Trading Maxims/Quotes

"My advice to any young man at the beginning of his career is to try to look for the mere outlines of big things with his fresh, untrained, and unprejudiced mind."

H. Selye

 

"It will be objected that this sharpness or clarity involves certain distortions or misrepresentations, depending on over-simplifications. But this is the perennial dilemma of the teacher: the teaching of facts and figures vs. the teaching of truth. To convey a model the teacher must reify and diagram and declare clearly what cannot be seen at all. The student must "learn" things in order to realize subsequently that they are not quite the way he learned them. But by this time he will have gotten into the spirit of the matter, and from this he may arrive at some approximation of the truth, an approximation he will continue to revise all his life long"

Karl Menninger

 

"Even the most renaissance of renaissance men in these days cannot hope to know more than a very small fraction of what is known. The "general systems man", therefore, is constantly taking leaps in the dark, constantly jumping to conclusions on insufficient evidence, constantly, in fact, making a fool of himself. Indeed, the willingness to make a fool of oneself is almost a prerequisite to rapid learning."

Kenneth Boulding, "General Systems as a Point of View"

 

"...a child of 4 who did not know his letters and could not read music managed to recognize the different songs in a book from one day or one month to another, simply by their titles and from the look of the pages. For him, the general effect of each page constituted a special scheme, whereas to us, who perceive each word or even each letter analytically, all the pages of a book are exactly alike."

Jean Piaget, "The Language and Thought of the Child"

 

"As we analyze a thing into its parts or into its properties, we tend to magnify these, to exaggerate their apparent independence, and to hide from ourselves (at least for a time) the essential integrity and individuality of the composite whole"

 

"There is, in this regard, a pertinent story about the great American linguist and anthropologist Edward Sapir, who had allegedly been working with an informant on an American Indian language with a grammar that he was having trouble sorting out. Finally, he felt he had caught on to the principles involved, and to test his hypothesis he began making up sentences in the language himself. "Can you say this?" he would ask his informant and would then produce his utterance in the informant's language. He repeated this several times, each time composing a different expression. Each time his informant nodded his head and said "Yes, you can say that." This apparently was a confirmation that he was on the right track. Then an awful suspicion crossed Sapir's mind. Once more he asked "Can you say this?" and once more received the answer "Yes." Then he asked, "What does it mean?" "Not a darn thing!" came the reply.

Ward H. Goodenough, "Culture, Language, and Society"



It is possible to speak or write perfectly acceptable things that do not mean anything. :-D

 

"Don't make things harder than they actually are. Just trade the trend with discipline, and let probability sort out your P&L over the long run."

CANDLETRADER