philosophy

20 Dec 09

rebels don’t like certain things, so they rally against those things while at the same time continuing to surround themselves with those things

19 Dec 09

Alex Payne — Criticism, Cheerleading, and Negativity

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philosophy

There is the perception, particularly in American culture, that criticism and negativity go hand-in-hand.
The reason a person is critical of a thing is because he is passionate about that thing. In order to have a critical opinion, you have to love something enough to understand it, and then love it so much more that you want it to be better. Passion breeds critical thinking.
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- Negativity, in contrast, is not the product of passion. There is a certain obvious duality to loving and hating a thing, but the kind of casual negativity that people read into criticism is really a product of apathy. You can’t truly a care about a thing only to casually dismiss it with a negative remark.
- It’s assumed that a professional chef must have such high critical standards for food that they couldn’t possibly enjoy anything less than a four-star gourmet meal. In actuality, most chefs I know enjoy a simple meal just as much as flights of culinary fancy.
- Someone with an informed, critical opinion is, in my experience, far less likely to be negative than someone not as informed. If anything, critical thinking adds dimension to an appreciation of the world around you.
- A healthy business needs passionate employees to succeed. Critics are the most passionate people you can find, but we’re conditioned to assume that critics are negative curmudgeons with nothing more than slings and arrows to contribute. So rather than seeking out critics, employers seek out cheerleaders.
- Cheerleaders are, on the face of it, lovely people to have around an office. They’re just super excited to be there, even if they haven’t had the time or inclination to really think about why. They abhor any suggestion of negativity, and pave over it with empty can-dos. A cheerleader might be a good worker or he might not be. It doesn’t really matter, because the guy is just so damn nice.
- What I am suggesting is a correlation between critical thinking and passion
- you don’t really love x until you’re critical of it
- Cheerleaders aren’t in love with your business. They care about your business, but from an emotional distance. If you treat them wrong, they’ll disappear and find a newer, happier company to cheerlead at. Critics, conversely, won’t just weather the storm with you, they’ll show up on Monday with a plan for a better umbrella. Who do you want to work with?

How to Win Friends and Influence People by

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imported business psychology philosophy

19 Nov 09

Apple's Mistake

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software business philosophy

They work on something till they think it's finished,
then they release it. You have to do that with hardware, but because
software is so easy to change, its design can benefit from evolution.
Programmers don't use
launch-fast-and-iterate out of laziness. They use it because it
yields the best results. By obstructing that process, Apple is
making them do bad work
1 more annotations...
- How would Apple like it if when they discovered a serious bug in
  OS X, instead of releasing a software update immediately, they had
  to submit their code to an intermediary who sat on it for a month
  and then rejected it because it contained an icon they didn't like?
  - great example of a bad process - on 2009-11-19
  Add Sticky Note

09 Nov 09

One Amongst a Multitude: Cynical or Idealistic?

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strategy philosophy self-improvement

A lot of people are either idealistic or cynical, and they take pride in being one and not the other. I think you need to be both.
You need to be idealistic about your vision.
1 more annotations...
- But for code and process, you need to be cynical

One Amongst a Multitude: Take the Jump!

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decision-making philosophy self-improvement

There will always be reasons not to do something risky, new, and unfamiliar. But if it's something you really want, then it's a waste of time doing something else. Just make sure it's not about prestige or money, because in the end, that's not what anyone's life should be about.

04 Nov 09

Chapter3: Luie

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research philosophy self-improvement collaboration physics

