the scientific method

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Evidence-Based Technical Analysis: Applying the Scientific Method and Statistical Inference to Trading Signals by David Aronson

Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, asset allocation, availability heuristic, backtesting, Black Swan, book value, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, cognitive dissonance, compound rate of return, computerized trading, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, distributed generation, Elliott wave, en.wikipedia.org, equity risk premium, feminist movement, Great Leap Forward, hindsight bias, index fund, invention of the telescope, invisible hand, Long Term Capital Management, managed futures, mental accounting, meta-analysis, p-value, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, price stability, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nelson Elliott, random walk, retrograde motion, revision control, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, riskless arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Sharpe ratio, short selling, source of truth, statistical model, stocks for the long run, sugar pill, systematic trading, the scientific method, transfer pricing, unbiased observer, yield curve, Yogi Berra

Part Two demonstrates one approach to EBTA: testing of 6,402 binary buy/sell rules on the S&P 500 on 25 years of historical data. The rules are evaluated for statistical significance using tests designed to cope with the problem of data-mining bias. Evidence-Based Technical Analysis: Applying the Scientific Method and Statistical Inference to Trading Signals by David R. Aronson Copyright © 2007 David R. Aronson PA RT I Methodological, Psychological, Philosophical, and Statistical Foundations Evidence-Based Technical Analysis: Applying the Scientific Method and Statistical Inference to Trading Signals by David R. Aronson Copyright © 2007 David R. Aronson CHAPTER 1 Objective Rules and Their Evaluation T his chapter introduces the notion of objective binary signaling rules and a methodology for their rigorous evaluation.

Methods more rigorous than visual analysis and intuition are needed to find the exploitable order that may exist in financial market fluctuations. THE ANTIDOTE TO ILLUSORY KNOWLEDGE: THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD This chapter examined many ways we can be fooled into adopting erroneous knowledge. The best antidote ever invented for this problem is the scientific method, the subject of the next chapter. Evidence-Based Technical Analysis: Applying the Scientific Method and Statistical Inference to Trading Signals by David R. Aronson Copyright © 2007 David R. Aronson CHAPTER 3 The Scientific Method and Technical Analysis T A’s central problem is erroneous knowledge.

Though some rules will be useful on a stand-alone basis, the complexity and randomness of financial markets make it likely that most TESTABLE NO Subjective YES RIGOROUS EVALUATION EBTA Objective NO Value Unknown EBTA YES Objective Valuable YES SIGNIFICANT FIGURE 3.16 Subsets of Technical Analysis. NO Objective No Value The Scientific Method and Technical Analysis 163 rules will add value when used in combination with other rules to form complex rules. Evidence-based technical analysis (EBTA) refers to subsets (3) and (4)—objective TA that has been back tested and subjected to statistical analysis. Given the preceding discussion, the categorization of TA is illustrated in Figure 3.16. The next three chapters discuss the application of statistical analysis to back-test results. Evidence-Based Technical Analysis: Applying the Scientific Method and Statistical Inference to Trading Signals by David R.


The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science by Michael Strevens

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Atul Gawande, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark matter, data science, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Fellow of the Royal Society, fudge factor, germ theory of disease, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, heat death of the universe, Higgs boson, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Johannes Kepler, Large Hadron Collider, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, Peace of Westphalia, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, systematic bias, Thales of Miletus, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, William of Occam

You’ll find no more agreement among them than you do among working scientists. Indeed, the question of the scientific method is one of the most difficult, most contentious, most puzzling problems in modern thought. The consequence is an argument that has sometimes smoldered, sometimes blazed for well over a hundred years—the Great Method Debate. Subtle, powerful thinkers have attempted to describe the scientific method and come to quite opposing conclusions. More perplexing still, many who have inspected science closely have concluded that there is no such thing as the scientific method. To the question of what is new about modern science, of what changed in the Scientific Revolution, they answer “Nothing much”—or as the sociologist Steven Shapin has declared, “There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution.”

