New Insights Quotes

“If we fail to lubricate our mental clockwork with new insights and perspectives, our cognitive texture becomes obsolete, and our ability to interpret and understand the world will be compromised. ("Drunken sailor")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“People being incoherent might get on our nerves sometimes. We like coherence in actions and thoughts since we value clarity and structure in our lives. But at times, we are alarmed because we cannot help being incoherent when we want to challenge established norms and explore unconventional paths that lead to unexpected connections or new insights. Allowing ourselves some incoherence might open the door to new perspectives and surprising outcomes. ("Drunken sailor”)”
― Erik Pevernagie

“The philosopher and historian George Santayana once remarked that those who do not know their history are doomed to repeat its mistakes. A perusal of some of the essays will reveal that this is not always true. In some cases psychologists have known about mistakes of the past and sought to repeat them. But the recurrence can sometimes be fruitful: going round in circles can be a good thing, provided the circle is large that when one returns to the task one sees it in a new light and the error brings new insights.”
― Noel Sheehy, Fifty Key Thinkers in Psychology

“Most new ideas come to us not through pure logic, but through a fusion of memory and imagination. If new ideas were purely a product of rationality, other people would quickly grasp and embrace novel solutions. People’s lack of imagination prevents them from comprehending the significance of an innovative idea.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“We must realize that a “final” decision is never entirely final. A final decision is not about closing a chapter, but it is the crystallization of our current knowledge and values. Our self evolves, circumstances change, and new insights emerge. The act of deciding shapes us, but the ongoing act of reflecting on those decisions shapes us even more. ("Final decision")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Novel ideas are unsettling, innovative concepts about important matters in human affairs is disruptive of the internal harmony that people prefer. There is a tendency even for the most logical and classically educated people steeped in rational scholastic traditions to assume that if any new hypothesis were correct, a scholar would already written it in a book.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“The whole idea of: "Well, surely if you're going to make progress on this set of [science] puzzles, you will want to know everything everyone has done on the way there."

[But] by the time you learn everything everyone has done on the way there you will have spent a huge amount of time and made no progress. And even worse, you will be entrained. You will be entrained in the thought process that got them stuck in the first place.

And this all very counter-intuitive:
Do you want to know everything that is known before you try to add anything?
The answer is: You probably don't.
You'll ask better questions [if you don't.]
You'll ask some bad ones [too].
You'll ask some questions that other people have figured their way past, but you'll ask some good ones that nobody's asked yet and that's where the breakthroughs live.”
― Bret Weinstein