Early quotes

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Samuel_C_Florman

Character

“To the everlasting credit of man, he recognized early the imperfection of his character, and set about finding ways of coping with it so as to enable himself to live harmoniously in large groups.”
  • Source: From the book “The Existential Pleasures of Engineering” by {Samuel C. Florman}. Second edition published in 1994 by {St. Martin's Press}, New York, NY. First edition published in 1976. Kindle edition published in 2023. E-book ISBN 978-1466842366. Chapter 6, page 84.
Keywords: Everlasting_quotes Credit_quotes Man_quotes Humanity_quotes Recognize_quotes Early_quotes Imperfect_quotes Character_quotes Find_quotes Way_quotes Cope_quotes Enable_quotes Live_quotes Harmony_quotes Large_quotes Group_quotes

Robert_Heinlein

Lazy Progress

“Progress doesn't come from early risers — progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things.”
  • Source: Written by Robert A. Heinlein in the book “Time Enough for Love”, published in 1973 by Putnam's Sons, ISBN: 0-399-11151-4. Variations on a Theme I: Affairs of State, page 53. Character: Lazarus Long.
Keywords: Progress_quotes Early_quotes Riser_quotes Lazy_quotes Men_quotes Look_quotes Way_quotes Do_quotes Thing_quotes

John_Maynard_Keynes

Slow Progress

“From the earliest times of which we have record — back, say, to two thousand years before Christ [BCE 2000] down to the beginning of the eighteenth century [CE 1700] — there was no very great change in the standard of life of the average man living in the civilised centres of the earth... This slow rate of progress, or lack of progress, was due to two reasons — to the remarkable absence of important technical improvements and to the failure of capital to accumulate.”
  • Source: From the Essay “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” written by John Maynard Keynes in 1930. Included in the book “Essays in Persuasion” edited by John Maynard Keynes and published by W. W. Norton & Company in 1963.
Keywords: Early_quotes Time_quotes Record_quotes Ancient_quotes Century_quotes Pre-industrial_quotes Industrial_quotes Change_quotes Standard_quotes Life_quotes Living_quotes Civilization_quotes Center_quotes Earth_quotes Slow_quotes Rate_quotes Progress_quotes Lack_quotes Due_quotes Causality_quotes Reason_quotes Remarkable_quotes Absence_quotes Important_quotes Technology_quotes Improvement_quotes Failure_quotes Capital_quotes Accumulate_quotes

Alexander_Kossiakoff et al.

Skeptical Positive Thinking

"The Power of Skeptical Positive Thinking... is meant to capture an important characteristic of successful systems engineering. The skeptical part is important to temper the traditional optimism of the design specialist regarding the probability of success of a chosen design approach. It is the driving force for the insistence of validation of the approach selected at the earliest possible opportunity. The other dimension of skepticism, which is directly related to the characteristic of positive thinking, refers to the reaction in the face of failure or apparent failure of a selected technique or design approach. Many design specialists who encounter an unexpected failure are plunged into despair. The systems engineer, on the other hand, cannot afford the luxury of hand wringing."
  • Source:Kossiakoff, Alexander; Sweet, William N.; Seymour, Samuel J.; Biemer, Steven M.. 'Systems Engineering Principles and Practice'. 2011. Wiley. Kindle Edition. Section 1.6 page 23.
Keywords: Power_quotes Skepticism_quotes Positive_quotes Thinking_quotes Importance_quotes Success_quotes System_quotes Engineering_quotes Optimism_quotes Design_quotes Specialization_quotes Probability_quotes Validation_quotes Early_quotes Opportunity_quotes Failure_quotes Despair_quotes Luxury_quotes Characteristic_quotes Drive_quotes Force_quotes Insist_quotes Approach_quotes Select_quotes Dimension_quotes Direct_quotes Relate_quotes Reaction_quotes Face_quotes Apparent_quotes Technique_quotes Encounter_quotes Unexpected_quotes Plunge_quotes Afford_quotes Hand_quotes Wring_quotes