Science is so vital to the quality of our modern life that even if the scientific method turned out to be something rather boring and unremarkable—a superior kind of experimental technique, say—it would be imperative to find it and to frame it in a book. I would have no interest, however, in writing that book. What fascinates me is that science’s rules of engagement are so unexpected, so unintuitive, so odd. It is this peculiarity, I believe, that accounts for science’s late arrival. Even putting aside the fascinating question of science’s delay, the weirdness of the scientific method is an intellectual spectacle in itself.

How is it that science, for all its protocols and procedures and statistical handbooks, remains so malleable, so subject in its deliverances to personal, social, financial interests? Do scientists knowingly and deliberately subvert or ignore the scientific method, saluting it in public but then in private doing whatever best suits their ends? Or is the scientific method itself a unicorn, a name for something that isn’t really there—leaving scientists to muddle through as best they can using the same rules of thumb that humans have relied on for millennia, subject to all the usual prejudices? Neither explanation, I think, is quite right.


pages: 340 words: 91,416

Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray by Sabine Hossenfelder

Adam Curtis, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Brownian motion, clockwork universe, cognitive bias, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data science, deep learning, double helix, game design, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Large Hadron Collider, Murray Gell-Mann, Nick Bostrom, random walk, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Skype, Stephen Hawking, sunk-cost fallacy, systematic bias, TED Talk, the scientific method

An unnatural number is called “fine-tuned.” • If we are starved of data and need a theory to decide where to look for new data, mistakes in theory development can lead to a dead end. • Some philosophers are proposing to weaken the scientific method so that scientists can select theories by criteria other than a theory’s ability to describe observation. • The questions of how to move on despite lack of data and whether to amend the scientific method are relevant beyond the foundations of physics. * Quick reminder: a 10 with a raised x is a 1 followed by x zeroes. So, for example, 102 = 100. † “Fine-tuning” has a slightly different meaning in cosmology.

Bardeen’s achievements clearly weren’t based on the arguments from beauty and naturalness that this book is about. 41. Dawid R. 2013. String theory and the scientific method. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. 42. Kragh H. 2002. “The vortex atom: a Victorian theory of everything.” Centaurus 44:32–114; Kragh H. 2011. Higher speculations. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. 43. Ellis G, Silk J. 2014. “Scientific method: defend the integrity of physics.” Nature 516:321–323. 44. Dawid R. 2013. String theory and the scientific method. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, back flap. 45. Wagner CEM. 2005. “Lectures on supersymmetry (II).”

I talk to friends and colleagues, see I’m not the only one confused, and set out to bring reason back to Earth. Chapter 2: What a Wonderful World In which I read a lot of books about dead people and find that everyone likes pretty ideas but that pretty ideas sometimes work badly. At a conference I begin to worry that physicists are about to discard the scientific method. Chapter 3: The State of the Union In which I sum up ten years of education in twenty pages and chat about the glory days of particle physics. Chapter 4: Cracks in the Foundations In which I meet with Nima Arkani-Hamed and do my best to accept that nature isn’t natural, everything we learn is awesome, and that nobody gives a fuck what I think.


pages: 317 words: 97,824

Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes by Maria Konnikova

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, availability heuristic, Bluma Zeigarnik, classic study, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, delayed gratification, fear of failure, feminist movement, functional fixedness, Lao Tzu, pre–internet, Richard Feynman, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Walter Mischel

Less, in that it is stripped of any accompanying emotion and conjecture—all elements that are deemed extraneous to clarity of thought—and made as objective as a nonscientific reality could ever be. The result: the crime as an object of strict scientific inquiry, to be approached by the principles of the scientific method. Its servant: the human mind. What Is the Scientific Method of Thought? When we think of the scientific method, we tend to think of an experimenter in his laboratory, probably holding a test tube and wearing a white coat, who follows a series of steps that runs something like this: make some observations about a phenomenon; create a hypothesis to explain those observations; design an experiment to test the hypothesis; run the experiment; see if the results match your expectations; rework your hypothesis if you must; lather, rinse, and repeat.

., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10013, USA Photograph credits: Page here (bottom left): United States Government here (bottom right): Wikimichels (Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0) here (bottom left): Biophilia curiosus (Creative Commons Attribution 3.0) here (bottom right): Brandon Motz (Creative Commons Attribution 2.0) British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library ISBN 978 0 85786 724 7 Export ISBN 978 0 85786 725 4 eISBN 978 0 85786 726 1 Typeset in Minion Pro Designed by Francesca Belanger To Geoff Choice of attention—to pay attention to this and ignore that—is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences. As Ortega y Gasset said: “Tell me to what you pay attention, and I will tell you who you are.” —W. H. AUDEN CONTENTS Prelude PART ONE UNDERSTANDING (YOURSELF) CHAPTER ONE The Scientific Method of the Mind CHAPTER TWO The Brain Attic: What Is It and What’s in There? PART TWO FROM OBSERVATION TO IMAGINATION CHAPTER THREE Stocking the Brain Attic: The Power of Observation CHAPTER FOUR Exploring the Brain Attic: The Value of Creativity and Imagination PART THREE THE ART OF DEDUCTION CHAPTER FIVE Navigating the Brain Attic: Deduction from the Facts CHAPTER SIX Maintaining the Brain Attic: Education Never Stops PART FOUR THE SCIENCE AND ART OF SELF-KNOWLEDGE CHAPTER SEVEN The Dynamic Attic: Putting It All Together CHAPTER EIGHT We’re Only Human Postlude Acknowledgments Further Reading Index Prelude When I was little, my dad used to read us Sherlock Holmes stories before bed.

So that you, too, can offhandedly mention that number of steps to dazzle a less-with-it companion. So, light that fire, curl up on that couch, and prepare once more to join Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John H. Watson on their adventures through the crime-filled streets of London—and into the deepest crevices of the human mind. PART ONE CHAPTER ONE The Scientific Method of the Mind Something sinister was happening to the farm animals of Great Wyrley. Sheep, cows, horses—one by one, they were falling dead in the middle of the night. The cause of death: a long, shallow cut to the stomach that caused a slow and painful bleeding. Farmers were outraged; the community, shocked.


The Ecotechnic Future: Envisioning a Post-Peak World by John Michael Greer

back-to-the-land, Black Swan, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, David Strachan, deindustrialization, Easter island, European colonialism, Extropian, failed state, feminist movement, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Santayana, hydrogen economy, hygiene hypothesis, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, Jevons paradox, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, McMansion, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, post-industrial society, Project for a New American Century, Ray Kurzweil, Stewart Brand, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K

As the age of cheap abundant energy comes to an end, and the reach of our sciences and technologies scales back to fit the realities of life in a world of hard ecological limits, the overblown ­fantasies 213 214 T he E cotechnic F u t u re that encouraged people to make science carry their ­cravings for transcendence are likely to give way. If the scientific method survives the social consequences of that loss of faith, it could still bring immense benefits to future societies. A useful comparison can be made between the scientific method and the greatest intellectual achievement of the civilization ancestral to ours, the logic devised by ancient Greek philosophers and systematized by Aristotle in the books of his Organon.5 By the time Roman civilization began to come apart, logic formed the core of the dominant intellectual movement of the ancient world: the schools of classical philosophy.

When modern Western cultures first began to take shape, in turn, Aristotle’s logic was still on hand and its influence pervaded the new ethos of science; it’s hardly an accident that Francis Bacon titled his groundbreaking ­essay on scientific method Novum Organum, “the New Organon.” The scientific method could be handed to the future in the same way by some newer Organon. (For that matter, a readable translation of Aristotle’s own Organon would be well worth passing to future societies, which will probably find logic just as useful as the founders of our civilization did.) Science could also be passed on Science in a more immediately useful form, though, by teaching the scientific method to people who have good reason to practice it straight through the twilight years of the industrial age.

