Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.
--Abraham Lincoln
That’s appropriate advice to become a good listener and, through that, learn. It seems, though, that to be a good learner, you also have to speak out and suffer the fool stage sufficiently to reach a better understanding that might otherwise be forfeited. Initiation as a fool allows you to play with the ideas you hear but don’t understand.
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Deception, most wonderful of messengers,
You tell me the things that I seek.
Your wonderful words soothe my passions.
You clobber my enemy's speech.
With you I can make my excuses,
You draw from the dark and the gray.
Your wonderful words give me reason
To bash every truth in my way.
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More than pure technology and business skills are needed to succeed. We enhance our talents and abilities through knowledge across seemingly unrelated fields, such as:
1. History. History helps us draw lessons from what has worked and what has failed in the past. It also gives us an appreciation of the unexpected benefits of different ways of doing things in other cultures. It provides us cultural contexts, sources of conflicts, solutions to conflicts, past problems and past solutions, and flows of human interactions toward solutions and fulfillment. It also gives us a lot of exciting stories to retell and ponder.
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Rules make life much easier and simpler! Because of them, we don't have to solve the puzzle again every time the problem pops up again. Instead, we can solve the riddle once, simplify it to a solution, and move on.
As a society, rules enable us to do a lot of things together that we couldn't otherwise do by ourselves, such as keep food and drink on the table daily, put shelter over our heads, clothing on our backs, transportation to get places, and communication to talk to people instantly, even on the other side of the world. Rules help us to play in the sandbox nicely together.
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1. Rules of thumb that work at small scales typically stop working at large scales. Large scales take on a whole new set of rules that differ from rules that worked at small scales. I can make a small piece of clay into an arch, but at large scales, the clay arch will collapse. Small boats can change direction quickly. Large ships can't. Large scales change the rules.
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“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.” Now that’s an insane cliché repeated repeatedly! Do you throw the same dice and every time get the same result? No! Do you pick the same stock year after year because two years ago it had the best returns? No! Only simple systems provide the same results every time you do the same thing. Complex systems will produce different results. So to do the same thing over and over again and expect the same results every time can itself be insane.
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It's possible that the universe within an atom is massively greater within its own context than the universe that we're able to observe. It's also possible that the entire set of galactic clusters in the universe that we're able to observe is just an invisible dot in yet a much, much larger world that, again, is massively larger in size and complexity than the universe that we observe. But both of these worlds, the super-microscopic and super-macroscopic, could be equal in massiveness and complexity within their respective scales. Some physicists speculate that our observable universe could be one of several coexisting universes within the same space, the others not being detectible by our senses other than from things like "weak" gravitational forces that are really strong forces, but appear weak because of the small portion of them that we only get a glimpse of within our observable universe.
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A surprising development in computer programming is the emergence of "truthiness" and "falsiness." They’re in the twilight zone of binary logic where the unknown falls somewhere between true and false, but rarely exactly in the middle of the two.
Boolean logic in binary computers stems from two values: on/off, also represented as true/false. Yet, from this black-and-white true/false logic develops mathematically more abstract concepts of "truthy" and "falsey."
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A law is usually written to fix a problem. Here's a list where well-intended laws fail because they don't achieve their purpose. They may stay on the books forever, but fail because they wind up, unexpectedly, to be counterproductive, even though the intent behind them may have been exceptionally good.
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Being cool lets you in on fun things.
Being cool can be a trendy thing rather than a substance thing.
What was cool can become uncool, and what was uncool can become cool.
To constantly be cool, you have to constantly adjust to change.
Ugly can be cool, and it can be uncool.
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Time moves much faster for a person living on an electron than for a person living on earth. To understand this, try to picture the movement of an electron. It whips around the nucleus of an atom at terrific speeds, nearly the speed of light. That's much faster than the time it takes for the earth to revolve around the sun. Now picture the electron being a super-tiny earth with people and animals and plants running around on it. (On earth, the plants don't go running around, but on our electron they might.)
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Here's how my education through ninth grade really happened. I would be assigned to write a paper, perhaps about Mark Twain. From that assignment though, only a portion of my learning was about Mark Twain. I learned a lot about a large number of other things that were totally unrelated to Twain. Here's how.
Part of the assignment required that I find information about Twain from different sources, usually around five sources. The easiest source, of course, would be the encyclopedia, and we were allowed up to two encyclopedias, plus magazines, books, or interviews.
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Understandably, people typically misunderstand what theories and facts are when discussing scientific research. Basically, a fact is something true, regardless of whether or not any scientist has even thought about it, let alone hypothesized it or researched it. On the other hand, a theory is believed to be true based on observation, experimentation, and research. Many people will say, "Well, that's only a theory!" When they say that, they mean that although scientists claim it to be true, there's insufficient supporting evidence.
The opposite is really the case, though.
