Systematic Thinking Quotes

I'll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there's evidence of any thinking going on inside it.

Man has such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort truth intentionally, he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to justify his logic.

Arthur Young's Reflexive Universe - fascinating but too schematic to fit into my scheme. The most I could hope for was a sense of the vocabulary and some possible images.

Any sensibility which can be crammed into the mold of a system, or handled with the rough tools of proof, is no longer sensibility at all. It has hardened into an idea.

Our culture has valued closed systems and tries to generate them in all walks of life. Women are better at and more comfortable with open systems, which occur naturally in nature.

Computations are everywhere, once you begin to look at things in a certain way.

But men love abstract reasoning and neat systematization so much that they think nothing of distorting the truth, closing their eyes and ears to contrary evidence to preserve their logical constructions.

Many children are taught to believe in God. I came to believe in the power of systems analysis.

An idea is always a generalization, and generalization is a property of thinking. To generalize means to think.

It's hard to do that with people who think emotionally. A lot of people think in terms of people, emotions, and feelings. That's more complicated. Engineering mentality makes it, in theory, a little easier.

If you start thinking about politics in an intellectual way, you are likely to be on the left because that provides a systematic solution and answer to the questions and puts it all in a system and also gives you a rather dignified and self-congratulatory place in the system. But once you started thinking, if you think about harder and longer about it, you’ll move back to what you would have been if you’d never thought at all.

Cognitive psychology tells us that the unaided human mind is vulnerable to many fallacies and illusions because of its reliance on its memory for vivid anecdotes rather than systematic statistics.

I must create a system, or be enslav'd by another man's.

What is a philosophy? It Is an answer satisfactory to the reason to all the great problems of life. That is what is meant by philosophy. It must satisfy the reason, and it must show the unity underlying the endless diversity of the facts that science observes.

I think putting numbers together into a coherent framework always seemed to me to be what really matters.

The writers against religion, whilst they oppose every system, are wisely careful never to set up any of their own.

It said what he would have said, if it had been possible for him to set his scattered thoughts in order. It was the product of a mind similar to his own, but enormously more powerful, more systematic, less fear-ridden. The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already.

But man is so addicted to systems and to abstract conclusions that he is prepared deliberately to distort the truth, to close his eyes and ears, but justify his logic at all cost.

You have to be just as mistrustful of straightforward rationality in business as you do of a uniquely gut approach.

God help us we're in the hands of engineers.

God improvises. Man systematizes.

Baking and coding involve using the same parts of your brain and a lot of the same skills, like being able to follow directions or create directions in a very systematic way.

Logic is not a body of doctrine, but a mirror-image of the world. Logic is transcendental.

It's actually very surprising how little we think about the quality of our decision-making and how we could improve it. How absent decision-making classes are from educational curricula. How little we think about how it is we think.

When placed in the same system, people, however different, tend to produce similar results.