Blaise Pascal, the seventeenth-century mathematician and philosopher who wrote in his Pensées, “ ‘God is, or He is not.’ But to which side shall we incline? Reason can decide nothing here.”

Nonlinear thinking means which way you should go depends on where you already are.

If I claim I can make the sun come up with my mind, and it does, you shouldn’t be impressed by my powers; but if I claim I can make the sun not come up, and it doesn’t, then I’ve demonstrated an outcome very unlikely under the null hypothesis, and you’d best take notice.

One of the great joys of mathematics is the incontrovertible feeling that you’ve understood something the right way, all the way down to the bottom; it’s a feeling I haven’t experienced in any other sphere of mental life. And when you know how to do something the right way, it’s hard—for some stubborn people, impossible—to make yourself explain it

That may seem like an unfair prejudice, but without some prejudices we would run the risk of walking around in a constant state of astoundedness. Richard Feynman famously captured this state of mind:

To paraphrase Clausewitz: Mathematics is the extension of common sense by other means.

(Let’s face it, famous old maxims attributed to ancient scientists are probably made up, but they’re no less instructive for that.)

null hypothesis significance test,

Laffer curve,