40 Quotes by Daniel J. Levitin

Ambiguity begets participation.

No one alive today has a single ancestor in his or her past who died in infancy. We are the champions, my friend!

Critical thinking is an active and ongoing process. It requires that we all think like Bayesians, updating our knowledge as new information comes in.

Critical thinking doesn’t mean we disparage everything; it means that we try to distinguish between claims with evidence and those without.

Just because someone quotes you a statistic or shows you a graph, it doesn’t mean it’s relevant to the point they’re trying to make. It’s the job of all of us to make sure we get the information that matters, and to ignore the information that doesn’t.

Be careful of averages and how they’re applied. One way that they can fool you is if the average combines samples from disparate populations. This can lead to absurd observations such as:"On average, humans have one testicle.

It is difficult to appreciate the complexity of the brain because the numbers are so huge. The average brain consists of 100 billion neurons.

As the old saying goes, a man with one watch always knows what time it is; a man with two watches is never sure.

It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so. – MARK TWAIN.