Bil Bakalım Uçaklar Nasıl Uçar? itibaren 1001 Çiçek Kitaplar içinde LIT biçim

Amy Belitsos amybelitsos — A zero star rating. This book was terrible. The main character is dying and she has lived a entirely parasitic, lazy, and dependent life. The ultimate question that is put to reader: is death still sad when the person who is dying/has died has no redeemable qualities? In terms of this character...no. Add this one to the pile of female characters that are totally undeveloped, immature, and disgusting in their lack of introspection and self-improvement. This writer should be banned from depicting another female character for the rest of her career.

Monsieur Gonoh michaelgon5fb7 — Gorgeous writing and ideas, but the book didn't really go anywhere. Too bad. Kindle quotes: It infuriates me to be wrong when I know I’m right. —MOLIÈRE - location 71 Why is it so fun to be right? As pleasures go, it is, after all, a second-order one at best. Unlike many of life’s other delights—chocolate, surfing, kissing—it does not enjoy any mainline access to our biochemistry: to our appetites, our adrenal glands, our limbic systems, our swoony hearts. And yet, the thrill of being right is undeniable, universal, and (perhaps most oddly) almost entirely undiscriminating. We can’t enjoy kissing just anyone, but we can relish being right about almost anything. The stakes don’t seem to matter much; it’s more important to bet on the right foreign policy than the right racehorse, but we are perfectly capable of gloating over either one. Nor does subject matter; we can be equally pleased about correctly identifying an orange-crowned warbler or the sexual orientation of our coworker. Stranger still, we can enjoy being right even about disagreeable things: the downturn in the stock market, say, or the demise of a friend’s relationship, or the fact that, at our spouse’s insistence, we just spent fifteen minutes schlepping our suitcase in exactly the opposite direction from our hotel. - location 73 A whole lot of us go through life assuming that we are basically right, basically all the time, about basically everything: about our political and intellectual convictions, our religious and moral beliefs, our assessment of other people, our memories, our grasp of facts. As absurd as it sounds when we stop to think about it, our steady state seems to be one of unconsciously assuming that we are very close to omniscient. - location 85 Paradoxically, we live in a culture that simultaneously despises error and insists that it is central to our lives. We acknowledge that centrality in the very way we talk about ourselves—which is why, when we make mistakes, we shrug and say that we are human. As bats are batty and slugs are sluggish, our own species is synonymous with screwing up. - location 117 if fallibility is built into our very name and nature, it is in much the same way the puppet is built into the jack-in-the-box: in theory wholly predictable, in practice always a jarring surprise. - location 125 Witness, for instance, the difficulty with which even the well-mannered among us stifle the urge to say “I told you so.” The brilliance of this phrase (or its odiousness, depending on whether you get to say it or must endure hearing it) derives from its admirably compact way of making the point that not only was I right, I was also right about being right. In the instant of uttering it, I become right squared, maybe even right factorial, logarithmically right—at any rate, really, extremely right, and really, extremely delighted about it. It is possible to refrain from this sort of gloating (and consistently choosing to do so might be the final milestone of maturity), but the feeling itself, that triumphant ha!, can seldom be fully banished. - location 149 we are usually much more willing to entertain the possibility that we are wrong about insignificant matters than about weighty ones. This has a certain emotional logic, but it is deeply lacking in garden-variety logic. In high-stakes situations, we should want to do everything possible to ensure that we are right—which, as we will see, we can only do by imagining all the ways we could be wrong. That we are able to do this when it hardly matters, yet unable to do so when the stakes are huge, suggests that we might learn something important by comparing these otherwise very different experiences. - location 233 Most of the rest of this book—into which I promise to release you very soon—is built around stories of people screwing up. These stories involve, among other things, illusions, magicians, comedians, drug trips, love affairs, misadventures on the high seas, bizarre neurological phenomena, medical catastrophes, legal fiascos, some possible consequences of marrying a prostitute, the lamentable failure of the world to end, and Alan Greenspan. - location 318 the whole reason it’s possible to be wrong is that, while it is happening, you are oblivious to it. When you are simply going about your business in a state you will later decide was delusional, you have no idea of it whatsoever. You are like the coyote in the Road Runner