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Marcus_Aurelius

Master The Difficult

“Because you find a thing very difficult, do not at once conclude that no man can master it. But whatever you observe proper and practicable by another, believe likewise within your own power.”

Claude_Bernard

Hypothesis Not Verified

“If an hypothesis is not verified and disappears, the facts which it has enabled us to find are none the less acquired as indestructible materials for science.”
  • Source: From the book "An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine" written by Claude Bernard published in French in 1865 as "Introduction à l'étude de la médecine expérimentale". Translated to English by Henry Copley Greene in 1927 and republished by Henry Shuman, Inc. in 1949. Chapter I, page 24. Available online at https://archive.org/details/b21270557 retrieved 2024.

William_Ian_Beardmore_Beveridge

Role of Hypothesis

“The role of hypothesis in research can be discussed more effectively if we consider first some examples of discoveries which originated from hypotheses. One of the best illustrations of such a discovery is provided by the story of Christopher Columbus’ voyage; it has many of the features of a classic discovery in science. (a) He was obsessed with an idea—that since the world is round he could reach the Orient by sailing West, (b) the idea was by no means original, but evidently he had obtained some additional evidence from a sailor blown off his course who claimed to have reached land in the west and returned, (c) he met great difficulties in getting someone to provide the money to enable him to test his idea as well as in the actual carrying out of the experimental voyage, (d) when finally he succeeded he did not find the expected new route, but instead found a whole new world, (e) despite all evidence to the contrary he clung to the bitter end to his hypothesis and believed that he had found the route to the Orient, (f) he got little credit or reward during his lifetime and neither he nor others realized the full implications of his discovery, (g) since his time evidence has been brought forward showing that he was by no means the first European to reach America.”
  • Source: W. I. B. Beveridge in his book ‘The Art of Scientific Investigation’ published in 1950 by William Heinemann, London, page 41.

Bible_Verses

Wisdom and Understanding (Proverbs 3:13)

(13) “Happy is the man that findeth wisdom, and the man that getteth understanding.”

Niels_Bohr

No Quantum World

“There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract quantum physical description. It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature.”
  • Source: The words of Niels Bohr as reported by Aage Petersen in his article ‘The Philosophy of Niels Bohr’ published in the journal Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, September 1963, volume XIX, number 7. Available online at https://books.google.pt/books?id=DgcAAAAAMBAJ retrieved 2024.

Robert_N_Britcher

Limits of Testing

“The limits of software are never more obvious than in its testing. Software systems are beyond discrete and statistical analysis. A single incorrect state - out of two to the trillionth states - can down a rocket: To find such a fault in a software system would require a hundred generations of programmers - but after the first failure is found and fixed, all bets are off; they wouldn't be testing the same system anymore. We can design and build fail-safe systems, but can we know we did?”
  • Source: Britcher, Robert N. (1999). The Limits of Software: People, Projects, and Perspectives. Reading, MA: Addison Wesley. ISBN 0-201-43323-0. Page 56.

Sources of Failures

“I never ran a test that didn't find at least one failure - not only is the software impure, but so are the requirements specifications. And every time we fix the software, there is a 10 percent chance - according to my anecdotal studies - we'll inject another fault. Those are the hardest to find: the faults that result from trying to get rid of them.”
  • Source: Britcher, Robert N. (1999). The Limits of Software: People, Projects, and Perspectives. Reading, MA: Addison Wesley. ISBN 0-201-43323-0. Page 56.

Failures Disappointing

“... discovering a failure is disappointing, and then there is pressure from above not to find them. Everyone wants the software out the door.”
  • Source: Britcher, Robert N. (1999). The Limits of Software: People, Projects, and Perspectives. Reading, MA: Addison Wesley. ISBN 0-201-43323-0. Page 61.

Acceptance Testing

“The very existence of an acceptance test ensures that, sooner or later, there will be pressure not to find failures, to reconcile test scenarios and the system they exercise so that the system will 'pass'. Remove this concept and testers would pursue the discovery of failures with a vengeance...”
  • Source: Britcher, Robert N. (1999). The Limits of Software: People, Projects, and Perspectives. Reading, MA: Addison Wesley. ISBN 0-201-43323-0. Page 157.

