John Allen Paulos Quotes

Always be smart; seldom be certain.

There is no such thing as free lunch, and even if there were, there’d be no guarantee against indigestion.

Too often, this concern for the big picture is simply obscurantist and is put forward by people who prefer vagueness and mystery to (partial) answers. Vagueness is at times necessary and mystery is never in short supply, but I don’t think they’re anything to worship. Genuine science and mathematical precision are more intriguing than are the “facts” published in supermarket tabloids or a romantic innumeracy which fosters credulity, stunts skepticism, and dulls one to real imponderables.

Any bit of nonsense can be computerized—astrology, biorhythms, the I Ching—but that doesn’t make the nonsense any more valid.

The fashion pages have always puzzled me. In my smugly ignorant view, the articles appear to be so full of fluff and nonsense as to make the astrology columns seem insightful by comparison.

Two dangers threaten the world—order and disorder.

Appreciating humor—even recognizing it—requires human skills of the highest order (level?); no computer comes close to having them.

Disproving a claim that something exists is often quite difficult, and this difficulty is often mistaken for evidence that the claim is true...Presented as I am periodically with these and other fantastical claims, I sometimes feel a little like a formally dressed teetotaler at a drunken orgy for reiterating that not being able to conclusively refute the claims does not constitute evidence for them.

For the record, natural selection is a highly nonrandom process that acts on the genetic variation produced by random mutation and genetic drift and results in those organisms with more adaptive traits differentially surviving and reproducing.

Humor, since it depends on so many emotional, social, and intellectual facets of human beings, is particularly immune to computer simulation.

In general, any differences between two groups will always be greatly accentuated at the extremes.

Claiming that a holy book’s claims are undeniable because the book itself claims them to be is convincing only to the convinced.

It’s become somewhat fashionable to say that religion and science are growing together and are no longer incompatible. This convergence is, in my opinion, illusory. In fact, I don’t believe that any attempt to combine these very disparate bodies of ideas can succeed intellectually.

Correlation and causation are two quite different words, and the innumerate are more prone to mistake them than most.

One can and should debate whether the tests in question are appropriate for the purposes at hand, but one shouldn’t be surprised when normal curves behave normally.