An expert is a person who avoids the small errors while sweeping on to the grand fallacy.
Interpretation
Experts may overlook minor mistakes while focusing on larger misconceptions.
This quote highlights the paradox of expertise, suggesting that while experts are skilled at avoiding trivial errors, they may simultaneously be blind to larger, more significant faults or misconceptions, leading to potentially severe consequences. It serves as a reminder that having expertise does not automatically equate to understanding the broader picture or questioning oneβs assumptions.
In practice
This quote can be shared during a seminar on critical thinking to emphasize the importance of questioning what we think we know.
It was one time when people thought the value of the fine structure constant was important. Now of course it's still important, of course, as a practical matter,but we now know that the value it has is a function, that in any fundamental theory you derive the fine structure constant as a function of all sorts of mass ratios and so on and it's not really that fundamental.
Americans swept away the instruments of English hereditary inequality - entails and titles of nobility - even before we had a constitution.
It's very difficult to convince other countries that they shouldn't pursue nuclear weapons programs if we ourselves are actively developing a component of a strategic defense system.
[Science] is corrosive of religious belief, and it's a good thing too.
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
I'm offended by the kind of smarmy religiosity that's all around us, perhaps more in America than in Europe, and not really that harmful because it's not really that intense or even that serious, but just... you know after a while you get tired of hearing clergymen giving the invocation at various public celebrations and you feel, haven't we outgrown all this? Do we have to listen to this?
When one door closes, another one opens, but sometimes we wait too long looking at the closed door, and never realize that another door has been opened.
You're so caught up in grumbling, complaining, and seeing what's wrong that you have no energy or time to appreciate what's good.
Whatever terrible things may have happened to you, only one thing allows them to damage your core self, and that is continued belief in them.
Many of us worry about the situation of the world . . . We need to remain calm, to see clearly. Meditation is a means to be aware, and to try to help.
Humility, as we all know, is one of those virtues that is never gained by seeking it. The more we pursue it the more distant it becomes. To think we have it is sure evidence that we don't.
Indeed we have great reason to rejoice. If life and its rushed pace and many stresses have made it difficult for you to feel like rejoicing, then perhaps now is a good time to refocus on what matters most. Strength comes not from frantic activity but from being settled on a firm foundation of truth and light. It comes from placing our attention and efforts on the basics of the restored gospel of Jesus Christ. It comes from paying attention to the divine things that matter most.
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