On Beliefs (2010-2019)

"Each person has a different mental model and, therefore, potentially a different interpretation of the Facts. The danger comes when we start to assume that our interpretation of the Facts is the only interpretation and we believe that what we see and think is the Truth, and that there is only one Truth." (Robina Chatham & Brian Sutton, "Changing the IT Leader’s Mindset", 2010)

"The objectivist view is that probabilities are real aspects of the universe - propensities of objects to behave in certain ways - rather than being just descriptions of an observer’s degree of belief. For example, the fact that a fair coin comes up heads with probability 0.5 is a propensity of the coin itself. In this view, frequentist measurements are attempts to observe these propensities. Most physicists agree that quantum phenomena are objectively probabilistic, but uncertainty at the macroscopic scale - e.g., in coin tossing - usually arises from ignorance of initial conditions and does not seem consistent with the propensity view. (Stuart J. Russell and Peter Norvig, "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach", 2010)

"A general limitation of the human mind is its imperfect ability to reconstruct past states of knowledge, or beliefs that have changed. Once you adopt a new view of the world (or any part of it), you immediately lose much of your ability to recall what you used to believe before your mind changed." (Daniel Kahneman, "Thinking, Fast and Slow", 2011)

"Chaos is impatient. It's random. And above all it's selfish. It tears down everything just for the sake of change, feeding on itself in constant hunger. But Chaos can also be appealing. It tempts you to believe that nothing matters except what you want." (Rick Riordan, "The Throne of Fire", 2011)

"Mental models and rules are intimately intertwined, since the models often suggest clear rules for societies to follow. Religions are more than theories; they are prescriptive moral codes that seek to enforce rules on their followers. They, like the rules they enjoin, are invested with considerable emotional meaning and therefore are believed for intrinsic reasons and not simply because they are accurate or useful. While religious beliefs cannot be verified, they are also difficult to falsify. All of this reinforces the fundamental conservatism of human societies, because mental models of reality once adopted are hard to change in the light of new evidence that they are not working." (Francis Fukuyama, "The Origins of Political Order", 2011)

"Our inner weighing of evidence is not a careful mathematical calculation resulting in a probabilistic estimate of truth, but more like a whirlpool blending of the objective and the personal. The result is a set of beliefs - both conscious and unconscious - that guide us in interpreting all the events of our lives." (Leonard Mlodinow, "War of the Worldviews: Where Science and Spirituality Meet - and Do Not", 2011)

"The confidence that individuals have in their beliefs depends mostly on the quality of the story they can tell about what they see, even if they see little." (Daniel Kahneman, "Thinking, Fast and Slow", 2011)

"Under normal conditions the research scientist is not an innovator but a solver of puzzles, and the puzzles upon which he concentrates are just those which he believes can be both stated and solved within the existing scientific tradition." (Thomas S Kuhn, "The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change", 2011)

"When people believe a conclusion is true, they are also very likely to believe arguments that appear to support it, even when these arguments are unsound." (Daniel Kahneman, "Thinking, Fast and Slow", 2011)

"Image theory is an attempt to describe decision making as it actually occurs. […] The concept of images is central to the theory. They represent visions held by individuals and organisations that constitute how they believe the world should exist. When considering individuals, the theory refers to these images as the value image, trajectory image and strategic image. The value image is based on an individual’s ethics, morals and beliefs. The trajectory images encompass the decision maker’s goals and aspirations. Finally, for each trajectory image, a decision maker may have one or more strategic images that contain their plans, tactics and forecasts for their goal. […] In an organisational decision-making setting, these images are referred to as culture, vision and strategy." (Christopher B Stephenson, "What causes top management teams to make poor strategic decisions?", 2012)

"There are thousands of apparent mathematical truths out there that we humans have discovered and believe to be true but have so far been unable to prove. They are called conjectures. A conjecture is simply a statement about mathematical reality that you believe to be true [..]" (Paul Lockhart, "Measurement", 2012)

