Herbert Simon: “”A large part of the difference between the experienced decision maker and the novice in these situations is not any particular intangible like “judgment” or “intuition.” If one could open the lid, so to speak, and see what was in the head of the experienced decision maker, one would find that he had at his disposal repertoires of possible actions; that he had checklists of things to think about before he acted; and that he had mechanisms in his mind to evoke these, and bring these to his conscious attention when the situations for decisions arose.” [via Shane Parish]
Ravi Gupta: “This is the single best articulation on hiring I’ve ever heard: “I have no idea how many great managers we have, so I have no idea how many people we should hire. The constraint on hiring should be how many great managers you have. Figure out how many managers you would clone and give them as many people as they can handle.””
Carlo Rovelli: “We understand reality better if we think of it in terms of interactions, not individuals. We, as individuals, exist thanks to the interactions we are involved in. This is why, in classic game theory, the winners in the long run are those who collaborate. Too often we foolishly measure success in terms of a single actor’s fortunes. This is both short-sighted and irrational. It misunderstands the true nature of reality, and is ultimately self-defeating. I believe, for example, that we make this mistake all the time in international politics. Prioritising individual countries, or groups of countries, over the common good, is a catastrophic error. It leads to the devastation of war and prevents us from addressing the true challenges that all of humankind – a node in nature’s network – faces as a whole.”
Alec Wilkinson: “Five years ago, when I was 65, I decided to see if I could learn adolescent mathematics — algebra, geometry and calculus — because I had done poorly at algebra and geometry and I hadn’t taken calculus at all. I didn’t do well at it the second time, either, but I have become a kind of math evangelist. Mathematics, I now see, is important because it expands the world. It is a point of entry into larger concerns. It teaches reverence. It insists one be receptive to wonder. It requires that a person play close attention. To be made to consider a problem carefully discourages scattershot and slovenly thinking and encourages systematic thought, an advantage, so far as I can tell, in all endeavors. Abraham Lincoln said he spent a year reading Euclid in order to learn to think logically.”