John_von_Neumann

Gradual Development of Theory

“What is important is the gradual development of a theory, based on a careful analysis of the ... facts. ... Its first applications are necessarily to elementary problems where the result has never been in doubt and no theory is actually required. At this early stage the application serves to corroborate the theory. The next stage develops when the theory is applied to somewhat more complicated situations in which it may already lead to a certain extent beyond the obvious and familiar. Here theory and application corroborate each other mutually. Beyond lies the field of real success: genuine prediction by theory. It is well known that all mathematized sciences have gone through these successive stages of evolution.”
  • Source: John von Neumann, 'Formulation of the Economic Problem' in Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1964), 8. Reprinted in John Von Neumann, F. Bródy (ed.) and Tibor Vámos (ed.), The Neumann Compendium (2000), 416.
Keywords: Importance_quotes Gradual_quotes Development_quotes Theory_quotes Careful_quotes Analysis_quotes Fact_quotes Application_quotes Elementary_quotes Problem_quotes Result_quotes Doubt_quotes Requirements_quotes Early_quotes Stage_quotes Service_quotes Corroborate_quotes Complexity_quotes Situation_quotes Lead_quotes Obvious_quotes Familiar_quotes Mutual_quotes Success_quotes Genuine_quotes Prediction_quotes Mathematics_quotes Science_quotes Evolution_quotes Beyond_quotes

Ascher_Opler

Spot the Lemon Early

“In managing software projects the real problem is ‘spot the lemon and spot the lemon early’.”
Keywords: Management_quotes Software_quotes Project_quotes Problem_quotes Spot_quotes Notice_quotes Find_quotes Mindfulness_quotes Lemon_quotes Bug_quotes Defect_quotes Early_quotes

Daniel_H_Pink

Motivation 1.0

“In our very early days — I mean very early days, say, fifty thousand years ago — the underlying assumption about human behavior was simple and true. We were trying to survive. From roaming the Savannah to gather food to scrambling for the bushes when a saber-toothed tiger approached, that drive guided most of our behavior. Call this early operating system Motivation 1.0.”
  • Source: Daniel H. Pink (2009). Drive. New York, NY: Riverhead Books. ISBN 9781101524381. Chapter 1.
Keywords: Motivation_quotes Early_quotes Day_quotes Year_quotes Underlie_quotes Assumption_quotes Human_quotes Behavior_quotes Simplicity_quotes True_quotes Try_quotes Survival_quotes Roam_quotes Savannah_quotes Gather_quotes Food_quotes Scramble_quotes Bush_quotes Saber-Tooth_quotes Tiger_quotes Approach_quotes Drive_quotes Guide_quotes Operating_System_quotes Prehistoric_quotes

