timelets | Entries tagged with book

“There are, after all, two kinds of growth. One proceeds gradually, allowing adjustments to environments as environments adjust to whatever’s new. Skillful growers can shape this process.

The other kind of growth defies environments. It’s inner-directed, and hence outwardly oblivious. It resists cultivation, setting its own direction, pace, and purpose. Anticipating no obstacles, it makes no compromises. Like an unchecked predator, an ineradicable weed, or a metastasizing cancer, it fails to see where it’s going until it’s too late. It sequentially consumes its surroundings, and ultimately itself.”
...
That’s the difference, fundamental in strategy, between respecting constraints and denying their existence.

--- John Lewis Gaddis. “On Grand Strategy.”

It's more about the relationship between external vs internal detection and control capabilities, rather than fundamental kinds of growth. The cancer example is particularly telling because during the early stages it can be dealt with relatively easily, while in a metastasizing phase it's almost impossible to contain, at least for now. The same applies to a chain reaction.

They agreed that until that time he should come to her every evening, for the
old woman came by day. The enchantress remarked nothing of this, until once rapunzel said to her, tell me, dame gothel, how it happens that you are so much heavier for me to draw up than
the young king's son - he is with me in a moment. Ah. You wicked child, cried the enchantress. What do I hear you say. I thought I had separated you from all the world, and yet you have deceived me.

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~spok/grimmtmp/
--- Rapunzel. Grimm's Fairy Tales.

“Literacy changes people’s biology and psychology without altering the underlying genetic code. A society in which 95 percent of adults are highly literate would have, on average, thicker corpus callosa and worse facial recognition than a society in which only 5 percent of people are highly literate.
...
Literacy thus provides an example of how culture can change people biologically independent of any genetic differences.
...
highly literate societies are relatively new, and quite distinct from most societies that have ever existed. This means that modern populations are neurologically and psychologically different from those found in societies throughout history and back into our evolutionary past.”

--- Joseph Henrich. “The WEIRDest People in the World.”

A good example about the relationship between information and allocation:

“Imagine you’re stepping on a traditional medical scale. It has two weight bars, one with notches at fifty-pound intervals and the other with notches at one-pound intervals. This allows the user to measure their weight down to the pound. What would happen if your doctor used a scale with only one bar with just two notches, one at fifty pounds and one at five hundred pounds, with no way to measure anything in between? Good luck getting medical advice after the person weighing you writes one or the other on your chart. You could only be morbidly obese or severely underweight. It would be impossible to make good decisions about your weight with such a poor model.

The same holds true for just about all of our decisions. If we misrepresent the world at the extremes of right and wrong, with no shades of grey in between, our ability to make good choices—choices about how we are supposed to be allocating our resources, what kind of decisions we are supposed to be making, and what kind of actions we are supposed to be taking—will suffer.”

--- Annie Duke. “Thinking in Bets.”

“...a victim of our tendency to equate the quality of a decision with the quality of its outcome. Poker players have a word for this: “resulting.” When I started playing poker, more experienced players warned me about the dangers of resulting, cautioning me to resist the temptation to change my strategy just because a few hands didn’t turn out well in the short run.”

Annie Duke. “Thinking in Bets.”

I would not want any reader to find my account confusing and obscure just because he is unfamiliar with the region, so I shall describe its natural features and their relative positions—as I intend to throughout my work, by constantly comparing and correlating unknown places with those which are familiar and long known. Since defeat in military engagements on land or at sea is usually due to geographical factors, and since knowing how an event happened is always more interesting to us than just knowing that it happened, topographical descriptions are important whatever kind of event is being talked about, and especially important for military events.

--- Polybius, The Histories.

Note the method he uses to introduce the reader to the unknown. He also emphasizes the connection between topographic layout and the process (how) that leads to a certain outcome.

