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Quote by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

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Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. was an American physician, poet, and writer who made significant contributions to the field of medicine and influenced American literature and culture. He was a pioneer in the use of ether as an anesthetic and a leading figure in the medical community of his time. more

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“What is intelligence, anyway It is only a word that people use to name those unknown processes with which our brains solve problems we call hard. But whenever you learn a skill yourself, you're less impressed or mystified when other people do the same. This is why the meaning of 'intelligence' seems so elusive: It describes not some definite thing but only the momentary horizon of our ignorance about how minds might work.”

“Unlike earlier thinkers, who had sought to improve their accuracy by getting rid of error, Laplace realized that you should try to get more error: aggregate enough flawed data, and you get a glimpse of the truth. "The genius of statistics, as Laplace defined it, was that it did not ignore errors; it quantified them," the writer Louis Menand observed. "...The right answer is, in a sense, a function of the mistakes.”