Paul_Davies

Hidden Links

"Finding hidden links between seemingly disparate phenomena is what makes the scientific method so powerful and compelling. The distinctive feature of science is that it is both broad and deep: broad in the way it tackles all physical phenomena and deep in the way it weaves them, economically, into a common explanatory scheme requiring fewer and fewer assumptions. No other system of thought can match its breadth and depth."
  • Source: Paul Davies, Cosmic Jackpot: Why Our Universe is Just Right for Life (2007)

Arthur_Eddington

Brain and Mind

“Take the living human brain endowed with mind and thought. Thought it is one of the indisputable facts of the world. I know that I think, with a certainty which I cannot attribute to any of my physical knowledge of the world. More hypothetically, but on fairly plausible evidence, I am convinced that you have minds which think. Here then is a world fact to be investigated. The physicist brings his tools and commences systematic exploration. All that he discovers is a collection of atoms and electrons and fields of force arranged in space and time, apparently similar to those found in inorganic objects. He may trace other physical characteristics, energy, temperature, entropy. None of these is identical with thought. He might set down thought as an illusion ⎯ some perverse interpretation of the interplay of the physical entities that he has found. Or if he sees the folly of calling the most undoubted element of our experience an illusion, he will have to face the tremendous question, How can this collection of ordinary atoms be a thinking machine?”

David_Epstein

Haiku Way

“Haiku finds depth in the simple, and creativity in constraints that block the path of least resistance... Haiku is small, so you can try easily and iterate quickly. It is in present tense, so it forces you to be in the moment... Haiku is the simplest example of a helpful constraint... It is not a form, it is a way — an attitude. It is a way of being, of eagerly accepting unnecessary obstacles because of where they can lead.”
  • Source: David Epstein in the book “Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better”. Published 2026 by Riverhead Books. Page 233. ISBN 978-0593715734 (Ebook).

Samuel_C_Florman

Despair

“From the beginning of recorded time, we find evidence of despair, melancholy, and ennui. We find also an abundance of greed, treachery, vulgarity, and stupidity. Absorbed as we are in our own problems, we tend to forget how replete history is with wars, feuds, floods, plagues, fires, massacres, tortures, slavery, the wasting of cities, and the destruction of libraries.”
  • 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 74.

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.

Glenn_Frank

Journalism and Facts

"Journalism must find the facts, it must not prejudge things in terms of conservatism or liberalism or radicalism; it must not decide in advance that it is to be conformist or non-conformist; it cannot fly in the face of facts without courting ultimate disaster. Journalism must focus the facts; facts are not important for their own sake; they are important only as a basis for action; journalism must focus the facts it finds upon the issues its readers face. Journalism must filter the facts; it must with conscientious care separate the facts from admixtures of prejudice, passion, partisanship, and selfish interest; facts that are diluted, colored, or perverted are valueless as a basis for action. Journalism must face the facts; it must learn that the energy spent in trying to find ways to get around, under, or over the facts is wasted energy; facts have a ruthless way of winning the day sooner or later. Journalism must follow the facts; journalism must say of facts as Job said, of God: though they slay us, yet shall we trust them; if the facts threaten to upset a paper's cherished policy, it always pays the journalist to reexamine his policy; that way lies realism, and realism is the ultimate good."
  • Source: Glenn Frank, spoken during an address as president of the Wisconsin local chapter of Theta Sigma Phi, at its first annual Matrix Table (9 Jan 1926). quoted in 'Journalism News and Notes', in Robert S. Crawford (ed.), The Wisconsin Alumni Magazine (Feb 1926), 27, No. 4, 101.

Galen

Seeks the Truth

“It would be better, I think, for the man who really seeks the truth not to ask what the poets say; rather, he should first learn the method of finding the scientific premises that I discussed in the second book; then he should train and exercise himself in this method; and when his training is sufficiently advanced, then, as he approaches each particular problem, he should enquire into the premise needed for proving it, which premise he should take from simple sense-perception, which from experience, whether drawn from life or from the arts, which from the truths clearly apprehended by the mind, in order to draw out from them the desired conclusion.”
  • Source: Galen, On the Doctrines of Hippocrates and Plato,: PHP III 8.35.1-11 translation: De Lacy, Phillip (1978- 1984) Galen, On the Doctrines of Hippocrates and Plato, Berlin. p. 233; cited in: Christopher Jon Elliott. "Galen, Rome and the Second Sophistic." p. 147-148.

Sylvester_James_Gates

Strange Codes

“In my research I found this very strange thing, I was driven to error-correcting codes —they’re what make browsers work. So why were they in the equations I was studying about quarks and electrons and supersymmetry? This brought me to the stark realization that I could no longer say people like Max [Tegmark] are crazy.”

