When we are surprised by a particular outcome or event, we should consciously acknowledge that there must be a gap between our perception and reality. A surprise should be a signal inviting us to realign our intuition and our thinking so that they conform to actuality. One of the life lessons that mathematical thinking offers us is that we should always reexamine a surprising situation from various angles and points of view until that surprising feeling is replaced by a rock-solid intuitive understanding of the truth.
—from Coincidences, Chaos, and All That Math Jazz by Edward B. Burger & Michael Starbird.
As a picky and pedantic point I’d argue that “the truth” there in the last line is a problematic phrasing–I know what they’re getting at, obviously, but the point here is that the surprise is an invitation to move to a more useful paradigm, which is not necessarily the same thing as moving to, or even toward, The Truth.
Still, that’s a lovely paragraph, and I was quite pleased to hit in the middle of a work of popularization.