Thomas Kuhn pointed out in his celebrated book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions that each branch of science rests on a set of paradigms that go unquestioned, and often unnoticed, except in those revolutionary periods when the gap between the paradigm and the evidence forces itself into view.9 What he did not discuss, and only a few of the sociologists of science have explored, is the extent to which those paradigms unfold from exactly that nonrational sphere of human life which science itself analyzes so ineffectively.10 The scientific method, after all, is simply a set of practical tools for studying nature. Many of the claims made in its name cannot be Science defended by scientific means. No controlled double-blind experiment proves, or could possibly prove, that truths revealed by science are more important than those uncovered by any other means, much less that the scientific method is the best hope for humanity’s future. The fact that many scientists have made these claims does not make them scientific.


pages: 404 words: 134,430

Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time by Michael Shermer

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anesthesia awareness, anthropic principle, Boeing 747, butterfly effect, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, cosmological principle, death from overwork, discovery of DNA, Eddington experiment, false memory syndrome, Gary Taubes, Higgs boson, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, laissez-faire capitalism, Laplace demon, life extension, moral panic, Murray Gell-Mann, out of africa, Richard Feynman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

In other words, science is a specific way of analyzing information with the goal of testing claims. Defining the scientific method is not so simple, as philosopher of science and Nobel laureate Sir Peter Medawar observed: "Ask a scientist what he conceives the scientific method to be and he will adopt an expression that is at once solemn and shifty-eyed: solemn, because he feels he ought to declare an opinion; shifty-eyed, because he is wondering how to conceal the fact that he has no opinion to declare" (1969, p. 11). A sizable literature exists on the scientific method, but there is little consensus among authors. This does not mean that scientists do not know what they are doing.

It is a process for systematically collecting and recording data about the physical world, then categorizing and studying the collected data in an effort to infer the principles of nature that best explain the observed phenomena." Next, the scientific method is discussed, beginning with the collection of "facts," the data of the world. "The grist for the mill of scientific inquiry is an ever increasing body of observations that give information about underlying 'facts.' Facts are the properties of natural phenomena. The scientific method involves the rigorous, methodical testing of principles that might present a naturalistic explanation for those facts" (p. 23). Based on well-established facts, testable hypotheses are formed.

So in the spirit of healthy acceptance of criticism, it is worth examining a few of these critiques. Perhaps the most worthwhile criticism in terms of self-review came from the Toronto Globe and Mail (June 28, 1997). The reviewer brought up an important problem for all skeptics and scientists to ponder. After first observing that "rational reflection does not end with the tenets of the scientific method, themselves subject to various forms of weird belief now and then," he concludes: "Skepticism of the aggressively debunking sort sometimes has a tendency to become a cult of its own, a kind of fascistic scientism, even when it is undertaken for the best of rational motives." Excusing the exaggerated rhetoric (I have never encountered a fellow skeptic who would qualify as a cultist or a fascist), he does have a point that there are limitations to science (which I do not deny) and that occasionally skepticism has its witchhunts.


pages: 467 words: 114,570

Pathfinders: The Golden Age of Arabic Science by Jim Al-Khalili

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Book of Ingenious Devices, colonial rule, Commentariolus, Dmitri Mendeleev, Eratosthenes, Henri Poincaré, invention of the printing press, invention of the telescope, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, liberation theology, retrograde motion, scientific worldview, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, time dilation, trade route, William of Occam

The question is where we draw the line in the work of Jābir ibn Hayyān. This is where we appeal to the quite clear definition of the scientific method: it is the investigation of phenomena, acquiring of new knowledge, and correcting and integrating previous knowledge, based on the gathering of data through observation and measurement. Wherever it is being practised, that is where real science is being done. So was Jābir doing real science? Not quite. Some of the ingredients of the scientific method were not yet in place. But I am more than happy to refer to him as a scientist. What is more, he was the very first of the great scientists of the golden age, even though he did not live to see the creation of al-Ma’mūn’s great academy in Baghdad, the place where we see the golden age truly beginning.

How important were the contributions of Persian culture, Greek philosophy and Indian mathematics? How and why did scientific scholarship flourish under the patronage of certain rulers? And, possibly most interestingly, why and when did this golden era come to an end? As a practising scientist and a humanist, I believe that what is referred to as the ‘scientific method’, and the knowledge that humanity has gained from rational science, gives us far more than just ‘one way of viewing the world’. Progress, through reason and rationality, is by definition a good thing; knowledge and enlightenment are always better than ignorance. Growing up in Iraq, I learnt at school about such great thinkers as Ibn Sīna (Avicenna), al-Kindi and Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen), not as remote figures in history but as my intellectual ancestors.