Steven_Pinker

Neurons to Consciousness

“None of us has a brain that can actually put us in touch with reality unaided with truth. I've just shown you a bunch of gadgetry that responds to things that are essential to our survival, things that prevent us from falling off cliffs and bumping into trees. But they don't actually correspond to any clear description of the world as it is. So we have, for example, circuitry that responds to the edges rather than the physical distribution of light, because edges are important, that's where objects leave off and their backgrounds begin. Moreover, they can be fooled, as I did with each one of you. That since our neural circuitry does consist of a mechanism, not a pipeline to the truth or a window onto objective reality. That is naïve realism we know is false because there are illusions. You can't just trust your senses. That means we need some way of augmenting the faculties that nature gave us to make our beliefs as accurate as possible. Which of course is why the early modern philosophers made such a big deal of visual illusions. They said you can't just open your eyes and see the world as it is. Look at all these illusions. So what we do, what gives some of us confidence that our beliefs are objectively true is that they are part of an institutional infrastructure of testing and criticism and logic and determining which hypotheses withstand criticism and attempts at refutation. Devising exotic arrangements of reality to reflect the way reality is put together, namely experiments. Thanks to this huge network of minds, each one of them making up for deficits of all the others, we like to think that we have a collective grasp on truth that none of us individually can have. But of course, it's always fallible. The religious beliefs I think were actually pretty reasonable hypotheses in earlier states of our collective knowledge. Even Richard Dawkins said that before Darwin he probably would have been a creationist because the cosmic engineer was the only available explanation for the obvious adaptive complexity of living things. I would add that prior to the advent of modern neuroscience I probably would have believed in souls because there was no better explanation for phenomena such as that people respond intelligently to their environments. When you dream some part of you is up and about the world while your body is in bed the whole time. That seems like there must be some part of you that can leave your body. When a person suddenly dies some kind of animating force no longer seems to be animating the body that was there just a few minutes ago. So the soul hypothesis is not a stupid or irrational belief, nor is creationism if it's the best that you have. Now, of course, we can do better. But doing better in part depends not just on this cumulative weight of evidence and argument. But because few of us can actually reconstruct the scientific observations that justify the theory of natural selection or the theory of neural networks, all of us, at least a little bit, take it on faith in the following sense; that there is a community that you trust enough because when they have been challenged to defend their beliefs they can connect them to reality. They have shown that it isn't magic. That they have given reason to trust them because they've convinced you that they're the mores of their culture, of their scientific culture, designed so that they will find true things and weed out false things. If you don't have a degree of solidarity or trust, if you think that scientists are all in cahoots with big corporations or are trying to tear down all faith and values and meaning and you simply refuse to follow through the very long chain of deduction that connects the claims to the experiments, then you'll naturally reject it just because it's not your tribe. For you and me scientists are our tribe and we're apt to give them some credibility, indeed some credulousness, knowing that if ever challenged it would be repaid. But unless you trace that through it can be all too easy to reject the conclusions of science, and indeed a number of studies have shown that contrary to the common belief that people believe in falsehoods, such as that vaccines cause autism or that humans were created five thousand years ago or that the burning of fossil fuels has no effect on global temperatures, it turns out that people with those beliefs that we have every reason to believe are false are no more scientifically naïve on average than people that have beliefs that are scientifically justified. You give a test on evolution to a bunch of people who believe in evolution, give it to a bunch of creationists, there's not much difference in how well they score. In fact, often they are equal. Likewise, the typical grasp of climate science among someone who signs on to the scientific consensus is not much better than the adamant deniers. That kind of dashes the hope that simply by increasing the quality of science education you will lead people to more accurate beliefs. There, in addition, has to be a dissociation of who you think are the good guys and who are the bad guys from who has the best claims to truth. That's what it depends on.”
Keywords: Accuracy_quotes Adament_quotes Adaptability_quotes Addition_quotes Advent_quotes Aid_quotes Animate_quotes Argue_quotes Arrangement_quotes Attempt_quotes Augment_quotes Autism_quotes Availability_quotes Background_quotes Bad_quotes Bed_quotes Belief_quotes Best_quotes Big_quotes Body_quotes Brain_quotes Bump_quotes Bunch_quotes Burn_quotes Cahoot_quotes Chain_quotes Challenge_quotes Circuit_quotes Claim_quotes Clear_quotes Cliff_quotes Climate_quotes Collective_quotes Complexity_quotes Common_quotes Community_quotes Conclusion_quotes Confidence_quotes Connection_quotes Consensus_quotes Consist_quotes Contrary_quotes Convince_quotes Cooperation_quotes Corporation_quotes Correspondence_quotes Cosmic_quotes Creationism_quotes Credibility_quotes Criticism_quotes Culture_quotes Cumulative_quotes Dash_quotes Deal_quotes Death_quotes Deception_quotes Deduction_quotes Defence_quotes Deficit_quotes Degree_quotes Deny_quotes Dependence_quotes Description_quotes Design_quotes Determine_quotes Devise_quotes Differences_quotes Dissociation_quotes Distribution_quotes Dreaming_quotes Early_quotes Easy_quotes Edge_quotes Education_quotes Effect_quotes Engineer_quotes Environment_quotes Essential_quotes Evidence_quotes Evolution_quotes Exotic_quotes Experiment_quotes Explanation_quotes Eye_quotes Faculty_quotes Faith_quotes Fall_quotes Fallible_quotes False_quotes Few_quotes Find_quotes Follow_quotes Fool_quotes Force_quotes Fossil_quotes Fuel_quotes Gadget_quotes Global_quotes Good_quotes Grasp_quotes Guy_quotes Huge_quotes Hypothesis_quotes Illusion_quotes Importance_quotes Increasing_quotes Individual_quotes Infrastructure_quotes Institution_quotes Intelligence_quotes Irrational_quotes Justification_quotes Knowledge_quotes Leave_quotes Life_quotes Light_quotes Logic_quotes Long_quotes Magic_quotes Meaning_quotes Mechanism_quotes Mind_quotes Modern_quotes Moral_quotes Naïve_quotes Nature_quotes Natural_Selection_quotes Network_quotes Neural_quotes Neuroscience_quotes Object_quotes Objectivity_quotes Observation_quotes Obvious_quotes Part_quotes People_quotes Perception_quotes Phenomena_quotes Philosophy_quotes Physical_quotes Pipeline_quotes Possibility_quotes Prehistoric_quotes Prevent_quotes Reality_quotes Reason_quotes Reconstruct_quotes Reflection_quotes Refuse_quotes Refutation_quotes Rejection_quotes Religion_quotes Repay_quotes Respond_quotes Science_quotes Scientist_quotes Score_quotes Seem_quotes Selection_quotes Sense_quotes Show_quotes Sight_quotes Solidarity_quotes Soul_quotes State_quotes Study_quotes Stupidity_quotes Survival_quotes Tear_quotes Temperature_quotes Testing_quotes Theory_quotes Thinking_quotes Time_quotes Touch_quotes Trace_quotes Tree_quotes Tribal_quotes Trust_quotes Truth_quotes Try_quotes Typical_quotes Unaided_quotes Vaccine_quotes Value_quotes Visual_quotes Weed_quotes Weight_quotes Whole_quotes Window_quotes Withstand_quotes World_quotes

