John Allen Paulos
45 quotes
Biography
John Allen Paulos is an American professor of mathematics at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, a writer and speaker on mathematics and the importance of mathematical literacy. He writes about the dangers of mathematical innumeracy, ie the layperson's misconceptions about numbers, probability, and logic.
"Certainty a strange Ferris wheel of a statement!"
"Together the, two ingredients—a perceived incongruity with a point and an appropriate emotional climate—seem to be both necessary and sufficient for humor."
"After all, one must have some grasp of logic even to recognize a non sequitur."
"The necessity of this psychic stepping back (or up) to the metalevel is probably what is meant when people say that a sense of perspective is needed for an appreciation of humor. It also explains why dogmatists, idealogues, and others with one-track minds are often notoriously humorless."
"Appreciating humor—even recognizing it—requires human skills of the highest order (level?); no computer comes close to having them."
"Humor, since it depends on so many emotional, social, and intellectual facets of human beings, is particularly immune to computer simulation."
"All art, in fact, has these two aspects: its content and its frame (or setting), which sets it apart from nonart and which says of itself, “This is not an everyday sort of communication. This is unreal.”"
"Innumerate people characteristically have a strong tendency to personalize—to be misled by their own experiences, or by the media’s focus on individuals and drama."
"A tendency to drastically underestimate the frequency of coincidences is a prime characteristic of innumerates, who generally accord great significance to correspondences of all sorts while attributing too little significance to quite conclusive but less flashy statistical evidence."
"The moral, again, is that some unlikely event is likely to occur, whereas it’s much less likely that a particular one will...The paradoxical conclusion is that it would be very unlikely for unlikely events not to occur. If you don’t specify a predicted event precisely, there are an indeterminate number of ways for an event of that general kind to take place."
"There’s always enough random success to justify almost anything to someone who wants to believe."
"There surely is something to these terms, but too often they’re the result of minds intent on discovering meaning where there is only probability."
"To follow foolish precedents, and wink with both eyes, is easier than to think."
"Disproving a claim that something exists is often quite difficult, and this difficulty is often mistaken for evidence that the claim is true...Presented as I am periodically with these and other fantastical claims, I sometimes feel a little like a formally dressed teetotaler at a drunken orgy for reiterating that not being able to conclusively refute the claims does not constitute evidence for them."
"I remember thinking of mathematics as a kind of omnipotent protector. You could prove things to people and they would have to believe you whether they liked you or not."
"Bad things happen periodically, and they’re going to happen to somebody. Why not you?"
"There is no such thing as free lunch, and even if there were, there’d be no guarantee against indigestion."
"Correlation and causation are two quite different words, and the innumerate are more prone to mistake them than most."
"If we’re not keenly aware of the choices we’re making, we’re not likely to work for better ones."
"It’s time to let the secret out: mathematics is not primarily a matter of plugging numbers into formulas and performing rote computations. It is a way of thinking and questioning that may be unfamiliar to many of us, but is available to almost all of us."
"You can only predict things after they’ve happened."
"Our two most basic political ideals—liberty and equality—are, in their purest forms, incompatible. Complete liberty results in inequality, and mandatory equality leads to a loss of liberty."
"Having been involved in a couple of lawsuits as an expert probability witness and having observed that a prudent skepticism is often less prized than an indefensible certainty, I turned down preliminary requests from both sides to testify."
"In general, any differences between two groups will always be greatly accentuated at the extremes."
"One can and should debate whether the tests in question are appropriate for the purposes at hand, but one shouldn’t be surprised when normal curves behave normally."