Overall, more than sixteen hundred banks failed between 1980 and 1994. Hoenig had to deliver many such verdicts personally. "Tom's German," Yorke said, referring to the ethnic origin of Hoenig's name. "He's strict. There's rules."
(The Lords of Easy Money)
Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach.
How much accuracy is lost when the method replaces the judge?
The answer may surprise you. Predictions did not lose accuracy when the model generated predictions.
They improved. In most cases, the model out-predicted the professional on which it was based.
The ersatz was better than the original product.
The analogy with handwashing is intentional. Hygiene measures can be tedious. Their benefits are not directly visible; you might never know what problem they prevented from occurring. Conversely, when problems do arise, they may not be traceable to a specific breakdown in hygiene observance. For these reasons, handwashing compliance is difficult to enforce, even among health-care professionals, who are well aware of its importance.
First act and then think...We discover the possibilities by doing, by trying new activities, building new networks, finding new role models." We learn who we are in practice, not in theory.
In one of the most cited studies of expert problem solving ever conducted, an interdisciplinary team of scientists came to a pretty simple conclusion: successful problem solvers are more able to determine the deep structure of a problem before they proceed to match a strategy to it. Less successful problem solvers are more like most students in the Ambiguous Sorting Task: they mentally classify problems only by superficial, overtly stated features, like the domain context.
Mental meandering and personal experimentation are sources of power, and head starts are overrated
The labs in which scientists had more diverse professional backgrounds were the ones where more and more varied analogies were offered, and where breakthroughs were more reliably produced when the unexpected arose.
Instead of asking whether someone is gritty, we should ask when they are. “If you get someone into a context that suits them,” Ogas said, “they’ll more likely work hard and it will look like grit from the outside.
In modern mathematics, the question of the impossibility of a solution to certain problems plays an important role, and attempts to answer such questions have often been the occasion of discovering new and fruitful fields for research.
We recall in this connection the demonstration by Abel of the impossibility of solving an equation of the fifth degree by means of radicals, the discovery of the impossibility of demonstrating the axiom of parallels, and finally the theorems of Hermite and Lindeman concerning the impossibility of constructing by algebraic means the numbers e and π.
--From (Foundations of Geometry)
“A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature; and because firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the case against a miracle is—just because it is a miracle—as complete as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined to be. Why is it more than merely probable that all men must die, that lead cannot when not supported remain suspended in the air, that fire consumes wood and is extinguished by water, unless it is that these events are found agreeable to the laws of nature, and for things to go differently there would have to be a violation of those laws, or in other words a miracle? Nothing is counted as a
miracle if it ever happens in the common course of nature. When a man who seems to be in good health suddenly dies, this isn't a miracle; because such a kind of death, though more unusual than any other, has yet often been observed
to happen. But a dead man’s coming to life would be a miracle, because that has never been observed in any age or country. So there must be a uniform experience against every miraculous event, because otherwise the event wouldn't count as a ‘miracle’. And as a uniform experience amounts to a proof, we have here a direct and full proof against the existence of any miracle, just because it’s a miracle; and
such a proof can’t be destroyed or the miracle made credible except by an opposite proof that is even stronger.
This clearly leads us to a general maxim that deserves of
our attention:
No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle unless it is of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact that it tries to establish. And even in that case there is a mutual destruction of
arguments, and the stronger one only gives us an assurance suitable to the force that remains to it after the force needed to cancel the other has been
subtracted.”
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
Don't let perfect be the enemy of good
Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer, Art is all the rest.
psychopaths distill into positions of power in bureaucracies
The best rides are the ones where you bite off much more than you can chew, and live through it
Plans Are Worthless, But Planning Is Everything
https://www.inc.com/melanie-curtin/in-just-12-words-winston-churchill-gives-us-a-definition-of-success-that-could-outlast-them-all.html
Inspiration and growth only comes from adversity and from challenge, from stepping away from what is comfortable and familiar and stepping out in to the unknown. In life we all have tempests to ride and poles to walk to. And metaphorically speaking we could all benefit to getting outside the house a little more often if we could only sum up the courage.
All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
As the saying attributed to the former astronaut and airline boss Frank Borman goes, capitalism without bankruptcy is like Christianity without hell. Put another way, if financial stability is destabilizing (as Hyman Minsky maintained), too much economic stability induces sclerosis.
(The Price of Time)
The surprising events that sometimes lead from natural history to medical breakthrough would make excellent science fiction—if only they were untrue.
The surprising events that sometimes lead from natural history to medical breakthrough would make excellent science fiction—if only they were untrue.
Vox Clamantis in Deserto.
a voice crying in the wilderness.
The secret of success is Vitamin N. Three main priorities:
1. Say No.
2. Get the priorities right
3. No Complaining
Laugh, and the world laughs with you;
Weep, and you weep alone.
For this brave old earth must borrow its mirth,
But has trouble enough of its own.
