Conventional Wisdom Quotes - Page 5

• The conventional wisdom is often wrong.

  Steven Levitt

  Conventional

  "Think Like a Freak extract: joining the dots between hot dogs, Van Halen and David Cameron" by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, www.theguardian.com. May 10, 2014.

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• Whats different now is that while political leaders used to give talking points to talk radio, now talk-radio hosts are giving talking points to political leaders. Its all part of the suffocating spin cycle were in. In media, politics and publishing, the conventional wisdom is to play to this base.

  John Avlon

  Media, Talking, Play

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• The rules your parents teach you to live by are very different than the rules the world actually runs by. Most of the conventional wisdom is not only wrong, it's a lie told to us by people who want to control us. It doesn't help us, it helps them. Pretty much everything we're told as children (and adults, really) by the established power structures in our lives are made up fairytales us to reinforce that control: Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the tooth fairy, fat-free frozen dinners, religion, and metering lights on the highway--the list goes on

  Tucker Max

  Running, Easter, Children

  Tucker Max (2012). “Hilarity Ensues”, p.241, Simon and Schuster

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• Trading has taught me not to take the conventional wisdom for granted. What money I made in trading is testimony to the fact that the majority is wrong a lot of the time. The vast majority is wrong even more of the time. I've learned that markets, which are often just mad crowds, are often irrational; when emotionally overwrought, they're almost always wrong.

  Richard Dennis

  Mad, Majority, Crowds

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• There are lots of cycles to markets - boom and bust - and also in perceptions of people. The conventional wisdom of Steve Case as genius or fool was highly cyclical. The truth was always in the middle.

  Steve Case

  People, Perception, Genius

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• The conventional wisdom is - people say this all the time - you should only write something when you're far enough away from it that you can have a perspective. But that's not true. That's a story that you're telling. The truth of it is here, right now. It's the only truth that we ever know. And I'm interested in that truth and the confusion being part of the experience and sorting it your way through and figuring it out.

  Charlie Kaufman

  Writing, People, Confusion

  "Charlie Kaufman" by Scott Tobias, www.avclub.com. October 22, 2008.

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• The conventional wisdom is often wrong. Crime didn't keep soaring in the 1990s, money alone doesn't win elections, and - surprise - drinking eight glasses of water a day has never actually been shown to do a thing for your health. Conventional wisdom is often shoddily formed and devilishly difficult to see through, but it can be done.

  Malcolm Gladwell

  Pain, Drinking, Winning

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• Conventional wisdom, fooled by our misleading "physical intuition", is that the real world is "continuous", and that discrete models are necessary evils for approximating the "real" world, due to the innate discreteness of the digital computer.

  Doron Zeilberger

  Real, Evil, Intuition

  ""Real" Analysis is a Degenerate Case of Discrete Analysis". Ruthgers School of Arts and Sciences Website, sites.math.rutgers.edu. November 26, 2001.

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• After listening to the debate on unemployment I can see a danger that Liberals lose to the Tories their claim to have new and sensible ideas and are left saying "Me too" to a Socialist conventional wisdom which is failing. The salient need of this country to produce more and much more efficiently hardly figured on the agenda.

  Jo Grimond

  Country, Ideas, Listening

  The Sunday Times, September 19, 1976.

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• Obama is very much an establishment sort of guy. The whole image of him as a transcendent figure was based on style rather than substance. If you actually looked at what he said, not how he said it, he said very establishment things. He's a moderate, cautious, ameliorative guy. He tends to gravitate toward Beltway conventional wisdom.

  Paul Krugman

  Guy, Style, Substance

  "Playboy Interview: Paul Krugman". Interview with Jonathan Tasini, www.playboy.com. February 15, 2012.

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• If you are the kind of person who listens to conservative advice, you may do okay in life, but you probably won't ever be a fantastic leader. You have to take risks, and you also have to go against conventional wisdom, because conventional wisdom doesn't make for startling advances in society.