Similar theories appeared around the same time in China, where it was believed that there were five fundamental elements (earth, water, fire, metal and wood) and in India (earth, water, fire, air and space). The question is whether this combination of the philosophy of matter on the one hand and applied chemical processes on the other constitutes what we might define as real chemistry. I would say not; chemistry is a science and as such must satisfy the rigorous requirements of the scientific method. It is more appropriate to call these ancient practices and notions, going back many thousands of years, ‘protochemistry’;3 the pursuit of alchemy can be regarded as a subfield of this protochemistry. But what of this Muslim scholar to whom I claim we owe so much? Geber the Alchemist is without doubt one of the most fascinating and enigmatic figures in the history of Arabic science.


pages: 198 words: 57,703

The World According to Physics by Jim Al-Khalili

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, butterfly effect, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, double helix, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, germ theory of disease, gravity well, heat death of the universe, Higgs boson, information security, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Large Hadron Collider, Murray Gell-Mann, post-truth, power law, publish or perish, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Stephen Hawking, supercomputer in your pocket, the scientific method, time dilation

I have some answers to my questions now; others I am still searching for. Some people turn to religion or some other ideology or belief system to find answers to life’s mysteries. But for me, there is no substitute for the careful hypothesising, testing, and deducing of facts about the world that are the hallmark of the scientific method. The understanding we have gained through science—and physics in particular—of how the world is made up and how it works is, in my view, not just one of many equally valid ways of reaching the ‘truth’ about reality. It is the only reliable way we have. No doubt many people never fell in love with physics, as I did.

We can also now say with confidence that what mysteries remain need not be attributed to the supernatural. They are phenomena we have yet to understand—and which we hopefully will understand one day through reason, rational enquiry, and, yes … physics. Contrary to what some people might argue, the scientific method is not just another way of looking at the world, nor is it just another cultural ideology or belief system. It is the way we learn about nature through trial and error, through experimentation and observation, through being prepared to replace ideas that turn out to be wrong or incomplete with better ones, and through seeing patterns in nature and beauty in the mathematical equations that describe these patterns.

By observing bodies in orbit around Jupiter, he showed that not all celestial bodies revolve around us. The Earth isn’t at the centre of the cosmos, but is just another planet, like Jupiter, Venus, and Mars, orbiting the Sun. With that discovery, Galileo ushered in modern astronomy. But it wasn’t just a revolution in astronomy that Galileo would bring about. He also helped put the scientific method itself on a firmer foundation. Building on the work of the medieval Arab physicist Ibn al-Haytham, Galileo ‘mathematised’ physics itself. In developing mathematical relationships that describe, and indeed predict, the motions of bodies, he showed beyond doubt that, as he put it, the book of nature ‘is written in mathematical language.’3 At the opposite end of the scale to Galileo’s astronomical observations, a very different new world was opened up by Robert Hooke and Antonie van Leeuwenhoek with the microscope.


pages: 446 words: 578

The end of history and the last man by Francis Fukuyama

affirmative action, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, centre right, classic study, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, European colonialism, Exxon Valdez, F. W. de Klerk, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, Isaac Newton, Joan Didion, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, kremlinology, land reform, liberal world order, liberation theology, life extension, linear programming, long peace, means of production, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, nuclear winter, old-boy network, open economy, post-industrial society, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Socratic dialogue, Strategic Defense Initiative, strikebreaker, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, zero-sum game

But a qualitative change occurred in the relationship of scientific knowledge to the historical process with the rise of modern natural science, that is, from the discovery of the scientific method by men like Descartes, Bacon, and Spinoza in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The possibility of mastering nature opened up by modern natural science was not a universal feature of all societies, but had to be invented at a certain point in history by certain Europeans. However, once having been invented, the scientific method became a universal possession of rational man, potentially accessible to everyone regardless of differences in culture or nationality. Discovery of the scientific method created a fundamental, non-cyclical division of historical time into periods before and after.