cartoons, after he has gone off the cliff but before he has looked down. Literally in his case and figuratively in yours, you are already in trouble when you feel like you’re still on solid ground. So I should revise myself: it does feel like something to be wrong. It feels like being right. - location 326 Whatever falsehoods each of us currently believes are necessarily invisible to us. Think about the telling fact that error literally doesn’t exist in the first person present tense: the sentence “I am wrong” describes a logical impossibility. As soon as we know that we are wrong, we aren’t wrong anymore, since to recognize a belief as false is to stop believing it. Thus we can only say “I was wrong.” Call it the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of Error: we can be wrong, or we can know it, but we can’t do both at the same time. - location 330 So too with the errors in our own lives. We file them under a range of headings—“embarrassing moments,” “lessons I’ve learned,” “stuff I used to believe”—but very seldom does an event live inside us with the simple designation “wrong.” This category problem is only one reason why our past mistakes can be so elusive. - location 371 Doctors don’t teach medical students the theory of bodily humors, and astronomy professors don’t teach their students to calculate the velocity of the fifty-five concentric spheres Aristotle thought composed the universe. This is practical and efficient pedagogy, but it shores up our tacit assumption that current belief is identical with true belief, and it reinforces our generalized sense of rightness. - location 377 Ross was struck by the contrast between the grim predictions [the speaker] was describing and the fact that she was pregnant—that, as he put it, “she had somehow found personal hopefulness in the midst of this really massive gloom and doom.” He saw it as a small grace note, a reminder about the possibility of optimism and renewal in even the hardest of times, and he used it as the kicker to his story. The Voice printed the article on the front page. That would have been nice for Ross—except that Donella Meadows wasn’t pregnant. Certain mistakes can actually kill us, but many, many more of them just make us want to die. - location 448 Today, we know these truth-revealing errors as Freudian slips—as the old saw goes, saying one thing and meaning your mother. - location 608 In ancient Indo-European, the ancestral language of nearly half of today’s global population, the word er meant “to move,” “to set in motion,” or simply “to go.” (Spanish speakers will recognize it as ir.) That root gave rise to the Latin verb errare, meaning to wander or, more rakishly, to roam. The Latin, in turn, gave us the English word “erratic,” used to describe movement that is unpredictable or aimless. And, of course, it gave us “error.” - location 712 In the mid-nineteenth century, France was experiencing difficulty in Algeria. The region’s Islamic holy men were using their status—and supposedly their supernatural powers—to encourage resistance to colonial rule, and the resulting rebellion was proving difficult to quell. Deciding to fight fire with fire, Napoleon III turned to one Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, an erstwhile watchmaker who had become an extraordinarily inventive and convincing illusionist. (Today Robert-Houdin is recognized as the father of modern magic, an honor that comes complete with a kind of figurative primogeniture. In 1890, an aspiring young magician named Ehrich Weiss, seeking to pay homage to his hero, changed his name to Houdini.) Napoleon sent Robert-Houdin to Algeria with instructions to out-holy the holy men, and so he did. Wielding the full panoply of contemporary illusions—plucking cannon balls from hats, catching bullets between his teeth, causing perfectly incarnate chieftains to vanish without a trace—the magician convinced his audience that the more powerful gods were on the side of the empire, and that the French, accordingly, were not to be trifled with. - location 1009 “I know” seems to describe a state of affairs which guarantees what is known, guarantees it as a fact. One always forgets the expression, “I thought I knew.” —LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN, ON CERTAINTY - location 1054 The Chicago Public Radio show This American Life once dedicated an entire episode to this kind of mild confabulation, in the course of which they did us all a favor by coining a vastly better term for it. Actually, it’s more accurate to say that they launched an imaginary magazine devoted to covering it—a magazine they called Modern Jackass. Modern Jackass: once you learn the phrase, it’s easy to find yourself using it all the time, which says everything you need to know about the pervasiveness of mild confabulation. One of the producers of the show, Nancy Updike, joked that she herself is a frequent contributor to Modern Jackass: Medical Edition—you know, the one where you bullshit your way through an explanation of the merits of antioxidants or the evils of partially hydrogenated vegetable oil. I