“Only one important thing has happened in the last three days, and that is that nothing has happened.” – Sherlock Holmes
“Physicians often pride themselves on curing all their patients with a remedy that they use. But the first thing to ask them is whether they have tried doing nothing, i.e., not treating other patients; for how can they otherwise know whether the remedy or nature cured them?” – Sherlock Holmes
Sherlock Holmes meets David Deutsch and Murray Rothbard.
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Related:
- Causation isn’t everything
- 1-2g2s8 The unobserved parts of the wider phenomenon have in no way affected what we observe, yet they are essential to its explanation. Causation doesn’t exhaust explanation.
- 10-2e8 Reasoning about causes and effects is reasoning about variants of the causes and effects. What would’ve happened. How it could’ve been otherwise.
- 13-1a3.1 The concept of cost must evoke the multiverse
- Abstractions are real
- Related?revisit
- 1-1d Usually the obstacles are your own preconceived notions, and rarely the laws of physics
- 1-2g1a In most cases, the new theory likely predicts the same outcome as the old ones, but that doesn’t mean we don’t need new theories because new theories give better explanations
- 2-1a1a9 ‘Survivorship bias’ - We only see what can be seen
- 3-1d6d Consistency with specific problems in mind is the key to (detect) progress
- 5-1b1d1 Not investing is also a form of investing
- 5-2 What counts cannot be counted
- 9-2a It’s easy to convince if people don’t know you enough for what you are not
- 10-2g1f3 We can only figure out what they know by what they do (‘performance’), because we can never directly study what people know (‘competence’). To assert that we can is a common error in thinking.