Christopher Alexander: You can almost never figure out what people actually want. But you can almost always figure out what they don’t want.
Marvin Bower: Most important thing consultant can do for client is to identify what works really well for them and get them to do more of it.
If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.
Cicero
By making predictions not excuses. As you go through your day, running your mind over the theories you are constructing and squaring them with current events and new data, you have two choices. You can try to predict what’s going to happen next, or you can assign blame for.
Life isn’t what you’re given, it’s what you create, what you overcome, and what you achieve that makes it beautiful.
Richard Feynman
First Law of Mentat: A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.
A world is supported by four things: “…the learning of the wise, the justice of the great, the prayers of the righteous and the value of the brave. But all of these are nothing […] without aruler who knows the art of ruling.
- Seeking
- Rage
- Fear
- Lust
- Care
- Panic
- Play
- Friendship
- Freedom
- Analysed Life
For Thucydides the death and suffering of a great epidemic (just like war) test the moral health of individuals and of societies. And a people who are not morally strong, when they become afraid, quickly slip into lawlessness and sacrilege:
“For the violence of the calamity was such that men, not knowing where to turn, grew reckless of all law, human and divine. Men who had hitherto concealed what they took pleasure in, now grew bolder.”
The secret to happiness is freedom. The secret to freedom is courage.
Thucydides
Absence of evidence ≠ evidence of absence
Whenever you hear “evidence based”, expect probabilistic fraud.
Careful when comparing idiosyncratic statistics with systemic: Plane and car crashes are neither multiplicative nor systemic, they more or less remain the same throughout the year. Pandemics behave differently.
If you get hit by a car today, it doesn’t increase the chances of someone else getting hit. Totally different story with infections. Therefore you cannot compare the fear of multiplicative pandemics to car crashes.
When paranoid, you can be wrong 1000 times & you will survive. If non-paranoid; wrong once, and you, your genes, & the rest of your group are done. Airplane safety is the result of mega-paranoia.
In the real world, one must REDUCE RISK in the absence of reliable data, via the MOST ROBUST (model resistant) method.
If you wait for all the fantastic & reliable data, before taking your risk decisions:
- you fall into the delay fallacy
- you probably die while waiting
I feel, therefore I am
Facts are useless and infinite. When a fact has a feeling attached it acquires meaning. That’s when it cannot be dismissed or discounted. Think about a sound in the bushes. That sound becomes a feeling which becomes a survival fact.
People can look at the same set of facts and come to a completely diametrically opposed conclusion.