Louisa_Gilder

Quantum Cause

“From the quantum mechanical perspective, to measure the position of an electron is not to find out where it is but to cause it to be somewhere.”
  • Source: Louisa Gilder (2008) The Age of Entanglement:When Quantum Physics Was Reborn. New York, NY: Vintage Books/Random House.

Eugene_Grace

Initiative

“The man who has in him the stuff of which success is made is never afraid to accept responsibilities; then, when he gets responsibility, he doesn't regard it lightly; nor does he ever seek to shirk the consequences or attempt to blame anyone else when anything goes wrong. My chief difficulty in building up our huge organization is to find men able and willing to take and discharge responsibilities. So many men can only go to the point of doing routine duties; when given tasks requiring initiative and readiness to shoulder responsibility, they continually run to the boss to get instructions. I am constantly on the lookout for fellows who are not afraid to use their own judgment, and, although they may make quite a few mistakes, yet they at least show executive potentialities... Of course there must be more than willingness to accept responsibility and to exercise initiative; willingness must be accompanied by ability, knowledge, and the judgment which can come only from having thoroughly mastered one's business.”

Yuval_Noah_Harari

Role of AI

“AI is taking up the role of both bureaucrats and mythmakers. AI systems know how to find and process data better than flesh-and-blood bureaucrats, and AI is also acquiring the ability to compose stories better than most humans.”
  • Source: Yuval Noah Harari writing in his book ‘Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI’. Published in 2024 by Random House. Kindle edition. Chapter 3 page 68. ISBN 978-0593734247.

Self-Skepticism

“The trademark of science is not merely skepticism but self-skepticism, and at the heart of every scientific institution we find a strong self-correcting mechanism.”
  • Source: Yuval Noah Harari writing in his book ‘Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI’. Published in 2024 by Random House. Kindle edition. Chapter 4 page 104. ISBN 978-0593734247.

Stephen_Hawking

Imaginary Reality

“One might think this means that imaginary numbers are just a mathematical game having nothing to do with the real world. From the viewpoint of positivist philosophy, however, one cannot determine what is real. All one can do is find which mathematical models describe the universe we live in. It turns out that a mathematical model involving imaginary time predicts not only effects we have already observed but also effects we have not been able to measure yet nevertheless believe in for other reasons. So, what is real and what is imaginary? Is the distinction just in our minds?”
  • Source: Hawking, Stephen in the book “The Universe in a Nutshell”, p. 59 (2001).

Robert_Heinlein

Opinions

“A thousand reasoned opinions are never equal to one case of diving in and finding out. Galileo proved that.”
  • 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. Prelude I, page 9. Character: Lazarus Long.

Steve_Jobs

Recruiting

“Recruiting is hard. It's just finding the needles in the haystack. You can't know enough in a one-hour interview. So, in the end, it's ultimately based on your gut. How do I feel about this person? What are they like when they're challenged? I ask everybody that: 'Why are you here?' The answers themselves are not what you're looking for. It's the meta-data.”
  • Source: Steve Jobs in Motivating Thoughts of Steve Jobs (ed. Prabhat Prakashan) - ISBN: 9789351869191.

Carl_Jung

Rational and Irrational Art

“I am of the opinion that the union of rational and irrational truth is to be found not so much in art as in the symbol per se; for it is the essence of the symbol to contain both the rational and the irrational.”
  • Source: Written by Carl Jung. See 'The Collected Works of C. G. Jung'. Edited by Herbert Read, Michael Fordham, and Gerhard Adler. Translated by R. F. C. Hull. Published by Princeton University Press, 1953-1982. Volume 10, section 24. Reprinted in the book 'The Red Book: Liber Novus: A Reader's Edition', published 2009 by W. W. Norton, ISBN: 978-039308908-0. Edited by Sonu Shamdasani, translated by Mark Kybruz, John Peck, and Sonu Shamdasani. Introduction, page 57.