"System dynamics models have little impact unless they change the way people perceive a situation. A model must help to organize information in a more understandable way. A model should link the past to the present by showing how present conditions arose, and extend the present into persuasive alternative futures under a variety of scenarios determined by policy alternatives. In other words, a system dynamics model, if it is to be effective, must communicate with and modify the prior mental models. Only people's beliefs - that is, their mental models - will determine action. Computer models must relate to and improve mental models if the computer models are to fill an effective role." (Jay W Forrester, "Modeling for What Purpose?", The Systems Thinker Vol. 24 (2), 2013)

"A very different - and very incorrect - argument is that successes must be balanced by failures (and failures by successes) so that things average out. Every coin flip that lands heads makes tails more likely. Every red at roulette makes black more likely. […] These beliefs are all incorrect. Good luck will certainly not continue indefinitely, but do not assume that good luck makes bad luck more likely, or vice versa." (Gary Smith, "Standard Deviations", 2014)

"The search for better numbers, like the quest for new technologies to improve our lives, is certainly worthwhile. But the belief that a few simple numbers, a few basic averages, can capture the multifaceted nature of national and global economic systems is a myth. Rather than seeking new simple numbers to replace our old simple numbers, we need to tap into both the power of our information age and our ability to construct our own maps of the world to answer the questions we need answering." (Zachary Karabell, "The Leading Indicators: A short history of the numbers that rule our world", 2014)

"We are genetically predisposed to look for patterns and to believe that the patterns we observe are meaningful. […] Don’t be fooled into thinking that a pattern is proof. We need a logical, persuasive explanation and we need to test the explanation with fresh data." (Gary Smith, "Standard Deviations", 2014)

"Learning is a dynamic event and so the belief that learning is primarily about the acquisition of facts is fundamentally flawed - the acquisition and manipulation of data is at best a prerequisite to learning. Real learning involves acquiring knowledge and understanding." (William Byers, "Deep Thinking: What Mathematics Can Teach Us About the Mind", 2015)

"A worldview consists of observations of the individual and other people with respect to the self, time and space, the natural and the supernatural and the sacred and profane. […] Beliefs about the world do not reside in the human mind in chaotic disorder; rather they form a latent system. A worldview cannot, however, be viewed as a well-organised network of cognitive models or a static collection of values; instead it should be regarded as the product of a process shaped by historical, cultural and social perspectives and contexts." (Helena Helve, "A longitudinal perspective on worldviews, values and identities", 2016)

"In the classical deterministic scenario, a model consists of a few variables and physical constants. The relational structure of the model is conceptualized by the scientist via intuition gained from thinking about the physical world. Intuition means that the scientist has some mental construct regarding the interactions beyond positing a skeletal mathematical system he believes is sufficiently rich to capture the interactions and then depending upon data to infer the relational structure and estimate a large number of parameters." (Edward R Dougherty, "The Evolution of Scientific Knowledge: From certainty to uncertainty", 2016)

"One kind of probability - classic probability - is based on the idea of symmetry and equal likelihood […] In the classic case, we know the parameters of the system and thus can calculate the probabilities for the events each system will generate. […] A second kind of probability arises because in daily life we often want to know something about the likelihood of other events occurring […]. In this second case, we need to estimate the parameters of the system because we don’t know what those parameters are. […] A third kind of probability differs from these first two because it’s not obtained from an experiment or a replicable event - rather, it expresses an opinion or degree of belief about how likely a particular event is to occur. This is called subjective probability […]." (Daniel J Levitin, "Weaponized Lies", 2017)

"We tend to think of maths as being an 'exact' discipline, where answers are right or wrong. And it's true that there is a huge part of maths that is about exactness. But in everyday life, numerical answers are sometimes just the start of the debate. If we are trained to believe that every numerical question has a definite, 'right' answer then we miss the fact that numbers in the real world are a lot fuzzier than pure maths might suggest." (Rob Eastaway, "Maths on the Back of an Envelope", 2019)