Counterfactuals Quotes & Sayings

I never ponder counterfactuals. — John Derbyshire

I think we live in a world where the most important thing is daily life: sharing a space with your family, making meals, being with your people. It's not only the idea of privacy, it's the beauty of the moment, at a time in the world when everything goes really fast - too fast. — Ana Tijoux

If you're trying to change someone you love, you don't love them. It's the oddnesses, the most unique imperfections that you'd miss the most. That's the stuff you can't replace. Everything else is easy to come by. — Crystal Woods

The population decided - out of sheer panic at first - to carry on as if nothing had happened.
- Air War and Literature: The Zurich Lectures — W.G. Sebald

Think of a "discovery" as an act that moves the arrival of information from a later point in time to an earlier time. The discovery's value does not equal the value of the information discovered but rather the value of having the information available earlier than it otherwise would have been. A scientist or a mathematician may show great skill by being the first to find a solution that has eluded many others; yet if the problem would soon have been solved anyway, then the work probably has not much benefited the world [unless having a solution even slightly sooner is immensely valuable or enables further important and urgent work]. — Nick Bostrom

As long as I have people's attention, I can't stop. You can't put the public on hold, because they might not be there when you get back. I have a pathological fear of stopping. — Tina Turner

There is no excuse for deceiving children. And when, as must happen in conventional families, they find that their parents have lied, they lose confidence in them and feel justified in lying to them. — Bertrand Russell

Imagination is all about new possibilities, eventualities that don't exist, counterfactuals, a recombination of elements in new ways. It is about the untested. And the untested is uncertain. It is frightening - even if we aren't aware of just how much it frightens us personally. It is also potentially embarrassing (after all, there's never a guarantee of success — Anonymous

The common denominator in all these problems is that the world is not a line of dominoes in which each event causes exactly one event and is caused by exactly one event. The world is a tissue of causes and effects that criss and cross in tangled patterns. The embarrassments for Hume's two theories of causation (conjunction and counterfactuals) can be diagrammed as a family of networks in which the lines fan in or out or loop around, as in the diagram on the following page. — Steven Pinker