When Plato expressly opposes reminiscence and innateness, he means that the latter represents only the abstract image of knowledge, whereas the real movement of learning implies a distinction within the soul between a 'before' and an 'after'; in other words, it implies the introduction of a first time, in which we forget what we knew, since there is a second time in which we recover what we have forgotten.

-- Giles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition.

The before and after technique works extremely well in trying to understand quantitative differences, i.e. recognize a difference maker, within a chain of events.

“The story of Steve Jobs is a remarkable narrative that ties into the fear of job loss to mechanization. His story was told in many books that appeared around the time of the 2007–9 world financial crisis. Particularly notable was the 2011 book Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, which sold 379,000 copies in its first week on sale,24 became a number-one New York Times best seller, and has over 6,500 reviews on Amazon with an average ranking of 4.5 stars out of 5.
...
The Steve Jobs narrative is a fantasy for people who don’t quite fit into conventional society, as many people with inflated egos but modest success in life may see themselves.”

Robert J. Shiller. “Narrative Economics.”

The crucial economic question, therefore, is not whether individual jobs are “bullshit,” but whether they increasingly perform a zero-sum distributive function, whereby the dedication of ever more skill, effort, and technology cannot increase human welfare, given the skill, effort, and technology applied on the other side of the competitive game.

Numerous jobs fall into that category: cyber criminals and the cyber experts employed by companies to repel their attacks; lawyers (both personal and corporate); much of financial trading and asset management; tax accountants and revenue officials; advertising and marketing to build brand X at the expense of brand Y; rival policy campaigners and think tanks; even teachers seeking to ensure that their students achieve the higher relative grades that underpin future success.

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/zero-sum-economy-fuels-high-inequality-by-adair-turner-2018-08

A good introductory book on Category Theory:

F.W. Lawvere & S.H. Schanuel, A first introduction to categories, 2009. Cambridge Univ. Press.

The book has many easy to understand examples, based on sets. I haven't gotten that far to see whether the set-based approach is a limiting or enabling constraint.

http://www.nature.com/news/crispr-the-disruptor-1.17673

https://books.google.com/books?id=h3_7aZz9ZMoC

Honorable mention:

https://books.google.com/books?id=IZ77BwAAQBAJ

A good background/intro book for abstract sets/CT.
https://www.amazon.com/Sets-Mathematics-F-William-Lawvere/dp/0521010608/

Following the capture of Washington in 1814, and in many cases it must be supposed welcoming the excuse, the banks outside of New England suspended specie payment. The elimination of any need to redeem notes greatly facilitated their issue. It alse led to a highly complicated set of discounts when the notes were forwarded for buying goods or paying debts. The notes of New England banks, since they were exchangealbe into gold o silver, were accepted at par therewith. The slightly less promising notes of New York were subject to a discount of 10 percent. The distinctly more garish notes of Baltimore and Washington banks had a 20 percent discount. Numerous notes from west of Appalachians were at a 50 percent discount. Galbraith, p.92.

In the naval battle of Copenhagen in 1801 Nelson lead the attack of the British fleet against a joint Danish/Norwegian enemy. The British fleet of the day was commanded by Admiral Sir Hyde Parker. The two men disagreed over tactics and at one point Hyde Parker sent a signal (by the use of flags) for Nelson to disengage. Nelson was convinced he could win if he persisted and that's when he 'turned a blind eye'.

In their biography, Life of Nelson, published just eight years later, Clarke and M'Arthur printed what they claimed to be a Nelson's actual words at the time:

"Putting the glass to this blind eye, he [Nelson] exclaimed, I really do not see the signal."
The first recorded use of the phrase in the form we normally use it today is in "More letters from Martha Wilmot: impressions of Vienna, 1819-1829." These were reprinted in 1935 and this quotation is recorded as being sent by Ms. Wilmot in 1823:
turn a blind eye and a deaf ear every now and then, and we get on marvellously well."

via http://www.nerdtests.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=641&start=15&

also mentioned in UCB "History of Information".