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Robert_N_Britcher

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.

Requirements Testing

“Requirements testing is a subtle way of treating a nonlinear, unpredictable system as if it were a discrete symbol like a number or a word. The potential and the actual become muddled. Requirements are natural language statements, peppered in places with arithmetic. These are discrete and usually quite vague representations of the system as it might become. But the truth is that two teams writing requirements for the same system would describe them differently, and neither would get it quite right, simply because 'right' cannot be known until the system is built. ... Requirements testing is a little like trying to reduce crime in England by running a test for each line in the Magna Carta. In practice, rhetoric replaces the scientific method. As with mathematical proofs, the quest for 'true or not false' soon turns into a party - a not very cordial party - marked by endless debate over whether this sentence or that sentence has been verified by this moment of behavior or that.”
  • Source: Britcher, Robert N. (1999). The Limits of Software: People, Projects, and Perspectives. Reading, MA: Addison Wesley. ISBN 0-201-43323-0. Page 157.

Winston Churchill

Democracy

“No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”
  • Source: Winston Churchill. Speech delivered 1947-11-11 to the U.K. House of Commons.

Tom_DeMarco and Tim_Lister

Error Quota

"For most thinking workers, making an occasional mistake is a natural and healthy part of their work. But there can be an almost Biblical association between error on the job and sin. This is an attitude we need to take specific pains to change. Speaking to a group of software managers, we introduced a strategy for what we think of as iterative design. The idea is that some designs are intrinsically defect-prone; they ought to be rejected, not repaired. Such dead ends should be expected in the design activity. The lost effort of the dead end is a small price to pay for a clean, fresh start. To our surprise, many managers felt this would pose an impossible political problem for their own bosses: 'How can we throw away a product that our company has paid to produce?' They seemed to believe that they’d be better off salvaging the defective version even though it might cost more in the long run. Fostering an atmosphere that doesn’t allow for error simply makes people defensive. They don’t try things that may turn out badly. You encourage this defensiveness when you try to systematize the process, when you impose rigid methodologies so that staff members are not allowed to make any of the key strategic decisions lest they make them incorrectly. The average level of technology may be modestly improved by any steps you take to inhibit error. The team sociology, however, can suffer grievously. The opposite approach would be to encourage people to make some errors. You do this by asking your folks on occasion what dead-end roads they’ve been down, and by making sure they understand that 'none' is not the best answer. When people blow it, they should be congratulated — that’s part of what they’re being paid for."
  • Source: Book: Entitled: Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams. Edition: 3rd. Written by: Tom DeMarco; Tim Lister. Date published: 1987; 1999; 2013. Publisher: Addison-Wesley. Country: USA; GBR; CAN; DEU; FRA; ESP; ZAF; AUS; JPN; SGP; MEX. Language: en. ISBN: ISBN-13: 978-0-321-93411-6 (alk paper); 0-321-93411-3 (alk paper). Chapter: 2 (Make a Cheeseburger, Sell a Cheeseburger).

Peter_Drucker

Mistakes

“The better a man is, the more mistakes will he make - for the more new things he will try. I would never promote a man into a top level job who had not made mistakes, and big ones at that. Otherwise he is sure to be mediocre.”
  • Source: Peter Drucker, The Practice of Management New York,: Harper, 1st ed. 1954 ; Routledge, 2012, p. 147.

David_Epstein

Haiku

“Haiku, the three-line poem made by alternating lines of five, seven, and five syllables... in the seventeenth century, a student of Zen named Matsuo Bashō... made it into its own serious form, imbued with Zen principles. Not only were the words spare, but the ethos was as well... It prompted poets to pause and look mindfully at the world around them... This minuscule problem space is known around the world for its ability to turn anyone, from kindergartener to adult, into a probing wordsmith in an instant. Look around you; try it. The form's scarcity will immediately ignite an exploration of new linguistic possibilities in your mind.”
  • Source: David Epstein in the book “Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better”. Published 2026 by Riverhead Books. Page 68. ISBN 978-0593715734 (Ebook).

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).

Johann_Wolfgang_von_Goethe

Intelligent Thoughts

“All intelligent thoughts have already been thought; what is necessary is only to try to think them again.”
  • Original German: ‘Alles Gescheite ist schon gedacht worden. Man muss nur versuchen, es noch einmal zu denken’.
  • Source: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in the novel “Wilhelm Meister's Wanderjahre” published 1821.

Donald_Hoffman

Spacetime Deep Enough

“The question is, is spacetime itself a deep enough structure for us to try to boot up consciousness from.”
  • Source: Donald Hoffman, in the YouTube video entitled “Donald Hoffman's New Approach To Consciousness” channel “Dr Brian Keating”. Online at <https://youtu.be/mU_WBela71Y?si=fNfLLsOsUDRDC1XD> posted 2024-08, retrieved 2024-08. In video at 36:10.

