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Christopher_Wolfgang_Alexander

Negative Requirements

“If we think of the requirements from a negative point of view, as potential misfits, there is a simple way of picking a finite set. This is because it is through misfit that the problem originally brings itself to our attention.”

Biased Decisions and Perceptions

“The self-conscious individual's grasp of problems is constantly misled. His concepts and categories, besides being arbitrary and unsuitable, are self-perpetuating. Under the influence of concepts, he not only does things from a biased point of view, but sees them biasedly as well. The concepts control his perception of fit and misfit — until in the end he sees nothing but deviations from his conceptual dogmas, and loses not only the urge but even the mental opportunity to frame his problems more appropriately.”

Charles_Darwin

Observation versus Theory

"About thirty years ago there was much talk that geologists ought only to observe and not theorize; and I well remember someone saying that at this rate a man might as well go into a gravel-pit and count the pebbles and describe the colours. How odd it is that anyone should not see that all observation must be for or against some view if it is to be of any service."

Paul_Dirac

Beauty in Equations

“I think there is a moral to this story, namely that it is more important to have beauty in one's equations than to have them fit experiment. It seems that if one is working from the point of view of getting beauty into one's equations, and if one has a really sound insight, one is on a sure line of progress.”
  • Source: Paul Dirac, "The Evolution of the Physicist's Picture of Nature". Article republished from May 1963 issue of Scientific American, blogs.scientificamerican.com. June 25, 2010.

Michael_Faraday

Assertion Duties

“A man who makes assertions, or draws conclusions, regarding any given case, ought to be competent to investigate it. He has no right to throw the onus on others, declaring it their duly to prove him right or wrong. His duty is to demonstrate the truth of that which he asserts, or to cease from asserting. The men he calls upon to consider and judge have enough to do with themselves, in the examination, correction, or verification of their own views. The world little knows how many of the thoughts and theories which have passed through the mind of a scientific investigator have been crushed in silence and secrecy by his own severe criticism and adverse examination; that in the most successful instances not a tenth of the suggestions, the hopes, the wishes, the preliminary conclusions have been realized.”
  • Source: Lecturer=Michael Faraday; Lecture/Title=“Observations on Mental Education: A Lecture Delivered at the Royal Institution of Great Britain Before H.R.H. Prince Albert”; Date=1854-05-06; Book/Title=“Lectures on Education”; Publication/Date=1855; Book/Title=“Experimental Researches in Chemistry and Physics”; Publication/Date=1859); Page=486.

Siddhartha_Gautama

Eightfold Path

“Just this noble eightfold path: right view, right aspiration, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration.”
  • Source: Siddhartha “Buddha” Gautama in Pali Canon, Samyutta Nikaya, Nagara Sutta, Samyutta Nikaya II.124, translated by Thanissaro Bhikkhu.

Yuval_Noah_Harari

Naive Information

“The naive view is this counter-speech doctrine that we just need more information, and if you have a lot of information the truth will just come up, will float up. In a free market of information, the truth will win. It won't. You need to tilt the balance in favor of truth. Because, as I said before, it's costly, it's rare, and more to the point, the truth is complicated and often painful.”
  • Source: Yuval Noah Harari speaking in a YouTube interview with MSNBC television news anchor Ari Melber discussion his book “Nexus”. Published 2024-09-12 on YouTube entitled “MAGA propaganda decoded: Obama’s fave historian shreds Trump tricks with groundbreaking scholarship”, channel “MSNBC”, at 24:25. Online at <https://youtu.be/toF5PIClNZ4?si=5ogXQFnsVW1yhv2R>, retrieved 2024.

Nick_Hodges

Scrum

“I fail utterly to see how scrum is a manifestation of the Agile Principles. In my view, scrum is in direct opposition to them, and in the end, doesn’t even remotely fulfill their purpose.”