The real problems
to solve are not the ones at the end of each chapter in the textbook. The
real problems come in dealing with the unexpected. The questions are vague
and fuzzy. How do you pick a research topic? How long do you study a subject
before you publish? What do you do when things don't look like you expected
them to look, when your results surprise you? How do you recognize when to
quit a not-completely-hopeless endeavor?
The real problems
to solve are not the ones at the end of each chapter in the textbook. The
real problems come in dealing with the unexpected. The questions are vague
and fuzzy. How do you pick a research topic? How long do you study a subject
before you publish? What do you do when things don't look like you expected
them to look, when your results surprise you? How do you recognize when to
quit a not-completely-hopeless endeavor? Coping with these problems is the
art of physics, and it is very similar to the art of business, or the art
of art.
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- It was a research area
  in which many people could work together, be they great scientists or only
  mediocre. Some people would fit more pieces together than others, and some
  were particularly good at finding that hard piece, the one that everyone else
  had given up on. But everybody was able to find some little way to help.
- He intro duced himself with
  "I'm Luie Alvarez," avoiding the title "professor," which
  many other faculty members obviously favored.
- At the end of the tour, Alvarez
  asked me, "When can you start?" I had not understood much of what
  I had seen, and I didn't think I had asked any intelligent questions. In addition,
  Alvarez hadn't had a chance to check my grades or to look at my record in the Physics Department office, so he had
  no way of knowing whether I was a good student. But it was an offer I couldn't
  refuse.
- Alvarez's
  whole approach to physics was that of an entrepreneur, taking big risks by
  building large new projects in the hope of large rewards, although
  his pay was academic rather than financial. He had drawn around him a group
  of young physicists anxious to try out the exciting ideas he was proposing.
  Many of these people were later to leave basic research and become entrepreneurs
  themselves of one kind or another. The true rewards for this kind of work
  were in the challenge, in the adventure. Alvarez seemed to care less about
  the way the picture in the puzzle would look, when everything fit together,
  than about the fun of looking for pieces that fit. He loved nothing more than
  doing something that everybody else thought impossible. His designs were clever,
  and usually exploited some little-known principle that everyone else had forgotten.
- You can read memos anytime, in the evenings, at home, but you can only learn
  experimental physics by being in the laboratory, by doing it
- Even today, when I visit someone's laboratory and they sit me down in a nearby
  office to hear a lecture on their experiment, I protest. I want to go see
  the hardware, if possible to touch it.
- In the Greek legend, the wrestler Antaeus
  was invincible as long as he touched the ground. Hercules defeated him by
  lifting Antaeus above his head, out of reach of the Earth, where he was able
  to squeeze him to death. This legend may have originated as a reminder to
  farmers to stay in close touch with the land, the source of their sustenance,
  and not to relegate all the manual work to hired laborers. The reminder applies
  equally well to experimental physicists, who must return periodically to their
  apparatus, to get their hands dirty, lest they forget why it often takes an
  hour to put in a screw.
- To become an experimental physicist,
  Alvarez seemed to feel, you had to destroy some expensive equipment. It was
  a rite of passage. "Don't do anything differently," he advised.
  "Keep it up."
- There were more Nobel laureates at Berkeley than in the entire
  Soviet Union. And there was Luie, who had no Nobel Prize then but seemed to
  have more important discoveries to his credit than any of the scientists who
  had won the honor.
- But it wasn't the art of invention, but the art of discovery that
  I most wanted to learn. How did he do it? What secret knowledge enabled him
  to make discovery after discovery? If only I could identify what it was, then
  I could try to learn it.
  
  Skepticism,
  the ability not to be fooled, was clearly important, but it is also cheap.
  It is easy to disbelieve everything, and some scientists seemed to take this
  approach. Sometimes Luie was skeptical, but more often he seemed to embrace
  crazy ideas, at least at first. He rarely dismissed anything out of hand,
  no matter how absurd, until he had examined it closely. But then one tiny
  flaw, solidly established, was enough to kill it. His openness to wild ideas
  was balanced by his firmness in dismissing those that were flawed. He had
  a finely honed skepticism. Perhaps that was part of his secret talent.
- the
  key to discovery was not being "lazy."
- The
  hardest discoveries to take seriously are often your own.
- Walter Alvarez never came that close to a Nobel Prize again,
  but he made sure that his son learned the lesson.
- he hadn't looked long enough
- The
  art of physics consists in knowing what to work on and for how long.
- Luie
  worked out virtually all the details before he even told anybody what he was
  thinking of, and he put these in a memo.
- The gaps in his
  knowledge were surprisingly large, but not detrimental to his work.
- He seemed to have a knack for learning just the right amount about everything,
  and for spending the time he saved inventing and bringing together ideas from
  disparate fields.

24 Oct 09

Be lucky - it's an easy skill to learn - Telegraph

www.telegraph.co.uk/...ts-an-easy-skill-to-learn.html - Preview

psychology philosophy luck self-improvement

I gave both lucky and unlucky people a newspaper, and asked them to look through it and tell me how many photographs were inside. On average, the unlucky people took about two minutes to count the photographs, whereas the lucky people took just seconds. Why? Because the second page of the newspaper contained the message: "Stop counting. There are 43 photographs in this newspaper." This message took up half of the page and was written in type that was more than 2in high. It was staring everyone straight in the face, but the unlucky people tended to miss it and the lucky people tended to spot it.
Personality tests revealed that unlucky people are generally much more tense than lucky people, and research has shown that anxiety disrupts people's ability to notice the unexpected.
2 more annotations...
- unlucky people miss chance opportunities because they are too focused on looking for something else
- My research revealed that lucky people generate good fortune via four basic principles. They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good.

17 Oct 09

An Essay by Einstein -- The World As I See It

www.aip.org/...essay.htm - Preview

philosophy quotes

A hundred times every day

I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors

of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order

to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving...