John_Maynard_Keynes

Purpose and Immortality

“The ‘purposive’ man is always trying to secure a spurious and delusive immortality for his acts by pushing his interest in them forward into time. He does not love his cat, but his cat’s kittens; nor, in truth, the kittens, but only the kittens’ kittens, and so on forward forever to the end of cat-dom. For him jam is not jam unless it is a case of jam tomorrow and never jam 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.

Henry_Louis_Mencken

Truth

“The truth, indeed, is something that mankind, for some mysterious reason, instinctively dislikes. Every man who tries to tell it is unpopular, and even when, by the sheer strength of his case, he prevails, he is put down as a scoundrel.”
  • Source: Mencken. Chicago Tribune (23 May 1926)

Alan_Perlis

Fit and Try

“Fundamentally, the procedure you mention, which is ‘fit-and-try’, will work very well with three or four people. If you have a hundred people the ‘fit-and-try’ process diverges because of lack of control.”

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.

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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Theodore_Roosevelt

Hard to Fail

“It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed.”
  • Source: Theodore Roosevelt, governor of New York, speech before the Hamilton Club, Chicago, Illinois, April 10, 1899.—The Strenuous Life (vol. 13 of The Works of Theodore Roosevelt, national ed.), chapter 1, p. 320 (1926).

Mark_Seemann

Rubber Duck

“The mere act of explaining a problem tends to produce new insight. If you don’t have a colleague, you may try explaining the problem to a rubber duck.”
  • Source: Mark Seemann, “Code That Fits in Your Head: Heuristics for Software Engineering”. Published in 2021 by Pearson Education, Kindle Edition, ISBN: 978-0-13-746440-1. Page 239.

Alfred_P_Sloan

Greatest Thrill

“The greatest real thrill that life offers is to create, to construct, to develop something useful. Too often we fail to recognize and pay tribute to the creative spirit. It is that spirit that creates our jobs. There has to be this pioneer, the individual who has the courage, the ambition to overcome the obstacles that always develop when one tries to do something worthwhile, especially when it is new and different.”

  • Source:
    • Alfred P. Sloan in his book “Adventures of a White-Collar Man”, published in 1941 by Doubleday Press, New York, NY. First edition. Also quoted in: John Bourne (2000), Learning Effectiveness and Faculty Satisfaction. p. 11.

Mark_Twain

Annihilation

“Annihilation has no terrors for me, I have already tried it before I was born — a hundred million years — and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together.”
  • Source: Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) in his autobiography, dictated circa 1907 published 1924 in ‘Mark Twain’s Autobiography’ by Mark Twain, Volume 1 and 2, edited by Albert Bigelow Paine, Harper & Brothers, New York.

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.

Technical Leaders

“Leadership, in the sense that social scientists use it, means the ability to influence people. Programmers, being people who tend to value creative work and professional competence, tend to put their stock in people whom they perceive to be good at the things they do. Thus, it is easier to exert leadership over — to influence — programmers by being a soft-spoken programming wizard than by being the world's fastest-talking salesman. When nonprogramming leaders are brought in to be in charge of programming teams, trouble usually brews unless the appointed leader explicitly and implicitly recognizes his incapacity on technical matters. The very worst he can do — and this goes also for a former programmer who has lost touch with the field — is to try to match programming wits with the other members of the team. Although a team might come to respect a leader who openly admitted his programming inexperience, they could only come to ridicule one whose pretense at knowledge was revealed to be a sham.”
  • Source: Chapter 5. Weinberg, G. M. (2011). The Psychology of Computer Programming (Silver anniversary edition) | 1971. Weinberg & Weinberg.

Stephen_Wolfram

Foundational Math Problem

“Here's the foundational problem. The mathematics you need is completely unknown. We're trying to build it, but here's how it works. If you study calculus, you'll study univariant calculus, calculus of one variable. You'll study multivariant calculus, calculus where there's variables x, y, z, and so on. What we need is calculus where there are fractional number of variables, and nobody has ever figured that out. Nobody has even tried to study that. When you look at the kind of geometry that emerges from these hypergraphs and things you end up needing to know about things like calculus in 3.1 dimensions. That's simply a mathematical structure that hasn't been built. We're in the process of building it, but it is a fairly heavy lift. That's a deep, foundational piece of mathematics that has to be built...”
  • Source: Spoken by Stephen Wolfram in a video interview with Brian Keating recorded in the YouTube video ‘What is Time? Stephen Wolfram’s Groundbreaking New Theory’ published on channel ‘Dr. Brian Keating’ on 2024-12-02. Video offset 1:32:08. Online at https://youtu.be/c-RO3vM10Ok?si=i-XspeEtzqA3jPl9 retrieved 2024.

Shoshana_Zuboff

Information Panopticon Isolation

“In the information panopticon, managers... frequently tried to simplify their managerial tasks by displacing face-to-face engagement with techniques of surveillance and control. As a consequence, they became isolated from the realities of their organizations as they were increasingly insulated by an electronic text that in turn was even more vulnerable to workers' antagonisms.”
  • Source: Zuboff, S. (1988). In The Age Of The Smart Machine: The Future Of Work And Power. New York, NY: Basic Books, p. 400. ISBN:0465032125.