Carl_Jung

Insoluble Problems

“I always worked with the temperamental conviction that fundamentally there are no insoluble problems, and experience justified me in so far as I have often seen individuals simply outgrow a problem which had destroyed others. This ‘outgrowing’, as I formerly called it, on further experience was seen to consist in a new level of consciousness. Some higher or wider interest arose on the person's horizon, and through this widening of his view the insoluble problem lost its urgency. It was not solved logically in its own terms, but faded out when confronted with a new and stronger life-tendency. It was not repressed and made unconscious, but merely appeared in a different light, and so did indeed become different. What, on a lower level, had led to the wildest conflicts and to panicky outbursts of emotion, viewed from the higher level of the personality, now seemed like a storm in the valley seen from a high mountain-top. This does not mean that the thunderstorm is robbed of its reality, but instead of being in it, one is now above it. However, since we are both valley and mountain with respect to the psyche, it might seem a vain illusion to feel oneself beyond what is human. One certainly does feel the affect and is shaken and tormented by it, yet at the same time one is aware of a higher consciousness, which prevents one from becoming identical with the affect, a consciousness which takes the affect objectively, and can say, Ί know that I suffer'.”

Synchronicity Empirical

“Synchronicity is not a philosophical view but an empirical concept.”
  • Source: Written by Carl Jung in the book “Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle”. Published in London, UK by Routledge. Published 1985. Page 133.

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.”

Alan_Perlis

Complex Information in the Mind

“One can only display complex information in the mind. Like seeing, movement or flow or alteration of view is more important than the static picture, no matter how lovely.”

Michael_Polanyi

Vast Knowledge First and Second Hand

“Nobody knows more than a tiny fragment of science well enough to judge its validity and value at first hand. For the rest he has to rely on views accepted at second hand on the authority of a community of people accredited as scientists. But this accrediting depends in its turn on a complex organization. For each member of the community can judge at first hand only a small number of his fellow members, and yet eventually each is accredited by all. What happens is that each recognizes as scientists a number of others by whom he is recognized as such in return, and these relations form chains which transmit these mutual recognitions at second hand through the whole community. This is how each member becomes directly or indirectly accredited by all. The system extends into the past. Its members recognize the same set of persons as their masters and derive from this allegiance a common tradition, of which each carries on a particular strand.”
  • Source: Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge (1958), 163.

Bertrand_Russell

Fed the Chicken

“The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken.”
  • Source: Bertrand Russell, (1912), In the book entitled “The Problems of Philosophy” by Bertrand Russell. Second edition published in 1998 (originally published in 1912) by Oxford University Press, Oxford, England. Chapter 6. ISBN 978-0-19-285423-0. Online at <https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5827> retrieved 2022.

Carl_Sagan

Changing Opinion

“In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.”
  • Source: Carl Sagan, Keynote address at CSICOP conference, 1987

Herbert_Simon

Design and Analysis

“In view of the key role of design in professional activity, it is ironic that in this century the natural sciences almost drove the sciences of the artificial from professional school curricula, a development that peaked about two or three decades after the Second World War. Engineering schools gradually became schools of physics and mathematics; medical schools became schools of biological science; business schools became schools of finite mathematics. The use of adjectives like 'applied' concealed, but did not change, the fact. It simply meant that in the professional schools those topics were selected from mathematics and the natural sciences for emphasis which were thought to be most nearly relevant to professional practice. It did not mean that design continued to be taught, as distinguished from analysis.”

Design Paradox

“A paradoxical, but perhaps realistic, view of design goals is that their function is to motivate activity which in turn will generate new goals.”

Robert_Louis_Stevenson

Same Views for Twenty Years

“To hold the same views at forty as we held at twenty is to have been stupefied for a score of years, and take rank, not as a prophet, but as an unteachable brat, well birched and none the wiser.”
  • Source: Stevenson, R.L. in the book 'Crabbed Age and Youth, Virginibus Puerisque and Later Essays', p. 67. Republished 1969, originally written between 1874–1879.

Shannon_Vallor

AI Longtermism

“What longtermists and effective altruists have in common... is the utilitarian view that morality is a happiness optimization problem, a matter of running the numbers. Conveniently for AI enthusiasts... For a virtue ethicist like me, there are profound dangers and moral errors in any view of morality that separates it from humane feeling, relational bonds, and social context, reducing it to a mere computation of net happiness units.”
  • Source: From the book “The AI Mirror” by Shannon Vallor. Published 2024 by Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0197759066. Chapter 3, page 77.