09 Oct 07

Mystical Traditions - Center for Sacred Sc

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philosophy

23 Sep 07

How to Do Philosophy

www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html - Preview

philosophy

Most philosophical debates are not
merely afflicted by but driven by confusions over words.
Mathematicians had by then shown that you could figure things out
in a much more conclusive way than by making up fine sounding stories
about them.
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- It was impressive even to ask the
  questions they did. That doesn't mean they always came up with
  good answers.
- He has noticed that theoretical knowledge
  is often acquired for its own sake, out of curiosity, rather than
  for any practical need.
- Certainly, people
  who want a deep understanding of something are often driven by
  curiosity rather than any practical need. But that doesn't mean
  what they end up learning is useless.
- It's very valuable in practice
  to have a deep understanding of what you're doing; even if you're
  never called on to solve advanced problems, you can see shortcuts
  in the solution of simple ones, and your knowledge won't break down
  in edge cases, as it would if you were relying on formulas you
  didn't understand.
- So while ideas don't have to have immediate practical applications
  to be interesting, the kinds of things we find interesting will
  surprisingly often turn out to have practical applications.
- It was not till around 1600 (in Europe, where the center
  of gravity had shifted by then) that one found people confident
  enough to treat Aristotle's work as a catalog of mistakes. And
  even then they rarely said so outright.
- If it seems surprising that the gap was so long, consider how little
  progress there was in math between Hellenistic times and the
  Renaissance.
  
  In the intervening years an unfortunate idea took hold: that it
  was not only acceptable to produce works like the Metaphysics,
  but that it was a particularly prestigious line of work, done by a
  class of people called philosophers. No one thought to go back and
  debug Aristotle's motivating argument. And so instead of correcting
  the problem Aristotle discovered by falling into it—that you can
  easily get lost if you talk too loosely about very abstract ideas—they
  continued to fall into it.
- If you write in an unclear way about big ideas,
  you produce something that seems tantalizingly attractive to
  inexperienced but intellectually ambitious students. Till one knows
  better, it's hard to distinguish something that's hard to understand
  because the writer was unclear in his own mind from something like
  a mathematical proof that's hard to understand because the ideas
  it represents are hard to understand.
- When things are hard to understand, people who suspect
  they're nonsense generally keep quiet.
- There's no way to prove a
  text is meaningless.
- instead of denouncing philosophy, most people who suspected
  it was a waste of time just studied other things.
- Because philosophy's flaws turned away the sort of people who might
  have corrected them, they tended to be self-perpetuating.
- The test of utility I propose is whether we cause people who read
  what we've written to do anything differently afterward.
- These seem to me what philosophy should look like: quite general
  observations that would cause someone who understood them to do
  something differently.
- In order to get tenure in any field you must not
  arrive at conclusions that members of tenure committees can disagree
  with. In practice there are two kinds of solutions to this problem.
  In math and the sciences, you can prove what you're saying, or at
  any rate adjust your conclusions so you're not claiming anything
  false
- In the humanities you can either avoid drawing any definite conclusions
  (e.g. conclude that an issue is a complex one), or draw conclusions
  so narrow that no one cares enough to disagree with you.
- there's no use in telling people things they already believe,
  and people are often upset to be told things they don't.

07 Sep 07

Overcoming Bias: "Science" as Curiosity-Stopper

www.overcomingbias.com/...science-as-curi.html - Preview

philosophy science

But what does the phrase "scientifically explicable" mean? It means that someone else
knows how the light bulb works. When you are told the light bulb is
"scientifically explicable", you don't know more than you knew earlier;
you don't know whether the light bulb will brighten or fade. But
because someone else knows, it devalues the knowledge in your eyes. You become less curious.
Since this is an econblog, someone out there is bound to say, "If
the light bulb were unknown to science, you could gain fame and fortune
by investigating it." But I'm not talking about greed. I'm not
talking about career ambition. I'm talking about the raw emotion of
curiosity - the feeling of being intrigued. Why should your curiosity be
diminished because someone else, not you, knows how the light bulb works? Is this not spite? It's not enough for you to know; other people must also be ignorant, or you won't be happy?

19 Aug 07

Overcoming Bias: Scientific Evidence, Legal Evidence, Rational Evidence

www.overcomingbias.com/...scientific-evid.html - Preview

human-based-computation legal philosophy related science

Science is made up of generalizations which apply to many
particular instances, so that you can run new real-world experiments
which test the generalization, and thereby verify for yourself that the
generalization is true, without having to trust anyone's
authority. Science is the publicly reproducible knowledge of humankind.
Like a court system, science
as a social process is made up of fallible humans. We want a
protected pool of beliefs that are especially reliable.
And we want social rules that encourage the generation of such
knowledge. So we impose special, strong, additional standards
before we canonize rational knowledge as "scientific knowledge", adding
it to the protected belief pool.
2 more annotations...
- Historical knowledge is not scientific knowledge.
- Perhaps future generations, acting on the theory that science is the public, reproducible
  knowledge of humankind, will only label as "scientific" papers
  published in an open-access journal. If you charge for access to
  the knowledge, is it part of the knowledge of humankind? Can we trust a result if people must pay to criticize it? Is it really science?

06 Aug 07

Stuff

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philosophy self-improvement

Every thing you own takes energy away from
you. Some give more than they take. Those are the only things
worth having.

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