Laws and Teachings

“Laws and teachings held in common compel people to solitude, so that they may escape the pressure of undesirable contact, but solitude makes people hostile and venomous. Therefore give people dignity and let each of them stand apart, so that each may find his own fellowship and love it. Power stands against power, contempt against contempt, love against love. Give humanity dignity, and trust that life will find the better way.”
  • Source: Written by Carl G. Jung in ‘The Red Book’, also known as ‘Liber Novus’, which was originally written from 1914 to 1930. It was first published in 2009 by W. W. Norton in a facsimile edition, complete with an English translation. The edition used here is the book ‘The Red Book: Liber Novus: A Reader's Edition’, written by C. G. Jung, edited with an introduction by Sonu Shamdasani, translated by Mark Kyburz, John Peck, and Sonu Shamdasani; published by W. W. Norton in 2012; ISBN 978-0393089080; Page 126.

Soul's Desire

“He whose desire turns away from outer things, reaches the place of the soul. If he does not find the soul, the horror of emptiness will overcome him, and fear will drive him with a whip lashing time and again in a desperate endeavor and a blind desire for the hollow things of the world. He becomes a fool through his endless desire, and forgets the way of his soul, never to find her again.”
  • Source: Written by Carl G. Jung in ‘The Red Book’, also known as ‘Liber Novus’, which was originally written from 1914 to 1930. It was first published in 2009 by W. W. Norton in a facsimile edition, complete with an English translation. The edition used here is the book ‘The Red Book: Liber Novus: A Reader's Edition’, written by C. G. Jung, edited with an introduction by Sonu Shamdasani, translated by Mark Kyburz, John Peck, and Sonu Shamdasani; published by W. W. Norton in 2012; ISBN 978-0393089080; Page 129.
  • Notes:
    • In 1913 Jung called this turning away process the ‘introversion of the libido’ in ‘On the Question of Psychological Types’.

Lost Path

“Time and again I lost the path and found it again where I would never have foreseen it.”
  • Source: Written by Carl G. Jung in ‘The Red Book’, also known as ‘Liber Novus’, which was originally written from 1914 to 1930. It was first published in 2009 by W. W. Norton in a facsimile edition, complete with an English translation. The edition used here is the book ‘The Red Book: Liber Novus: A Reader's Edition’, written by C. G. Jung, edited with an introduction by Sonu Shamdasani, translated by Mark Kyburz, John Peck, and Sonu Shamdasani; published by W. W. Norton in 2012; ISBN 978-0393089080; Page 132.

Daniel_Kahneman

Intelligence

“Intelligence is not only the ability to reason; it is also the ability to find relevant material in memory and to deploy attention when needed.”

Learn by Surprise

“You are more likely to learn something by finding surprises in your own behavior than by hearing surprising facts about people in general.”

John_Maynard_Keynes

Technological Unemployment

“In our own lifetimes... we may be able to perform all the operations of agriculture, mining, and manufacture with a quarter of the human effort to which we have been accustomed. For the moment the very rapidity of these changes is hurting us and bringing difficult problems to solve... We are being afflicted with... technological unemployment. This means unemployment due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour. But this is only a temporary phase of maladjustment... In the long run... mankind is solving its economic problem. I would predict that the standard of life in progressive countries one hundred years hence will be between four and eight times as high as it is today.”
  • 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.

Christof_Koch

Brain Cells Switches or Computers

“Conventional wisdom views individual brain cells as simple switches or relays. In fact, we are finding that neurons are able to function more like a sophisticated computer.”

Lawrence_M_Krauss

Biggest Misconception

“The biggest misconception about science is that it tells us what's true. It doesn't do that at all. It tells us what's false. And by knowing what's false, it's like Sherlock Holmes, you get rid of what's false and you hope what's left is closer to the truth. But you never know that any theory is absolutely true, and the only way to find out to make progress is to be able to rule things out. So falsifiability is very important.”
  • Source: Panel comments by Lawrence Krauss at Perimeter Institute's festival "Quantum to Cosmos: Ideas for the Future" in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, October 2009. Available online as Youtube video "Lawrence Krauss, Sean Carroll, Neil Turok & Others - Quantum to Cosmos" at https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ftH1yig-HDU (accessed 2017) at about 27 minutes into the video.

Ronald_Dowl_Moore

Love Time

“There comes a time when a man finds that he can't fall in love again. He knows that it's time to stop.”
  • Source: From the television series “Star Trek: The Next Generation” season 6 episode 4 entitled “Relics”. Screenplay written by Ronald Dowl Moore. Directed by Alexander Singer. Words spoken by the character Montgomery Scott (Scotty) played by the actor James Doohan.