introduced the Modern Jackass concept to my family and within a matter of hours they were turning around and congratulating me on my cover story for the magazine. - location 1336 one extremely good way to become wedded to a theory you’ve just idly expressed is to have it contradicted by, say, your mother. I myself have gone from noncommittal to evangelical in a matter of milliseconds using this technique. - location 1350 In the literal sense, a model of the world is a map, and that’s basically what beliefs are, too: mental representations of our physical, social, emotional, spiritual, and political landscapes. My explicit belief that my father-in-law dislikes me is crucial to my mental representation of my family, just as my implicit belief that my mattress is solid is crucial to my mental representation of my bedroom. Both serve the same maplike function of helping me figure out where I might or might not want to sit when I enter a certain room. - location 1476 the instant an implicit assumption is violated, it turns into an explicit one. Imagine for a moment a scene worthy of a Marx Brothers movie. It’s nighttime, I emerge from the bathroom in my pajamas, pick up my book, lie down on my bed—and, wham, fall straight through the mattress onto the floor. Should this exceedingly unlikely scenario somehow transpire, three things will have collapsed. The first is my mattress. The second is my belief in the solidity of that mattress. The third—and here is the point I am trying to make—is the implicitness of that belief. If I find myself sprawled on the floor, all of my previously unconscious convictions about mattresses will suddenly surge into consciousness. - location 1487 (The very word “believe” comes from an Old English verb meaning “to hold dear,” which suggests, correctly, that we have a habit of falling in love with our beliefs once we’ve formed them.) - location 1660 leaping to conclusions is what we always do in inductive reasoning, but we generally only call it that when the process fails us—that is, when we leap to wrong conclusions. - location 1981 Kuhn’s great insight was that preexisting theories are necessary to the kind of inquiry that is the very essence of science. And the history of the field bears this out: science is full of examples of how faith in a theory has led people to the evidence, rather than evidence leading them to the theory. In the early nineteenth century, for instance, astronomers were puzzled by perturbations in the orbit of Uranus that seemed to contradict Newtonian mechanics. Because they weren’t prepared to jettison Newton, they posited the existence of an unknown planet whose gravitational pull was affecting Uranus’s path, and calculated that planet’s necessary orbit around the sun. Guided by this work, later astronomers with better telescopes took a second look at the sky and, sure enough, discovered Neptune—less than one degree away from where the theorists had predicted it would be.* - location 2026 In logic, this tendency is known, rather charmingly, as the No True Scotsman fallacy. Let’s say you believe that no Scotsman puts sugar in his porridge. I protest that my uncle, Angus McGregor of Glasgow, puts sugar in his porridge every day. “Aye,” you reply, “but no true Scotsman puts sugar in his porridge.” - location 2057 Two of my favorite examples of this form of confirmation bias come from the wonderfully evidence-resistant realm of early anatomy and physiology. The first is the traditional Judeo-Christian belief that women had one more rib than men (Adam having furnished one for the making of Eve). This belief somehow survived until 1543, when the Flemish anatomist Andreas Vesalius finally showed otherwise—by, you know, counting. - location 2076 Here is Switzerland—that bastion of political stability, military neutrality, excellent chocolate, and hyper-accurate clocks—and here is a startling fact about it. Although it is one of the world’s oldest and most established democracies, women there were not allowed to vote until 1971. - location 2139 Lise Girardin, who became the first female mayor of Geneva in 1968, was allowed to run the nation’s second largest city but not allowed to vote in national elections. - location 2164 On average across the globe, the women of any given nation have had to wait forty-seven years longer for the right to vote than their male compatriots. In Switzerland, where male citizens began gathering in town squares for public balloting in 1291, universal suffrage took exactly seven centuries. - location 2180 you have to understand something about the cantons in general, which is that their independence is a sacrosanct pillar of Swiss political culture—a kind of state’s rights sentiment on steroids. There’s a joke in Switzerland that illustrates the point: a German kid, an American kid, and a Swiss kid are sitting around talking about how babies are made. The German kid claims that they are brought to their parents by storks. The American kid describes the mechanics of sex. Then the Swiss kid pipes up and says, “In Switzerland, it varies by canton.” - location 2340 tergiversator. - location 