George_Sarton

Scientific Progress

“No history of civilization can be tolerably complete which does not give considerable space to the explanation of scientific progress. If we had any doubts about this, it would suffice to ask ourselves what constitutes the essential difference between our and earlier civilizations. Throughout the course of history, in every period, and in almost every country, we find a small number of saints, of great artists, of men of science. The saints of today are not necessarily more saintly than those of a thousand years ago; our artists are not necessarily greater than those of early Greece; they are more likely to be inferior; and of course, our men of science are not necessarily more intelligent than those of old; yet one thing is certain, their knowledge is at once more extensive and more accurate. The acquisition and systematization of positive knowledge is the only human activity which is truly cumulative and progressive. Our civilization is essentially different from earlier ones, because our knowledge of the world and of ourselves is deeper, more precise, and more certain, because we have gradually learned to disentangle the forces of nature, and because we have contrived, by strict obedience to their laws, to capture them and to divert them to the gratification of our own needs.”
  • Source: George (Alfred Léon) Sarton, Introduction to the History of Science (1927), Vol. 1, 3-4.
Keywords: History_quotes Civilization_quotes Tolerance_quotes Completion_quotes Explanation_quotes Science_quotes Progress_quotes Doubt_quotes Sufficient_quotes Constitute_quotes Essential_quotes Differences_quotes Early_quotes Course_quotes Period_quotes Country_quotes Small_quotes Saint_quotes Great_quotes Art_quotes Intelligence_quotes Old_quotes Year_quotes Greece_quotes Inferior_quotes Knowledge_quotes Extension_quotes Accuracy_quotes Acquire_quotes System_quotes Positive_quotes Humanity_quotes Activity_quotes True_quotes Cumulative_quotes World_quotes Depth_quotes Precision_quotes Certainty_quotes Gradual_quotes Learning_quotes Disentangle_quotes Force_quotes Nature_quotes Contrive_quotes Strict_quotes Obedience_quotes Law_quotes Capture_quotes Divergence_quotes Gratify_quotes Need_quotes Progressive_quotes