David_E_Nye

Programmers Perfectionists

“A single error in a program thousands of lines long prevented it from running correctly, and computer programmers became known as a fanatically exact group of perfectionists, working in an arcane specialty. Sociologists studying the ‘man-machine' interface found that a programmer's personality often changed after prolonged exposure to the computer, becoming severely logical and machine-like.”
  • Source: A book. Written by David E. Nye. Entitled 'Narratives and Spaces'. Published in 1997 by Univerity of Exeter Press, Exeter, UK. Hardback ISBN 0-85989-555-6. Paperback ISBN 0-85989-556-4. Chapter 10, page 164.

Worker Control Obsolete

“Highly computerized corporations simply do not attempt to separate information from skill, nor do they find it profitable to control workers in the same ways as before. Such practices and the kind of alienation they involved, belong to a previous epoch.”
  • Source: A book. Written by David E. Nye. Entitled 'Narratives and Spaces'. Published in 1997 by Univerity of Exeter Press, Exeter, UK. Hardback ISBN 0-85989-555-6. Paperback ISBN 0-85989-556-4. Chapter 10, page 171.

Ascher_Opler

Spot the Lemon Early

“In managing software projects the real problem is ‘spot the lemon and spot the lemon early’.”

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.”

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Plato

Dreaming

“(Socrates) There's a question you must often have heard people ask - the question what evidence we could offer if we were asked whether in this present instant, at this moment, we are asleep and dreaming all our thoughts, or awake and talking to each other in real life.
(Theaetetus) Yes, Socrates, it certainly is difficult to find the proof we want here. The two states seem to correspond in all their characteristics. There is nothing to prevent us from thinking when we are asleep that we are having the very same discussion that we have just had. And when we dream that we are telling the story of a dream, there is an extraordinary likeness between the two experiences.”
  • Source: Plato, 'Theaetetus' 158bc

Opinion Explanation

“All those who have a right opinion about anything will also have right explanation, nor will right opinion be anywhere found to exist apart from knowledge.”

Carl_Sagan

Wrong Hypothesis OK

“There are many hypotheses in science which are wrong. That's perfectly all right; they're the aperture to finding out what's right. Science is a self-correcting process. To be accepted, new ideas must survive the most rigorous standards of evidence and scrutiny.”
  • Source: Carl Sagan, Quoted in Donald R. Prothero and Carl Dennis Buell, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why it Matters (2007), 3.

Rupert_Sheldrake

Empirical Approach

“Science needs to be liberated from these constrictive dogmas of mechanistic materialism... If we go beyond those dogmas, science gets much more interesting. All sorts of new research become possible. New questions can be asked. We can find out more about nature and more about consciousness by doing science in a new more open way. But what remains part of science so crucial to it is the empirical approach. The putting forward of hypotheses, the critical discussion, and the testing of hypotheses by experiment, the scientific method.”
  • Source: Rupert Sheldrake. The video “Nature's Hidden Intelligence: Morphic Fields”. Online at https://youtu.be/qrIlWrGe4w4?t=4894. Posted 2025-01-03. Video offset 1:21:34.

Herbert_Simon

Artificial Intelligence Satisfice

“The alternative methods provided by AI, most often in the form of heuristic search (selective search using rules of thumb), find decisions that are 'good enough', that satisfice.”

Psychology of Choice

“Research findings on the psychology of choice, indicate some properties a thermometer of satisfaction should have. First, unlike the utility function, it is not limited to positive values, but has a zero point (of minimal contentment). Above zero, various degrees of satisfaction are experienced, and below zero, various degrees of dissatisfaction. Second, if periodic readings are taken of people in relatively stable life circumstances, we only occasionally find temperatures very far from zero in either direction, and the divergent measurements tend to regress over time back toward the zero mark. Most people consistently register either slightly below zero (mild discontent) or a little above (moderate satisfaction). To deal with these phenomena, psychology employs the concept of aspiration level... Aspiration levels provide a computational mechanism for satisficing.”

Albert_Speer

Sell Soul for Project

“I was wild to accomplish things... For the commission to do a great building, I would have sold my soul like Faust. Now I had found my Mephistopheles.”
  • Source: From the book "Inside the Third Reich" by Albert Speer, published 1970 by Simon and Schuster, ISBN 978-0-684-82949-4. Chapter 3, page 31.

