"Engineers tend to develop tools for the pleasure of developing tools, not to induce nature to yield its secrets. It so happens that some of these tools bring us more knowledge; becasue of the slient effect, we forget to consider tools that accomplished nothing but keeping engineers off the streets. Tools lead to unexpected discoveries. But rarely do our tools seem to work as intended; it is only the engineer's gusto and love for the building of toys and machines that contribute to the augmentation of out knowledge. Knowledge does not progress from tools desinged to verify or help theories, but rather the opposite."
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb, 'The Black Swan' pg.169, Random House 2nd Edition.
"If you don’t know how compilers work, then you don't know how computers work. If you're not 100% sure whether you know how compilers work, then you don't know how they work."
-- Steve Yegge
"It is not my job ot have all the answers, but it is my job to ask lots of penetrating, distrurbing and occasionally almost offensive questions as part of the analytic process that leads to insight and refinement."
-- Gary Loveman Chairmain of the Board, President and CEO of Harrah's Entertainment, Inc., Competing on Analytics by Davenport Harris.
To know something in greater detail eats up time to compute other things. To know something in greater detail takes away from starting on other forms of knowlegde. (This is really just allocation of resouces- time.) Note, we are ignoring network-theory here.
Direct resources for improvement once the effects of not improving becomes to strong to ignore (this needs to be carefully appied because 'planning ahead' is important). Notice, this a comment against optimization.
My best cooking comes from when I dont try.
Just because I say I like pancakes doesn't mean I hate waffles. I have said nothing about waffles.
The 'covid-sidewalk' fallacy: the perpetuation of unneeded actions due to benevolent assumptions of respecting others.
Ex.) "I am personally not worried about someone walking within 6 feet of me. However, I presume others would be nervous of someone walking within 6 feet of them. Therefore, when crossing someone on the sidewalk I will move, perhaps to the street or grass, so that I not risk subjugating them to the worries."
If someone moves off the sidewalk, before your paths cross, it may not be that they may not be worried about covid - but think that you are.
This is similar to the 'small-talk' fallacy: two people are 'small talking' and they each hate it. However, they don't express it due to the chance the other enjoys or needs it. The risk for offence is to high. Thus, both continue doing something they hate.
Things are defined only by relation to others. Analysis occurs by two or more entities; even if one of more of the entities need to be made up (hypotheticals or non-realized sample paths).
Leanring is nonlinear process. And by trying to force it into a linear one, you will most likely fail.
The reason being, everyone is different. Their thoughts, comments, and questions are outputs of a nonlinear, chaotic, system.
Thoughts, comments, and questions are inflection points; points produced by the natural, chaotic, system. It is a signal from the system to increase the network topology. These points must be entertained. At least to a majority degree.
Consider the following quotes form NNT's Black Swan (prologue xxv)
Black swans being unpredictable, we need to adjust to their existence (rather than naively try to predict them). there are so many things we can do is we focus on antiknowledge, or what we dont know. Among many other benefits, you can set yourself up to collect serendipitous Black Swans (os positive kind) by maximizing your exposure to them. Indeed, in some domains - such as scientific discovery and venture capital investments - ther is a disproportionate payoff from the unknown, since you typically have little to lose and plenty to gain from a rare event. We will see that, contrary to social-science wisdom, almost no discovery, no technologies of note, came from design and planning - they were just Black Swans. The strategy for the discoverers and entrepreneurs is to rely less on top-down planning and focus on maximum tinkering and recognizing oportunities when they present themselves. [...] The stragety is, then, to tinker as much as possible and try to collect as many Black Swan opportunies as you can.
Thoughts, comments, and questions are Black Swans during the learning process. One must entertain as many as possible as to maximiz the collection of them. This is tinkering; with thoughts.
Reliablity is more about mapping a given input to a consistent output. Scalablity is more about mapping a range of inputs to a range of outputs. Moreover, it is about how a system responds to changes at the input. How does a spike, or drought, at the input effect the output?