Cognitive Simplicity Quotes

… too much of a talker to be a deep thinker

Your brain works with all the subtlety of a malicious child.

Software options proliferate extremely easily - too easily, in fact - because too many options create tools that can't ever be used intuitively. Intuitive actions confine the detail work to a dedicated part of the brain, leaving the rest of one's mind free to respond with attention and sensitivity to the changing texture of the moment.

An enormously vast field lies between "God exists" and "there is no God." The truly wise man traverses it with great difficulty. A Russian knows one or the other of these two extremes, but is not interested in the middle ground. He usually knows nothing, or very little.

Baseball is a sport where being stupid and keeping things really simple a lot of times is the right way to do things. There are very few guys that are capable of processing a lot of information and applying it and still being good at it. … I don't want to name names, but there were guys I played with that were so stupid that they're really good, because their mind never gets in the way.

Strange as it may sound, the power of mathematics rests on its evasion of all unnecessary thought and on its wonderful saving of mental operations.

Once the last trace of emotion has been eradicated, nothing remains of thought but absolute tautology.

Science itself, therefore, may be regarded as a minimal problem, consisting of the completest possible presentment of facts with the least possible expenditure of thought.

The evolution of knowledge is toward simplicity, not complexity.

Mathematicians come to the solution of a problem by the simple arrangement of the data, and reducing the reasoning to such simple operations, to judgments so brief, that they never lose sight of the evidence that serves as their guide.

My brain is very simple. Like when you break everything down. I see things in a simple way. And that simplicity for some reason becomes funny to other people because they don't look at it that way.