  Ruth Simmons

  Leader, Advice, Risk

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• Perhaps the only thing that saves science from invalid conventional wisdom that becomes effectively permanent is the presence of mavericks in every generation - people who keep challenging convention and thinking up new ideas for the sheer hell of it or from an innate contrariness.

  David M. Raup

  Wisdom, Science, Thinking

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• Clinton is a big personality who has led a big life, and for some of the media conventional wisdom to boil it down to a view that 'all people are really interested in' are a few moments of madness in the Oval Office gets him, the importance of the presidency, and the significance of his life, all wrong.

  Alastair Campbell

  Views, Media, People

  "The Bill Clinton I knew" by Alastair Campbell, www.theguardian.com. June 26, 2004.

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• The line that I am urging as today's conventional wisdom is not a denial of consciousness. It is often called, with more reason, arepudiation of mind. It is indeed a repudiation of mind as a second substance, over and above body. It can be described less harshly as an identification of mind with some of the faculties, states, and activities of the body. Mental states and events are a special subclass of the states and events of the human or animal body.

  Willard Van Orman Quine

  Animal, Mind, Special

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• Active management strategies demand uninstitutional behavior from institutions, creating a paradox that few can unravel. Establishing and maintaining an unconventional investment profile requires acceptance of uncomfortably idiosyncratic portfolios, which frequently appear downright imprudent in the eyes of conventional wisdom.

  David F. Swensen

  Independent, Eye, Acceptance

  David F. Swensen (2009). “Pioneering Portfolio Management: An Unconventional Approach to Institutional Investment, Fully Revised and Updated”, p.8, Simon and Schuster

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• I do think that the standard media is controlled by the conventional wisdom about global warming. We've come to believe - from reading a lot of articles and talking to a lot of scientists - that there's another side to be heard.

  Steven Levitt

  Wisdom, Believe, Reading

  "Personal Quotes/ Biography". www.imdb.com.

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• It's funny, because in deference to conventional wisdom, I spent my struggling writer years trying to suppress my naturally baroque literary voice and write clean, spare prose. I finally gave up and embraced my baroque tendencies when I wrote the Kushiel series.

  Jacqueline Carey

  Wisdom, Struggle, Writing

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• The author brings to the table a healthy skepticism of the conventional wisdom, an admirable ability to separate fact from fancy, and an undisguised repugnance for the mumbo-jumbo that's the curse of so much commentary on anything to do with economics or investment. A World of Wealth is not only a lively read, but an exceptionally enlightening and rewarding one to boot.

  Alan Abelson

  Healthy, Boots, World

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• The intricate and different life cycles of both male and female root-heads, and the great behavioral sophistication shown by the female in reconfiguring a host crab as a support system, all underscore the myopia of our conventional wisdom in regarding rhizocephalans as degenerate parasites because the adult anatomy of internal roots and external sac seem so simple.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Simple, Roots, Support Systems

  Stephen Jay Gould (2011). “Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms”, p.371, Harvard University Press

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• Remember, the conventional wisdom is, "Yeah, you can do this like [Donald] Trump has done it during the primaries, buuuut once you get to the general, it's not about national votes. It's about states! It's about swing states. It's about battleground states. And you've gotta have targeted expenditures, great ads running against your opponent in those swing states."

  Rush Limbaugh

  Running, Swings, Done

  Source: www.rushlimbaugh.com

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• The problem in our society is the ego psychology and conventional wisdom about "look out for #1." That conventional wisdom thinks that "love your enemy" is to some a principle no one can ever live by.

  Robert Thurman

  Love You, Thinking, Psychology

  Interview with Maranda Pleasant, www.marandapleasantmedia.com.

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• Watch what happens on Twitter. One thing leads to another very quickly. And in an ironic sense, even though it's such a democratic form of communication, there's a funny way in which it leads to a hardening of a conventional wisdom much more quickly than might happen if you were reflecting on it a little more.

  Donald Verrilli Jr.

  Communication, Ironic, Watches

  "Farewell to the General". "Amicus" with Dahlia Lithwick, www.slate.com. June 28, 2016.

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