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[personal profile] birdwatcher
   By a mental mechanism I call naïve empiricism, we have a natural tendency to look for instances that confirm our story and our vision of the world—these instances are always easy to find. Alas, with tools, and fools, anything can be easy to find. You take past instances that corroborate your theories and you treat them as evidence. For instance, a diplomat will show you his "accomplishments," not what he failed to do. Mathematicians will try to convince you that their science is useful to society by pointing out instances where it proved helpful, not those where it was a waste of time, or, worse, those numerous mathematical applications that inflicted a severe cost on society owing to the highly unempirical nature of elegant mathematical theories.
--Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan.

Date: 2007-09-02 07:36 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] glocka.livejournal.com
Тепеpь пpидется читать... Не цените Вы чужое вpемя!

Date: 2007-09-02 08:59 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] vinopivets.livejournal.com
Он мне будет рассказывать за Телеба!

Date: 2007-09-02 09:05 pm (UTC)

Date: 2007-09-02 11:36 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] averros.livejournal.com
He'd better call that mechanism by its standard scientific name: the confirmation bias (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias) :)

Besides, naive empiricism (http://encyclopedia.kids.net.au/page/na/Naive_Empiricism) is actually a belief that science is solely about experimental data, and that pre-conceptions (or theories) should be avoided when gathering data - something quite opposite.