Home > Topic > the conventional wisdom
1 " It is our task, both in science and in society at large, to prove the conventional wisdom wrong and to make our unpredictable dreams come true "
― Freeman Dyson
2 " When the conventional wisdom of physics seemed to conflict with an elegant theory of his, Einstein was inclined to question that wisdom rather than his theory, often to have his stubbornness rewarded. "
― Walter Isaacson
3 " Living a long life, the conventional wisdom at the time said, depended to a great extent on who we were—that is, our genes. It depended on the decisions we made—on what we chose to eat, and how much we chose to exercise, and how effectively we were treated by the medical system. No one was used to thinking about health in terms of community. "
― Malcolm Gladwell , Outliers: The Story of Success
4 " A willingness to go against the conventional wisdom was one of the side effects of looking at the world in a particular light. "
― Kem Nunn , Unassigned Territory
5 " The witch-hunt narrative is now the conventional wisdom about these cases. That view is so widely endorsed and firmly entrenched that so widely endorsed and firmly entrenched that there would seem to be nothing left to say about these cases. But a close examination of the witch hunt canon leads to some unsettling questions: Why is there so little in the way of academic scholarship about these cases? Almost all of the major witch-hunt writings have been in magazines, often without any footnotes to verify or assess the claims made. Why hasn't anyone writing about these cases said anything about how difficult they are to research? There are so many roadblocks and limitations to researching these cases that it would seem incumbent on any serious writer to address the limitations of data sources. Many of these cases seem to have been researched in a manner of days or weeks. Nevertheless, the cases are described in a definitive way that belies their length and complexity, along with the inherent difficulty in researching original trial court documents. This book is based on the first systematic examination of court records in these cases. "
― , Witch-Hunt Narrative: Politics, Psychology, and the Sexual Abuse of Children
6 " Community organizing is all about building grassroots support. It's about identifying the people around you with whom you can create a common, passionate cause. And it's about ignoring the conventional wisdom of company politics and instead playing the game by very different rules. "
7 " Hurricane Katrina overwhelmed levees and exploded the conventional wisdom about a shared American prosperity, exposing a group of people so poor they didn't have $50 for a bus ticket out of town. If we want to learn something from this disaster, the lesson ought to be: America's poor deserve better than this. "
8 " The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events. "
9 " Doubt the conventional wisdom unless you can verify it with reason and experiment. "
10 " Up until Trump announced his candidacy, the conventional wisdom was that you had to be a professional politician in order to run. You had to have a background that was politically scrubbed. In other words, smart people who didn't live perfect lives could never run. "
11 " Around '93, '94, the conventional wisdom about the Internet was that it was a toy for academics and researchers. So it was very, very underestimated for about two years. "
12 " I'm particularly interested in black swan events: unprecedented surprises that destroy the conventional wisdom about how the world works. "
