the unforseen, the fluke event?

I'm disturbed when people let superstition, magical thinking, extreme conspiracy theories and so on blur their minds.

Most people can't think, most of the remainder won't think, and the small fraction who do think mostly can't do it very well.

I've debated many economists who claim to specialize in risk and probability: when one takes them slightly outside their narrow focus, but within the discipline of probability, they fall apart, with the disconsolate face of a gym rat in front of a gangster hit man.

Of Belief Human mathematics, so to speak, like the length of life, are subject to the doctrine of chances.

Many modern philosophers claim that probability is relation between an hypothesis and the evidence for it.

We do not at present educate people to think but, rather, to have opinions, and that is something altogether different.

Because of their very nature, science and logical thinking can never decide what is possible or impossible. Their only function is to explain what has been ascertained by experience and observation.

I think people have common sense and can tell what's real, what's right or what's wrong and work it out.

I think that it's important for people to read philosophy and literature is not because I think everyone should be a well-rounded human being, but because it will help you think better about what you are doing.

People who think well, write well

If the prior distribution, at which I am frankly guessing, has little or no effect on the result, then why bother; and if it has a large effect, then since I do not know what I am doing how would I dare act on the conclusions drawn?

Inferences of Science and Common Sense differ from those of deductive logic and mathematics in a very important respect, namely, when the premises are true and the reasoning correct, the conclusion is only probable.

The concept of logical thinking is selection and this is brought about by the processes of acceptance and rejection. Rejection is the basis of logical thinking.

God will bring people and events into our lives, and whatever we may think about them, they are designed for the evolution of His life in us.

The scientist believes in proof without certainty.

If you were making poetry out of convictions - trying to convince other people - you were in the territory of rhetoric, and that wasn't the territory of poetry. I think that's pretty smart. I think that it doesn't need to be altogether true, but that was my starting place.

I think about people and events in terms of archetypes a lot.

It's a better tradition for people who think for themselves and who don't pray in aid of any supernatural authority. That's what you should be spending your life is in spreading and deepening that tradition.

no matter how many instances of white swans we may have observed, this does not justify the conclusion that all swans are white.

I think it's important to reason from first principles rather than by analogy. The normal way we conduct our lives is we reason by analogy. [With analogy] we are doing this because it's like something else that was done, or it is like what other people are doing. [With first principles] you boil things down to the most fundamental truths…and then reason up from there.

Organized common (or uncommon) sense -- very basic knowledge -- is an enormously powerful tool. There are huge dangers with computers. People calculate too much and think too little.