Thursday, February 21, 2008

no fish in the tank

Insignificant people must be tolerated in order to keep them well disposed. Then we can make use of them if we should need them. If we become alienated from them and do not meet them halfway, they turn their backs on us and are not at our disposal when we need them. But this is our own fault.

i ching, kou

On psychological grounds I have discarded the idea that we are dealing with mere chance numbers. In a total picture of natural events, it is just as important to consider the exceptions to the rule as the averages. This is the fallacy of the statistical picture: it is one-sided, inasmuch as it represents only the average aspect of reality and excludes the total picture . . . Inasmuch as chance maxima and minima occur, they are facts whose nature I set out to explore.

c g jung, synchronicity

Making an extreme idealization, . . . a person has only one decision to make in his whole life. He must, namely, decide how to live, and this he might in principle do once and for all. Though many . . . have found the concept of overall decision stimulating, it is certainly unrealistic and in many contexts unwieldy.

l savage, the foundations of statistics

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