Achieve quotes

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Christopher_Wolfgang_Alexander

Negative Differences

“We should always expect to see the process of achieving good fit between two entities as a negative process of neutralizing the incongruities, or forces, which cause misfit.”

Flimsy Solution Conviction

“In the case of a real design problem, even our conviction that there is such a thing as fit to be achieved is curiously flimsy and insubstantial. We are searching for some kind of harmony between two intangibles: a form which we have not yet designed, and a context which we cannot properly describe. The only reason we have for thinking that there must be some kind of fit to be achieved between them is that we can detect incongruities, or negative instances of it.”

Time for Equilibrium

“Misfit provides an incentive to change; good fit provides none. In theory the process is eventually bound to reach the equilibrium of well-fitting forms. However, for the fit to occur in practice, one vital condition must be satisfied. It must have time to happen. The process must be able to achieve equilibrium before the next culture change upsets it again... The direct response is the feedback of the process. If the process is to maintain the good fit ... while the culture drifts, it needs a feedback sensitive enough to take action the moment that one of the potential failures actually occurs.”

Mihaly_Csikszentmihalyi

True Believer

“The true believer is not really interacting with the belief system; he usually lets his psychic energy be absorbed by it. From this submission nothing new can come; consciousness may attain a welcome order, but it will be an order imposed rather than achieved. At best the self of the true believer resembles a crystal: strong and beautifully symmetrical, but very slow to grow.”
  • Source: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in the book “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience“, chapter “The Elements of Enjoyment”, page 65. Original content published by Harper Perennial Modern Classics in 1990. Kindle edition published by Harper Collins in 2008. ISBN: 978-0061876721.

Joseph_Heller

Mediocrity

“Major Major had been born too late and too mediocre. Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them. With Major Major it had been all three. Even among men lacking all distinction he inevitably stood out as a man lacking more distinction than all the rest, and people who met him were always impressed by how unimpressive he was.”
  • Source: Heller, Joseph. 'Catch-22: 50th Anniversary Edition'. Chapter 9 'Major Major Major Major', page 92. Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.

Pearl_and_Mackenzie

Strong AI

“The successes of deep learning have been truly remarkable... Nevertheless, deep learning has succeeded primarily by showing that certain questions or tasks we thought were difficult are in fact not. It has not addressed the truly difficult questions that continue to prevent us from achieving humanlike AI. As a result the public believes that ‘strong AI,’ machines that think like humans, is just around the corner or maybe even here already. In reality, nothing could be farther from the truth.”
  • Source: Judea Pearl and Dana Mackenzie in “The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect”. Published by Basic Books of New York, NY in 2018. Chapter 1, page 30. ISBN 978-0465097616 (ebook).

Stephen_Wolfram

Simple Purpose

“Whenever there’s computational irreducibility we can think of it as exerting a powerful force towards unpredictability and randomness... So for a system to achieve an overall “computationally simple purpose” this computational irreducibility must in some sense be tamed, or at least contained. And in fact it’s an inevitable feature of computational irreducibility that within it there must be “pockets of computational reducibility” where simpler behavior occurs. And at some level the way computationally simple purposes must be achieved is by tapping into those pockets of reducibility. When there’s computational irreducibility it means that there’s no simple narrative one can expect to give of how a system behaves, and no overall “mechanism” one can expect to identify for it. But one can think of pockets of computational reducibility as corresponding to at least small-scale “identifiable mechanisms”... When there’s a “simple overall purpose” being achieved these mechanisms tend to become more manifest.”