#theory

To an intellectual who is adrift in politics, a theory is an aim; to a true politician his theory is a boundary. ↗

— Francis Parker Yockey

#aim #boundary #his #intellectual #politician

But if all maximizing models are really arguing is that “people will always seek to maximize something,” then they obviously can’t predict anything, which means employing them can hardly be said to make anthropology more scientific. All they really add to analysis is a set of assumptions about human nature. The assumption, most of all, that no one ever does anything primarily out of concern for others; that whatever one does, one is only trying to get something out of it for oneself. In common English, there is a word for this attitude. It’s called “cynicism.” Most of us try to avoid people who take it too much to heart. In economics, apparently, they call it “science. ↗

— David Graeber

#pomo #rational-choice-theory #utilitarianism #attitude

Most areas of intellectual life have discovered the virtues of speculation, and have embraced them wildly. In academia, speculation is usually dignified as theory. ↗

— Michael Crichton

#guessing #scenario #scenarios #speculation #theories

I've been a soldier all my life. I've fought from the ranks on up, you know my service. But sir, I must tell you now, I believe this attack will fail. No 15,000 men ever made could take that ridge. It's a distance of more than a mile, over open ground. When the men come out of the trees, they will be under fire from Yankee artillery from all over the field. And those are Hancock's boys! And now, they have the stone wall like we did at Fredericksburg. - Lieutenant General James Longstreet to General Robert E. Lee after the initial Confederate victories on day one of the Battle of Gettysburg. ↗

— Michael Shaara

#life

that man is a reality, mankind an abstraction; that men cannot be treated as units in operations of political arithmetic because they behave like the symbols for zero and the infinite, which dislocate all mathematical operations; that the end justifies the means only within very narrow limits; that ethics is not a function of social utility, and charity not a petty bourgeois sentiment but the gravitational force which keeps civilization in its orbit. ↗

— Arthur Koestler

#men

One thus sees that a new kind of theory is needed which drops these basic commitments and at most recovers some essential features of the older theories as abstract forms derived from a deeper reality in which what prevails in unbroken wholeness. ↗

— David Bohm

#basic #commitments #deeper #derived #drops

I am not the kind of girl who can trust a theory based on one person. ↗

— Brigitte Boisselier

#based #girl #i #i am #kind

Probability is expectation founded upon partial knowledge. A perfect acquaintance with all the circumstances affecting the occurrence of an event would change expectation into certainty, and leave nether room nor demand for a theory of probabilities. ↗

— George Boole

#affecting #certainty #change #circumstances #demand

Architecture doesn't come from theory. You don't think your way through a building. ↗

— Arthur Erickson

#building #come #theory #think #through

At MIT, I had the good fortune for seven years to teach network theory, which is basic to many disciplines, to one-third of the undergraduate student body. It was an experiment to see how high we could bring their level of understanding, and it exceeded all of my expectations. ↗

— Amar Bose

#body #bring #could #disciplines #exceeded