In Silicon Valley, [...] many of the more successful entrepreneurs seem to be suffering from a mild form of Asperger’s where it’s like you’re missing the imitation, socialization gene... It happens to be a plus for innovation, and creating great companies, but I think we always should turn this around as an incredible critique of our society. We need to ask, what is it about our society where those of us who do not suffer from Asperger’s are at some massive disadvantage because we will be talked out of our interesting, original, creative ideas before they are even fully formed?

Peter Thiel on the Future of Innovation, in conversation with Tyler Cowen.

To teach students any psychology they did not know before, you must surprise them. But which surprise will do? Nisbett and Borgida found that when they presented their students with a surprising statistical fact, the students managed to learn nothing at all. But when the students were surprised by individual cases—two nice people who had not helped—they immediately made the generalization and inferred that helping is more difficult than they had thought. Nisbett and Borgida summarize the results in a memorable sentence:

Subjects’unwillingness to deduce the particular from the general was matched only by their willingness to infer the general from the particular.

This is a profoundly important conclusion. People who are taught surprising statistical facts about human behavior may be impressed to the point of telling their friends about what they have heard, but this does not mean that their understanding of the world has really changed. The test of learning psychology is whether your understanding of situations you encounter has changed, not whether you have learned a new fact. There is a deep gap between our thinking about statistics and our thinking about individual case

Science has this in common with art, that the most ordinary, everyday thing appears to it as something entirely new and attractive, as if metamorphosed by witchcraft and now seen for the first time. Life is worth living, says art, the beautiful temptress; life is worth knowing, says science.

Nietzsche, Homer and Classical Philology, http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Homer_and_Classical_Philology

“What's up, Sarge? Do you want to live for ever?”

“Dunno. Ask me again in five hundred years.”

• "Guards! Guards!", Terry Pratchett

Now on what condition is the use of hypothesis without danger?

The firm determination to submit to experiment is not enough; there are still dangerous hypotheses; first, and above all, those which are tacit and unconscious. Since we make them without knowing it, we are powerless to abandon them. Here again, then, is a service that mathematical physics can render us. By the precision that is characteristic of it, it compels us to formulate all the hypotheses that we should make without it, but unconsciously.

Henri Poincaré, "The Foundations of Science".

"Make your contribution such as it is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged." -- ''Grice, Paul (1975). "Logic and conversation". pp. 41–58.''

Conversation is an art. The above is the 'well-known' Cooperative Principle.

Magnificent phrases like 'inductive reactance' flow effortlessly from the lips of guys who can't cook hotdogs or find the flashing blue light in a K-mart store. That's important to keep in mind. It doesn't take a lot of brains to learn a few words. Parakeets and my a birds do it all the time. You can, too. It's not work, it's a game.

• Kenn Amdahl "There are no Electrons: Electronics for Earthlings"

Yet another variant on the difference between words and understanding.

It would have been wiser for the English governing class to have called upon some other god. All other gods, however weak and warring, at least boast of being constant. But science boasts of being in a flux for ever; boasts of being unstable as water.

GK Chesterton, Heretics

(for "god" read "moral principles")

So raise your glass if you are wrong in all the right ways!

• Pink, virtually alone among the pop-singer community in her early endorsement of the post-rationality movement.

(Epistemic status: frivolous wordplay on the different meanings of "wrong.")