Allen_Wheelis

Science Accuracy Certainty

“Science would have us believe that such accuracy, leading to certainty, is the only criterion of knowledge, would make the trial of Galileo the paradigm of the two points of view which aspire to truth, would suggest, that is, that the cardinals represent only superstition and repression, while Galileo represents freedom. But there is another criterion which is systematically neglected in this elevation of science. Man does not now — and will not ever — live by the bread of scientific method alone. He must deal with life and death, with love and cruelty and despair, and so must make conjectures of great importance which may or may not be true and which do not lend themselves to experimentation: It is better to give than to receive; Love thy neighbor as thyself; Better to risk slavery through non-violence than to defend freedom with murder. We must deal with such propositions, must decide whether they are true, whether to believe them, whether to act on them — and scientific method is no help for by their nature these matters lie forever beyond the realm of science.”
  • Source: Allen Wheelis, In The End of the Modern Age (1973), 89.

Stephen_Wolfram

Computational Irreducibility

“I’ve increasingly come to view the whole fundamental story of science as being about the interplay between computational irreducibility and computational reducibility. The computational nature of things inevitably leads to computational irreducibility. But there are slices of computational reducibility that inevitably exist on top of this irreducibility that are what make it possible for us — as computationally bounded entities — to identify meaningful scientific laws and to do science.”

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

Life at the Data Interface

“Life at the data interface invites the worker into the abstract precincts of managerial work. It provides access to a broader view of the business as well as a deepened understanding of one's tasks and their role in the wider sphere of organizational functions. When work becomes synonymous with responsiveness to data, it engenders inquiry and dialogue, thus opening the way for workers to envision new possibilities and fresh alternatives to the reigning definitions of process, product, and organization.”
  • Source: Zuboff, S. (1988). In The Age Of The Smart Machine: The Future Of Work And Power. New York, NY: Basic Books, p. 301. ISBN:0465032125.

The Panopticon

“The Panopticon was an architectural innovation developed by the moral philosopher Jeremy Bentham. In Foucault's view, it is both a sign of and metaphor for this new disciplinary society. Bentham extolled the Panopticon as a technological triumph capable of exploiting the productive potential of those who had flouted, thwarted, or otherwise escaped social authority. His initial targets were convicts and paupers, though he did not fail to see the potential usefulness of the Panopticon for students, asylum inmates, and workers. The architectural plan conceived by Bentham was first constructed by his brother Samuel, an engineer, in 1787 for a factory at Critchef in Russia. It was later adapted to the problems of housing convicts and paupers. The structure consisted of a twelve-sided polygon formed in iron and sheathed in glass in order to create the effect of what Bentham called 'universal transparency.' A central tower, pierced with wide windows, opened onto the inner wall of the surrounding polygonal structure, which itself was divided into narrow cells extending across the width of the building. Each cell had a window on both the inner and outer walls, allowing light to cross it and illuminate all the inhabitants to an observer in the central tower, while that observer could not be seen from any one of the cells. Mirrors were fixed around the tower to direct extra light into these apartments.”
  • Source: Zuboff, S. (1988). In The Age Of The Smart Machine: The Future Of Work And Power. New York, NY: Basic Books, p. 320. ISBN:0465032125.

Panoptic Power

“This rendering of panoptic power reflects an important evolution of the original concept. It rests on a new collectivism in which ‘the many' view themselves and each views ‘the other.' Horizontal visibility is created even as vertical visibility is intensified. The model is less one of Big Brother than of a workplace in which each member is explicitly empowered as his or her fellow worker's keeper. Instead of a single omniscient overseer, this panopticon relies upon shared custodianship of data that reflect mutually enacted behavior. This new collectivism is an important antidote to the unilateral use of panoptic power, but it is not a trouble-free ideal. Horizontal transparency breeds new human dilemmas as well.”
  • Source: Zuboff, S. (1988). In The Age Of The Smart Machine: The Future Of Work And Power. New York, NY: Basic Books, p. 351. ISBN:0465032125.