The Noah principle: predicting rain doesn’t count, building arks does.
-Warren E. Buffett
The Noah principle: predicting rain doesn’t count, building arks does.
-Warren E. Buffett
John, when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.
-Isaac Asimov, The Relativity of Wrong
“At one of our dinners, Milton recalled traveling to an Asian country in the 1960s and visiting a worksite where a new canal was being built. He was shocked to see that, instead of modern tractors and earth movers, the workers had shovels. He asked why there were so few machines. The government bureaucrat explained: “You don’t understand. This is a jobs program.” To which Milton replied: “Oh, I thought you were trying to build a canal. If it’s jobs you want, then you should give these workers spoons, not shovels.”
-Milton Friedman story
The Company that needs a new machine tool is already paying for it.
-old Warner & Swasey ad
What is your information diet like? Do you control it deliberately (do you have a method; is it, er, intelligently designed), or do you just let it happen naturally.
By that I mean things like: Do you have a reading schedule (x number of hours daily, etc)? Do you follow the news, or try to avoid information with a short shelf-life? Do you frequently stop yourself from doing things that you enjoy (f.ex reading certain magazines, books, watching films, etc) to focus on what is more important? etc.
A man who has committed a mistake and doesn’t correct it, is committing another mistake.
-Confucius
Your “Bookshelf” page is 10 years old (and contains a warning sign saying it is obsolete):
http://yudkowsky.net/obsolete/bookshelf.html
Could you tell us about some of the books and papers that you’ve been reading lately? I’m particularly interested in books that you’ve read since 1999 that you would consider to be of the highest quality and/or importance (fiction or not).
“When you’re young, you look at television and think, There’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That’s a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It’s the truth.”
-Steve Jobs, [Wired, February 1996]
If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea...
Antoine de Saint Exupery
One of the most serious problems with modern “management” is that the incentives are all wrong. Imagine that I hire a programmer and pay him by the line of code. This idea has been so thoroughly debunked that it is nearly impossible to write out the consequences without sounding cliché. Yet it happens all the time: Companies promote “Architects” who are evaluated by the weight of their “architecture.” The result is stultifying and demoralizing. The architect does not work to facilitate the programmer’s work, he works to produce evidence of his contribution in the form of frameworks, standards, and software process.
So, how are most managers evaluated? By the amount of “managing” they do, as measured by the amount of process they impose on their team. Evaluating a manager by the amount of managing they do is exactly the same thing as evaluating a programmer by the amount of code they write. And it produces results like you describe, where the manager works to produce evidence of their management in the form of processes and decisions from the top down, rather than facilitating the work actually being done.
-raganwald, HN, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2423236
“The more you sweat in training, the less you bleed in war.”
--WSJ article about Navy SEALs
From the Wikipedia article about perverse incentives:
In Hanoi, under French colonial rule, a program paying people a bounty for each rat pelt handed in was intended to exterminate rats. Instead, it led to the farming of rats.
and
19th century palaeontologists traveling to China used to pay peasants for each fragment of dinosaur bone (dinosaur fossils) that they produced. They later discovered that peasants dug up the bones and then smashed them into multiple pieces to maximise their payments.
Thank you for writing this.
If you ever feel like writing a longer post about your experience in the cryonics world, I’d love to read it and I suspect others would too.
Science is the only news. When you scan through a newspaper or magazine, all the human interest stuff is the same old he-said-she-said, the politics and economics the same sorry cyclic dramas, the fashions a pathetic illusion of newness, and even the technology is predictable if you know the science. Human nature doesn’t change much; science does, and the change accrues, altering the world irreversibly.
--Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Discipline (2009), p 216
The person you are most afraid to contradict is yourself.
-Nassim Nicholas Taleb
If I had six hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend the first four sharpening the axe. - Abraham Lincoln
“Smart people learn from their mistakes. But the real sharp ones learn from the mistakes of others.”
― Brandon Mull, Fablehaven
Bonus feature: If you ‘pagedown’ rapidly through all the videos, you get an Eliezer flipbook.
--Aubrey de Grey