Snippets

Quotes

AI

If intelligence is a cake, the bulk of the cake is unsupervised learning, the icing on the cake is supervised learning, and the cherry on the cake is reinforcement learning..

— Yann LeCun

Thinking

We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress..

— Richard Feynman

Tolerate genius. My observation has been that mediocre men recognize genius, resent it, and feel compelled to destroy it. There are very few men of genius. But we need all we can find. Almost without exception, they are disagreeable. Don’t destroy them. They lay golden eggs..

— David Ogilvy

The trouble is that most people want to be right. The very best people, however, want to know if they’re right.

— John Cleese

When you first start to study a field, it seems like you have to memorize a zillion things. You don’t. What you need is to identify the core principles – generally three to twelve of them – that govern the field.

— John Reed

“Writing is nature’s way of telling us how lousy our thinking is.”

— Leslie Lamport

…my first thought is never my best thought. My first thought is always someone else’s; it’s always what I’ve already heard about the subject, always the conventional wisdom. It’s only by concentrating, sticking to the question, being patient, letting all the parts of my mind come into play, that I arrive at an original idea. By giving my brain a chance to make associations, draw connections, take me by surprise. And often even that idea doesn’t turn out to be very good. I need time to think about it, too, to make mistakes and recognize them, to make false starts and correct them, to outlast my impulses, to defeat my desire to declare the job done and move on to the next thing…

— William Deresiewicz

Decision Making

Wrong decisions are part of life. Being able to make them work anyway is one of the abilities of those who are successful.

— Warren Buffett

Instead of asking how many tasks you can tackle given your working hours, ask how many you can ditch given what you must do to excel

— Morten Hansen

The knowledge we get by tinkering, via trial and error, experience, and the workings of time, in other words, contact with the earth, is vastly superior to that obtained through reasoning, something self-serving institutions have been very busy hiding from us.

— Nassim Taleb

Communicating

The best way to communicate from one human being to another is through story.

— Donald Knuth

Always remember that to argue, and win, is to break down the reality of the person you are arguing against. It is painful to lose your reality, so be kind, even if you are right.

— Haruki Murakami

Politics & Sport

Politicians and sports coaches both need to be smart enough to master the game, but dumb enough to think it matters.

— David Mitchel

Politics & Religion

You should, in science, believe logic and arguments, carefully drawn, and not authorities.

— Richard Feynman

The instructions of a secular morality that is not based on religious doctrines are exactly like what a person ignorant of music might do, if he were made a conductor and started to wave his hands in front of musicians well-rehearsed in what they are performing. By virtue of its own momentum, and from what pervious conductors had taught the musicians, the music might continue for a while, but obviously the gesticulations made with a stick by a person who knows nothing about music would be useless and eventually confuse the musicians and throw the orchestra off course.

…this sort of confusion is beginning to take place in the minds of people today, as a result of the attempts made by leading figures to instruct people in a morality that is not based on that superior religion which Christian humanity has started, and to some extent succeeded, in assimilating.

— Leo Tolstoy

Politicians and sports coaches both need to be smart enough to master the game, but dumb enough to think it matters.