Patrick_Vlaskovits

Faster Horse

“However, even if Ford didn’t verbalize his thoughts on customers’ ostensible inability to communicate their unmet needs for innovative products — history indicates that Henry Ford most certainly did think along those lines... Henry Ford froze the design of the Model T... Ford had no compelling reason to innovate in any other sphere other than cost and price reduction... But everything changed with the onset of the innovations introduced by General Motors in the 1920s, which took the direct opposite of Henry Ford’s tack of “Any color … so long as it is black” and is best summed up by Alfred Sloan’s consumer-research driven “A Car for Every Purse and Purpose”... In 1921, the Ford Motor Company sold about 2/3 of all the cars built in the U.S. By 1926, this share had fallen to approximately 1/3. And in 1927, when Ford belatedly responded (at tremendous financial cost and internal strife) to changes in the market’s tastes and competitive innovation by shutting down production temporarily to re-tool his factories and bring the Model A to the market, that percentage fell to about 15%... Yes, some customers in certain types of businesses are quite capable of verbalizing precisely what sort of innovative product one could build and sell them. And of course, customers in other types of businesses are wholly incapable of verbalizing, with any sort of fidelity whatsoever, what they need and why they need it. An innovator should have understanding of one’s customers and their problems via empirical, observational, anecdotal methods or even intuition. They should also feel free to ignore customers’ inputs. Because by now it should be clear that Ford’s adherence to his vision of the mass-market car and how to materialize that vision was instrumental in both his early success in growing Ford Motor Company as well as his later failure to respond in a timely and effective manner to rapid innovation in the marketplace.”'
Keywords: Ford(topic)_quotes Sloan(topic)_quotes Verbalize_quotes Thinking_quotes Customer_quotes Requirements_quotes Ostensible_quotes Inability_quotes Communication_quotes Unmet_quotes Need_quotes Innovation_quotes Product_quotes History_quotes Freeze_quotes Design_quotes Model_T_quotes Automobile_quotes Compel_quotes Sphere_quotes Cost_quotes Price_quotes Reduction_quotes Change_quotes General_Motors_quotes Consumer_quotes Research_quotes Opposite_quotes Color_quotes Black_quotes Car_quotes Purse_quotes Ford_Motor_quotes Build_quotes United_States_quotes Share_quotes Market_quotes Belated_quotes Respond_quotes Tremendous_quotes Financial_quotes Internal_quotes Strife_quotes Taste_quotes Competition_quotes Shut_quotes Production_quotes Tool_quotes Factory_quotes Model_A_quotes Percentage_quotes Type_quotes Business_quotes Capable_quotes Precise_quotes Sort_quotes Sell_quotes Incapable_quotes Fidelity_quotes What_quotes Why_quotes Understand_quotes Problem_quotes Empirical_quotes Observation_quotes Anecdotal_quotes Method_quotes Intuition_quotes Feel_quotes Free_quotes Ignore_quotes Input_quotes Clear_quotes Adherence_quotes Vision_quotes Mass_quotes Innovator_quotes Materialize_quotes Instrumental_quotes Success_quotes Early_quotes Grow_quotes Later_quotes Failure_quotes Timely_quotes Effective_quotes Manner_quotes Rapid_quotes Marketplace_quotes Horse_quotes Faster_quotes

Shoshana_Zuboff

Fundamental Scientific Management Reevaluation

“The logic that motivated the early purveyors and adapters of scientific management has continued to dominate the course of automation... It is a logic that must undergo a fundamental reevaluation as information technology is widely adapted to productive activity.”
  • Source: Zuboff, S. (1988). In The Age Of The Smart Machine: The Future Of Work And Power. New York, NY: Basic Books, p. 42. ISBN:0465032125.
Keywords: Logic_quotes Motivation_quotes Adapter_quotes Scientific_Management_quotes Domination_quotes Automation_quotes Fundamental_quotes Evaluation_quotes Information_Technology_quotes Adaptation_quotes Productivity_quotes Activity_quotes Early_quotes Purveyor_quotes Science_quotes Management_quotes Undergo_quotes Reevaluation_quotes Information_quotes Technology_quotes
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