Inferential Quotes & Sayings

The ramparts of Vienna are crumbling into the sand; no one wants to live so confined, however, the entire country is already surrounded by a Chinese wall! — Franz Grillparzer

If we had ever met in person, I would have given her a kiss to thank her for all the wonderful help she gave me. Ann, if you read this, your kiss is waiting. — Kevin D. Mitnick

The thing that happens remarkably often is that the people who are writing a dissertation believe they need to speak to me in order to do their dissertation. They need to interview me. — Tom Stoppard

If one's interest is not in some global question about the possibility of knowledge, but about some particular mechanism or inferential tendency, this fact about our evolutionary origin is of no use at all in addressing questions about reliability. — Hilary Kornblith

But it's not about knowing. It is simply about going forward. — Lauren Oliver

We underestimate the distance between ourselves and others. Not just inferential distance, but distances of temperament and ability, distances of situation and resource, distances of unspoken knowledge and unnoticed skills and luck, distances of interior landscape. — Eliezer Yudkowsky

open coding; development of concepts; grouping concepts into categories; formation of a theory. In the open coding stage, we analyze the text and identify any interesting phenomena in the data. Normally each unique phenomenon is given a distinctive name or code. The procedure and methods for identifying coding items are discussed in section 11.5.2. In the second stage, collections of codes that describe similar contents are grouped together to form higher level "concepts." In the third stage, broader groups of similar concepts are identified to form "categories" and there is a detailed interpretation of each category. In this process, we are constantly searching for and refining the conceptual construct that may explain the relationship between the concepts and categories (Glaser, 1978). In the last stage, theory formulation, we aim at creating inferential and predictive statements about the phenomena recorded in the data. — Jonathan Lazar

A third position has been called "strong Al." When the Mind As Computer metaphor is believed as a deep scientific truth, the true believers interpret the ontology and the inferential patterns that the metaphor imposes on the mind as defining the essence of mind itself. For them, concepts are formal symbols, thought is computation (the manipulation of those symbols), and the mind is a computer program. — George Lakoff

[...] proficiency in inferring the large-scale and small-scale structure of our immediate environment, or any features of parts of the universe distant from our ancestral stomping grounds, was of no relevance to our ancestors' reproductive fitness. Hence, there is no reason to imagine that our habitual intuitions and inferential responses are well designed for science or for metaphysics. — James Ladyman

Injection of environmental and political perspectives in midstream of the science discussion cannot help the process of inquiry. I believe that persons with relevant scientific expertise should concentrate, with pride, on cool objective analysis, providing information to the public and decision-makers when it is found, but leaving the moral implications for later common consideration, or at most for summary inferential discussion. — James Hansen

The difficulty in judging what type of behavior works well arises not only because a given course of action does not always produce the outcomes. Similar outcomes can occur for reasons other than the person's actions, which further complicates inferential judgment. Effects that arise independently of one's actions distort the influence of similar effects produced by the actions, but only on some occasions. Given a strong cognitive set to perceive regularities, even chance joint occurrences of events can be easily misjudged as genuine relationships of low contingent probability — Albert Bandura

The pillow smells like the sunlight, a precious smell. — Haruki Murakami

When everything around me is crumbling to pieces, all I have to do is look at you and I can keep going, keep living. You're warm, Quinn. The warmest person I've ever known. I never realized just how devoid of warmth my life was until you came into it. — Katie Jennings

Your denial is beneath you, and thanks to the use of hallucinogenic drugs, I see through you. — Bill Hicks

I can tell you a dozen different stories. This is what we are: a collection of stories that we share, in common. This is what we are to each other. — Graham Joyce