2809 indissolubly—with - location 2843 Sometimes in life we find ourselves between jobs, and sometimes we find ourselves between lovers, and sometimes we find ourselves between homes. But we almost never find ourselves between theories. Rather than assess a belief on its own merits, we choose among beliefs, clinging to our current ones until something better comes along. - location 2971 The Design of Everyday Things, - location 3357 Rather than signaling the Second Coming, Edson concluded, October 22 marked the day that Christ had assumed his place in the holiest compartment of the heavens, from whence he would begin judging conditions on earth in preparation for his return. This doctrine, formulated by Edson more or less on the spot, is known as Investigative Judgment. It was formalized by two other Millerites, Ellen White and her husband James White, who together founded the Seventh-Day Adventists on its basis. - location 3379 If you don’t have any direct experience with this kind of trauma-induced denial, it’s easy to assume that it is less a deep psychological reaction and more a surface rhetorical reflex: this can’t be happening to me, you must have the wrong person, there’s got to be some kind of mistake here. In reality, though, the denial reaction to trauma is profound and potent. To take a particularly mind-boggling example: at least 20 percent of seriously ill people who are told that they are near death actually forget the news within a few days—a form of denial so extreme that it involves not simply rejecting but entirely obliterating unwanted information. - location 3656 So we have four possibilities: the eight-year-old was sexually active; her eleven-year-old sister was sexually active while wearing her sister’s underpants; a third party was in the room (even though the victim had testified to a single intruder); or the father had deposited the semen in one perverse way or another. Neufeld, clearly somewhat nonplussed, concedes that all these scenarios are hypothetically possible—but, he says: NEUFELD: You have no basis to believe that happened here, do you? MCGRATH: Other than I was a prosecutor for eighteen years, and I’ve been in the criminal justice system for twenty-five years. I think it’s a very definite possibility. NEUFELD: That’s the sole source of it? MCGRATH: Which is a pretty significant source. - location 3790 When that kind of comprehension is not forthcoming, we take it hard. Think about how distressing it is to feel misunderstood, and how frustrating it is when someone believes something about you—that you’re irresponsible or can’t handle commitment or don’t pull your weight at work—that you think is untrue. Conversely, there are few things more gratifying than the feeling that someone deeply understands us. In fact, as we are about to see, this feeling of being “gotten” is the sine qua non of our most important relationships, and the very hallmark of being in love. - location 4031 This feeling of being utterly absorbed in something, from cover to cover or curtain to curtain, is the primordial pleasure of art, one that kicks in long before a grasp of tradition or an admiration of technique. It is the kid-happiness of disappearing into another world. - location 5331 the goal of therapy isn’t necessarily to make our beliefs more accurate; it is to make them more functional. - location 5420 [In] Another variant of the Sally-Ann task….the experimenter shows the child a Polaroid camera, explains what it does, takes some sample pictures, and allows the child to play with it until he or she is familiar with how it works. Then the puppet show proceeds as in the original experiment—except that, when Sally puts the candy bar in the basket, the experimenter takes a picture of it there. At the end of the show, after Sally has left the room and Ann has moved the candy bar to the cupboard, the child is asked not where Sally thinks the candy bar is, but where it will appear in the photograph….Healthy children find the Polaroid version of the false-belief task harder than the original one: they continue to fail it for some months after they’ve begun to reason correctly about other people’s beliefs. Autistic children, by contrast, can pass the false-belief test when it involves Polaroid pictures, but not when it involves other people’s minds. - location 7442 In theory, the outer limit of wrongness would be the condition of being wrong about absolutely everything….Lee defines fractal wrongness as “being wrong at every conceivable scale of resolution.”….As a condition, fractal wrongness is, thankfully, unattainable. As an insult, however, it is incomparable. - location 7624 The oft-reported 50 percent divorce rate in the United States comes from a faulty calculation method and is not correct....it’s still high (usually calculated between 36 and 40 percent), and astronomically so for second and third marriages: 60 percent and 73 percent, respectively. - location 7697 thirty-five states have now passed “I’m sorry” laws, which prevent physicians’ apologies from being used against them in malpractice suits. - location 7733