John_Steinbeck

All Information Not In

“It is not enough to say that we cannot know or judge because all the information is not in. The process of gathering knowledge does not lead to knowing. A child's world spreads only a little beyond his understanding while that of a great scientist thrusts outward immeasurably. An answer is invariably the parent of a great family of new questions. So we draw worlds and fit them like tracings against the world about us, and crumple them when we find they do not fit and draw new ones.”
  • Source: John Steinbeck, In John Steinbeck and Edward Flanders Ricketts, Sea of Cortez: a Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research (1941), 165-66.

Alfred_Tarski

Search For Truth

“The search for truth is rightly considered the essence of scientific activities, it appears as an important problem to find at least partial criteria of truth and to develop procedures that may enable us to ascertain or negate the truth (or at least the likelihood of truth).”
  • Source: Alfred Tarski in his paper entitled ‘Truth and Proof’, published in Scientific America, 1969, volume 220 issue 6, pages 63-77. Online at https://www.jstor.org/stable/24926385.

JRR_Tolkien

One Ring

“One Ring to rule them all,
 One Ring to find them,
 One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.”
  • Source: From the book “The Fellowship Of The Ring: Being the First Part of The Lord of the Rings”, written by {J. R. R. Tolkien}, first published by {George Allen and Unwin} in 1954. E-book edition published by Harper Collins in 2022. ISBN 978-0547952017. Words inscribed on the ring. Book One, chapter 2, page 93.

Alfred_Russel_Wallace

Truth Proof

“There is no more convincing proof of the truth of a comprehensive theory than its power of absorbing and finding a place for new facts, and its capability of interpreting phenomena which had been previously looked upon as unaccountable anomalies. It is thus that the law of universal gravitation and the undulatory theory of light have become established and universally accepted by men of science. Fact after fact has been brought forward as being apparently inconsistent with them, and one after another these very facts have been shown to be the consequences of the laws they were at first supposed to disprove. A false theory will never stand this test. Advancing knowledge brings to light whole groups of facts which it cannot deal with, and its advocates steadily decrease in numbers, notwithstanding the ability and scientific skill with which it may have been supported.”
  • Source: Alfred Russel Wallace, From a review of four books on the subject 'Mimicry, and Other Protective Resemblances Among Animals', in The Westminster Review (Jul 1867), 88, 1. Wallace is identified as the author within the article as reprinted in William Beebe, The Book of Naturalists: An Anthology of the Best Natural History (1988), 108.

Gerald_Weinberg

Egoless Programming and Cognitive Dissonance

“Now, what cognitive dissonance has to do with our programming conflict should be vividly clear. A programmer who truly sees his program as an extension of his own ego is not going to be trying to find all the errors in that program. On the contrary, he is going to be trying to prove that the program is correct — even if this means the oversight of errors which are monstrous to another eye.”
  • Source: Chapter 4. Weinberg, G. M. (2011). The Psychology of Computer Programming (Silver anniversary edition) | 1971. Weinberg & Weinberg.

Bad Managers and Good Programmers

“Bad managers are easier to find than good programmers.”
  • Source: Chapter 5. Weinberg, G. M. (2011). The Psychology of Computer Programming (Silver anniversary edition) | 1971. Weinberg & Weinberg.

Stephen_Wolfram

Future Jumping

“There’s a certain robustness to time when viewed in these computational terms. There’s no way to ‘jump ahead’ in time; the only way to find out what will happen in the future is to go through the irreducible computational steps to get there.”

Shoshana_Zuboff

Technology Leadership

“The questions that we face today are finally about leadership. Will there be leaders who are able to recognize the historical moment and the choices it presents? Will they find ways to create the organizational conditions in which new visions, new concepts, and a new language of workplace relations can emerge? Will they be able to create organizational innovations that can exploit the unique capacities of the new technology and thus mobilize their organization's productive potential to meet the heightened rigors of global competition? Will there be leaders who understand the crucial role that human beings from each organizational stratum can play in adding value to the production of goods and services? If not, we will be stranded in a new world with old solutions. We will suffer through the unintended consequences of change, because we have failed to understand this technology and how it differs from what came before.”
  • Source: Zuboff, S. (1988). In The Age Of The Smart Machine: The Future Of Work And Power. New York, NY: Basic Books, p. 12. ISBN:0465032125.

Computers Over People

“When managers express a preference for computers over people, the effects find their way into every corner of the worker's mind.”
  • Source: Zuboff, S. (1988). In The Age Of The Smart Machine: The Future Of Work And Power. New York, NY: Basic Books, p. 268. ISBN:0465032125.