E.T. Jaynes · 753 pages
Rating: (427 votes)
“A paradox is simply an error out of control; i.e. one that has trapped so many unwary minds that it has gone public, become institutionalized in our literature, and taught as truth.”
― E.T. Jaynes, quote from Probability Theory: The Logic of Science
“if fallacious reasoning always led to absurd conclusions, it would be found out at once and corrected. But once an easy, shortcut mode of reasoning has led to a few correct results, almost everybody accepts it; those who try to warn against it are not listened to.”
― E.T. Jaynes, quote from Probability Theory: The Logic of Science
“something which is absurd or logically contradictory, but which appears at first glance to be the result of sound reasoning.”
― E.T. Jaynes, quote from Probability Theory: The Logic of Science
“Not only in probability theory, but in all mathematics, it is the careless use of infinite sets, and of infinite and infinitesimal quantities, that generates most paradoxes.”
― E.T. Jaynes, quote from Probability Theory: The Logic of Science
“passage to a limit should always be the last operation, not the first.”
― E.T. Jaynes, quote from Probability Theory: The Logic of Science
“It seems very straightforward when I say “I.” At the time, “I” meant Justice of Toren, the whole ship and all its ancillaries. A unit might be very focused on what it was doing at that particular moment, but it was no more apart from “me” than my hand is while it’s engaged in a task that doesn’t require my full attention. Nearly twenty years later “I” would be a single body, a single brain. That division, I–Justice of Toren and I–One Esk, was not, I have come to think, a sudden split, not an instant before which “I” was one and after which “I” was “we.” It was something that had always been possible, always potential. Guarded against. But how did it go from potential to real, incontrovertible, irrevocable? On one level the answer is simple—it happened when all of Justice of Toren but me was destroyed. But when I look closer I seem to see cracks everywhere. Did the singing contribute, the thing that made One Esk different from all other units on the ship, indeed in the fleets? Perhaps. Or is anyone’s identity a matter of fragments held together by convenient or useful narrative, that in ordinary circumstances never reveals itself as a fiction? Or is it really a fiction? I don’t know the answer. But I do know that, though I can see hints of the potential split going back a thousand years or more, that’s only hindsight. The first I noticed even the bare possibility that I–Justice of Toren might not also be I–One Esk, was that moment that Justice of Toren edited One Esk’s memory of the slaughter in the temple of Ikkt. The moment I—“I”—was surprised by it.”
― Ann Leckie, quote from Ancillary Justice
“Dr. Stayner once suggested that all people face a day in their life that defines who they are, that shapes who they will become, that sets them on their path. He said that one day will either guide or haunt them until they take their last breath.”
― K.A. Tucker, quote from One Tiny Lie
“To love me, my family does not need to understand me.”
― Julia Glass, quote from Three Junes
“When the history of African development is written, it will be clear that a turning point involved the empowerment of women.”
― Nicholas D. Kristof, quote from Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide
“You will be a great queen when you come back, you know. And someday you'll love me the way you love your wolf.”
― Carrie Jones, quote from Entice
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