I’m looking for a Darwin quote I used to have, but lost. It was something about how whenever he encoutered a fact that seemed wrong to him, he immediately noted it down, as such facts are both important and easy to forget.
It’s harder to find than you think. It’s not on the master list of rationality quotes or any of the top 10 google results for “darwin quotes”. And the problem with 19th century thinkers is that their vocabulary is too big, and so Google is crippled against them.
(Edit: good job. I had tried “fact”, but not limiting the source. And some other words I attempted—“note”, “write”, “remember”, “forget”—are not there.)
Anyone who upvotes this comment is committing to upvote the person who finds the quote.
I had, also, during many years followed a golden rule, namely, that whenever a published fact, a new observation or thought came across me, which was opposed to my general results, to make a memorandum of it without fail and at once; for I had found by experience that such facts and thoughts were far more apt to escape from the memory than favourable ones. Owing to this habit, very few objections were raised against my views which I had not at least noticed and attempted to answer.
A wonderful quote indeed. Found by guessing that it was biographical or autobiographical (it seemed a little too personal for a scientific treatise) and searching for the word “fact” in the online text of the (very readable) autobiography.
I’m looking for a Darwin quote I used to have, but lost. It was something about how whenever he encoutered a fact that seemed wrong to him, he immediately noted it down, as such facts are both important and easy to forget.
It’s harder to find than you think. It’s not on the master list of rationality quotes or any of the top 10 google results for “darwin quotes”. And the problem with 19th century thinkers is that their vocabulary is too big, and so Google is crippled against them.
(Edit: good job. I had tried “fact”, but not limiting the source. And some other words I attempted—“note”, “write”, “remember”, “forget”—are not there.)
Anyone who upvotes this comment is committing to upvote the person who finds the quote.
-From his Autobiography, 1902.
A wonderful quote indeed. Found by guessing that it was biographical or autobiographical (it seemed a little too personal for a scientific treatise) and searching for the word “fact” in the online text of the (very readable) autobiography.
If I could give an additional upvote for your elaboration of methodology, I would.