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Alistair_Cockburn

Formal Development

"In the formal development of communications software, in 1987, I was given the motivation, 'The problem with software development is that there is too much ambiguity in the problem statement and in the design description. Things will go better if we get people to work with mathematical formalisms.” After some work in this area, I discovered:
Problem 1. The people on the projects were not interested in learning our system.
Problem 2. They were successfully able to ignore us, and were still delivering software, anyway.
I shifted out of formal development, hearing my formal development colleagues saying, 'The problem lies in the training. Things will go better if we start training students in the necessary mathematics earlier, i.e., secondary school.' Based on what I have learned about people, I expect this will be a frustrated desire. It is not that I doubt certain advantages of formal development, but I do doubt our ability to coax 10**6 people to master it. The question should become, 'Under what circumstances, and with what assignment, should a formal specialist be called in?'"

Source: Cockburn, A. A. R. (1999). Characterizing people as non-linear 1st order components in software development. HaT Technical Report 1999.03, Humans and Technology, Inc.. Retrieved 2019-06-29 from https://ameyakarve.wordpress.com/2012/07/22/characterizing-people-as-non-linear-1st-order-components-in-software-development-cockburn-us/.


David_Epstein

Knowledge Bridge

“Work that builds bridges between disparate pieces of knowledge is less likely to be funded, less likely to appear in famous journals, more likely to be ignored upon publication, and then more likely in the long run to be a smash hit in the library of human knowledge.”
  • Source: David Epstein in the book “Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World”. Published 2019 by Riverhead Books. Chapter 12, page 282. ISBN 978-0735214484.

Richard_Feynman

Cargo Cult

“...there have been many experiments running rats through all kinds of mazes, and so on — with little clear result. But in 1937 a man named Young did a very interesting one. He had a long corridor with doors all along one side where the rats came in, and doors along the other side where the food was. He wanted to see if he could train rats to go to the third door down from wherever he started them off. No. The rats went immediately to the door where the food had been the time before. The question was, how did the rats know, because the corridor was so beautifully built and so uniform, that this was the same door as before? Obviously there was something about the door that was different from the other doors. So he painted the doors very carefully, arranging the textures on the faces of the doors exactly the same. Still the rats could tell. Then he thought maybe they were smelling the food, so he used chemicals to change the smell after each run. Still the rats could tell. Then he realized the rats might be able to tell by seeing the lights and the arrangement in the laboratory like any commonsense person. So he covered the corridor, and still the rats could tell. He finally found that they could tell by the way the floor sounded when they ran over it. And he could only fix that by putting his corridor in sand. So he covered one after another of all possible clues and finally was able to fool the rats so that they had to learn to go to the third door. If he relaxed any of his conditions, the rats could tell. Now, from a scientific standpoint, that is an A-number-one experiment. That is the experiment that makes rat-running experiments sensible, because it uncovers the clues that the rat is really using — not what you think it's using. And that is the experiment that tells exactly what conditions you have to use in order to be careful and control everything in an experiment with rat-running. I looked into the subsequent history of this research. The next experiment, and the one after that, never referred to Mr. Young. They never used any of his criteria of putting the corridor on sand, or of being very careful. They just went right on running rats in the same old way, and paid no attention to the great discoveries of Mr. Young, and his papers are not referred to, because he didn't discover anything about rats. In fact, he discovered all the things you have to do to discover something about rats. But not paying attention to experiments like that is a characteristic of cargo cult science.”
  • Source: "Cargo Cult Science", adapted from a 1974 Caltech commencement address; also published in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, p. 345.
    • Feynman, R. P. (1974). In Feynman, R. P. (1974, June). Cargo Cult Science. Science and Engineering.

Samuel_C_Florman

Irrationality

“So for the foreseeable future man’s irrationality — which engineering philosophers have seen fit to ignore — will have to be taken very seriously into account. In retrospect, the ideals and dreams of engineering’s Golden Age seem foolish and immature.”
  • 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 2, page 16.

Thomas_Gold

Knowledge Rules

“In no subject is there a rule, compliance with which will lead to new knowledge or better understanding. Skilful observations, ingenious ideas, cunning tricks, daring suggestions, laborious calculations, all these may be required to advance a subject. Occasionally the conventional approach in a subject has to be studiously followed; on other occasions it has to be ruthlessly disregarded. Which of these methods, or in what order they should be employed is generally unpredictable. Analogies drawn from the history of science are frequently claimed to be a guide; but, as with forecasting the next game of roulette, the existence of the best analogy to the present is no guide whatever to the future. The most valuable lesson to be learnt from the history of scientific progress is how misleading and strangling such analogies have been, and how success has come to those who ignored them.”
  • Source: Thomas Gold, 'Cosmology', in Arthur Beer (ed.), Vistas in Astronomy (1956), Vol. 2, 1722.

Stephen_Hawking

Artificial Intelligence

“The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race. We cannot quite know what will happen if a machine exceeds our own intelligence, so we can't know if we'll be infinitely helped by it, or ignored by it and sidelined, or conceivably destroyed by it.”

Robert_Heinlein

History

“A generation which ignores history has no past — and no future.”
  • 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. ISBN: 9781101503072 (ebook). Page 250 (Kindle edition).

Brooks_Jackson and Kathleen_Hall_Jamieson

Psychological Experiments

“Psychological experiments have shown ... that humans tend to seek out even weak evidence to support their existing beliefs, and to ignore evidence that undercuts those beliefs. In the process, we apply stringent tests to evidence we don't want to hear, while letting slide uncritically into our minds any information that suits our needs.”
  • Source: Brooks Jackson, As co-author with Kathleen Hall Jamieson, in unSpun: Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation (2007), 69-70.

Steve_Jobs

Misfits

“Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”
  • Source: Steve Jobs in “Motivating Thoughts of Steve Jobs”, published by Prabhat Prakashan in 2020. ISBN: 9789351869191.

Roger_Penrose

Self-Evident Truth

“Like so many works that have had a great impact on human thinking, it [Schrödinger's book ‘What is Life’] makes points that, once they are grasped, have a ring of almost self-evident truth; yet they are still blindly ignored by a disconcertingly large proportion of people who should know better.”


Alan_Perlis

Complexity

“Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.”

Herbert_Simon

Computer Programming as Data Structures

“When we write a computer program in any language except machine language, we are really not writing down processes but data structures. These data structures are then interpreted or compiled into processes, that is, into machine-language instructions that the computer can understand and execute. Nevertheless, for most purposes, it is convenient for us simply to ignore the translation step and to treat the computer programs in higher-level languages as representing processes.”

Max_Tegmark

Quantum Impact

“We virtually ignore the astonishing range of scientific and practical applications that quantum mechanics undergirds: today an estimated 30 percent of the U.S. gross national product is based on inventions made possible by quantum mechanics, from semiconductors in computer chips to lasers in compact-disc players, magnetic resonance imaging in hospitals, and much more.”
  • Source: Max Tegmark and John Archibald Wheeler; Scientific American, February 2001

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.”'