Cognitive Simplification Quotes

The attempt to turn a complex problem of the head into a simple moral question for the heart to answer, is of course a necessary part of all political discussion.

It's okay to be two things at once and a paradox. Everybody is. As humans for survival we like to label things in a split second. It is how we don't implode from anxiety.

The human mind is not rich enough to drive many horses abreast and wants one general scheme, under which it strives to bring everything.

As the mind learns to understand more complicated combinations of ideas, simpler formulae soon reduce their complexity; so truths that were discovered only by great effort, that could at first only be understood by men capable of profound thought, are soon developed and proved by methods that are not beyond the reach of common intelligence. The strength and the limits of man

Generalities are intellectually necessary evils.

The first effect of the mind growing cultivated is that processes once multiple get to be performed in a single act. Lazarus has called this the progressive "condensation" of thought. ... Steps really sink from sight. An advanced thinker sees the relations of his topics is such masses and so instantaneously that when he comes to explain to younger minds it is often hard ... Bowditch, who translated and annotated Laplace's Méchanique Céleste, said that whenever his author prefaced a proposition by the words "it is evident," he knew that many hours of hard study lay before him.

Because he treats the world as rather empty and ignores the interrelatedness of all things (so stupefying to thought and action), administrative man can make decisions with relatively simple rules of thumb that do not make impossible demands upon his capacity for thought.

History is one of those marvelous and necessary illusions we have to deal with. It's one of the ways of dealing with our world with impossible generalities which we couldn't live without.

You know, people tend to get stereotyped for about forty percent of their behavior, so if you're completely crazy forty percent of the time you'll get stereotyped as crazy, even if you're totally boring thirty percent of the time and just studious the other thirty percent of the time.

Simplification is as much in the mind as it is in the device.

Seven is more than a lucky number or a famous baseball player's uniform. It's the brain's natural shepherd, herding vast amounts of information into manageable chunks.