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In this day and age of everything goes, what do we do when we're actually right? On Facebook, I posted the following comment: "Good compromise isn't meeting in the middle. It's both sides suddenly 'getting it,' and from their varying perspectives are able to reach an accord that works. It's both sides, after much discussion, reaching their own 'oh!' moments, usually finding solutions that neither started out with."
Jerome Tjerkstra, an old roommate and someone I have high respect for, responded with the question, "But...what if I'm right?"
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A problem is something that has its own set of laws that you have to follow. That's why it's a problem. You can't dictate to it what laws must be followed. It dictates to you what laws must be followed. So now that you're wanting to solve this problem, you have to do two things: understand the laws that the problem requires you to follow, and then figure out how to navigate through those laws to arrive at your solution.
A problem, even though it might not exist in physical form, is just as real as something that does have physical form. It has a life and personality of its own that you have to deal with if you want to solve that problem.
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Looking for a job isn’t enough. You have to constantly position yourself to achieve your life’s ambitions.
Looking for a job isn’t enough. The paycheck you receive today reflects what you did over the last three years to build up to this point, while work you do today helps determine the paycheck you’ll receive three to five years from now.
Looking for a job isn't enough. You have a number of talents that you don't value enough. You need to start capitalizing on them when you look for work.
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Thinking of a library should help most people visualize a concept of nine physical dimensions.
One dimension: A line of text on a page in a book
(In traditional math, a line extends infinitely in both directions.)
Two dimensions: A page in a book
(In traditional math, it’s a plane that extends infinitely “up and down” and “right and left.”)
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I was listening to someone talk about Civil War photographs they had from the 1860s. That person mentioned that many people called photographs "shades" or "shadows" of themselves. That struck me as odd, but as I thought about it I started understanding why that connection was made. If I walk along a sidewalk on a bright sunny day, I'll see a shadow of myself. Now we know that my shadow doesn't exist in the sense that I exist. But it does exist. What's interesting is that it's an image of me, distorted and flattened out as it might be. A photograph follows a similar process, but fills in a lot more details about me than my shadow from the sun.
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90% of us are in that rare class of people that thinks we're smarter than 90% of everyone else. Once the other 10% joins us, our delusions will be complete.
I remember reading a few years ago that one study interviewed a large number of Fortune 500 CEOs (chief executive officers – the top dog in each of the 500 largest companies in the world). Not surprisingly, the study claimed that 90% of them thought they were among the top 10% of the most skilled Fortune 500 CEOs. I don’t know how legitimate the study was, but it certainly makes sense that it would be true.
The problem is that we tend to have two opposing perceptions.
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Selective Blindness: An ability to not see something really useful. A good solution can stare us straight in the face, but because it's a solution we're not familiar with, we tend to be blind to it.
We tend to not see quite a number of better ways that would drastically improve our lives. We tend to not see when someone just gave us a great tip when it's too far from our traditional ways of approaching things. We tend to not see a little trick that would make using the computer much easier. Many of these "not see" things are simple, but we're blind to them because we've never done them nor observed these solutions before.
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There seem to be three essential moments of genius: the "that's odd" moment, the "aha!" moment, and the "oh" moment.
The "that's odd" moment comes when you're fiddling around doing something, many times something monotonous, something that's done all the time, and all of a sudden a totally unexpected result jumps right in front of you. It's not a moment of revelation. Instead, it's more of a "that's odd" or "that's funny" moment. It's something that immediately gains respect ("spect" means look, "re" means again). It's a "look at me again, this is important" something. It grabs your unshakable curiosity.
The "aha!" moment comes after puzzling and puzzling over this unexpected result.
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Peace is hard to come by for one reason: Nature doesn't care what we think is fair.
That creates a dilemma. One blog I wrote illustrates this dilemma. I entitled it "A Perfectly Fair Voting System is Mathematically Impossible." In it, I talk about Kenneth Arrow's famous mathematical proof that it's impossible to always have what people would commonly consider a fair voting system.
At times, following policies that we think are fair is impossible.
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The opposite of a fact is a falsehood, but the opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth.
--Niels Bohr, physicist
Bohr, who debated Einstein extensively and always seemed to have the upper hand, developed the principle of complementarity, meaning items could have contradictory properties. For example, although light appears to behave as both a wave and a stream of particles, many physicists (for now, at least) view the two properties as mutually exclusive. Yet experiments will show both to be true. Thus, he observed with the quote above that the opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth.
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Meet my dog, Mugsy. He's really a very simple creature. He gets excited about all the unimportant things in life. Of course, to him, they're important. However, to us, we understand that the important things in life really are the disagreeable things in other people, why those things are so unacceptable, and why the disagreeable things in us should be acceptable. Those are the important things!
Mugsy? He gets excited about simple things. When it's time to get up and have breakfast. When someone wants to take him for a walk. When he goes outside to relieve himself. When he comes back in from relieving himself. When he gets in the car. When he gets out of the car.
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