If, however, our assumptions about the interrelationships between modern natural science and modern social organization are correct, then such “mixed” outcomes would not be viable for long: for without the destruction or rejection of the scientific method itself, modern natural science would eventually reproduce itself and force the recreation of many aspects of the modern, rational social world as well. So let us consider the question: Is it possible for mankind as a whole to reverse the directionality of history through the rejection or loss of the scientific method? This problem can be broken down into two parts: first, can modern natural science be deliberately rejected by existing societies; and second, can a global cataclysm result in the involuntary loss of modern natural science?

There is no democracy without democrats, that is, without a specifically Democratic Man that desires and shapes democracy even as he is shaped by it. A Universal History based on the progressive unfolding of modern natural science can, moreover, make sense only of the past four hundred or so years of human history, dating from the discovery of the scientific method in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Yet neither the scientific method nor the liberation of human desire that drove subsequent efforts to conquer nature and bend it to human purposes sprang ex nihilo from the pens of Descartes or Bacon. A fuller Universal History, even one that based itself in large measure on modern natural science, would have to understand the pre-modern origins of science, and of the desire that lay behind the desire of Economic Man.


A Dominant Character by Samanth Subramanian

affirmative action, Alfred Russel Wallace, Arthur Eddington, British Empire, CRISPR, double helix, Drosophila, Eddington experiment, epigenetics, Etonian, Fellow of the Royal Society, Gregor Mendel, Gunnar Myrdal, Louis Pasteur, peak oil, phenotype, statistical model, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, Tim Cook: Apple

Haldane Samanth Subramanian For Padma, the most patient recipient imaginable of a writer’s daily bulletins of torture Suffer. —The family motto of the Haldane clan Pathei-mathos (“We suffer into knowledge”). —Aeschylus, Agamemnon Contents Chapter 1: The Scientific Method Chapter 2: The Deep End Chapter 3: Synthesis Chapter 4: Red Haldane Chapter 5: The War at Home Chapter 6: India Chapter 7: Ten Thousand Years Acknowledgments Notes Selected Bibliography Illustration Credits Index A Dominant Character 1. The Scientific Method 1. THE LETTER ARRIVED UNSOLICITED, like thousands of others. A retired chemist in Surrey had taken up plant genetics and set himself an immodest task: to improve the yield of his plants by a process that could then be applied by any farmer anywhere in the world.

The chemist’s results seemed striking, but Haldane needed more: fuller details of the techniques he used and the results he obtained. “You will realise that an account is useless unless it is so worded that others can repeat the work.” This forms the kernel of the scientific method: that researchers elsewhere be able to replicate experiments and derive identical results. Science is held up by principles, and these principles have to be inherent in every place, not just in an amateur horticulturist’s patch of Surrey earth. Haldane never shrank from exalting the scientific method, even in casual correspondence. “Science advances by successive improvements in former theories,” he wrote once to a man who sent him a hollow hypothesis about how thoroughbred racehorses inherited their coat colors.

The papers modeled the processes of natural selection and estimated rates at which gene mutations develop and spread through a population. He was gaining the measure of life itself. The stringency of statistics delighted Haldane. Everyone should know more mathematics, he always thought. Numbers were so satisfyingly precise, equations so universal. How well they ministered to the scientific method! Had Haldane done just this and little else, he would have been an important scientist—not as revolutionary as Einstein, perhaps, and not associated for perpetuity like Watson and Crick with a single, shining discovery, but certainly among the few who altered their field beyond recognition, pushing it forward paper by paper.


pages: 476 words: 132,042

What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, c2.com, carbon-based life, Cass Sunstein, charter city, classic study, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer vision, cotton gin, Danny Hillis, dematerialisation, demographic transition, digital divide, double entry bookkeeping, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, George Gilder, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, invention of air conditioning, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Conway, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lao Tzu, life extension, Louis Daguerre, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, performance metric, personalized medicine, phenotype, Picturephone, planetary scale, precautionary principle, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, refrigerator car, rewilding, Richard Florida, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, silicon-based life, skeuomorphism, Skype, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, the built environment, the long tail, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, Vernor Vinge, wealth creators, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K, yottabyte

Solutions could be archived and transmitted on durable paper. This vastly accelerated humanity’s evolution. The third transition is science, or rather, the structure of the scientific method. This is the invention that enables greater invention. Instead of depending on random hit or miss, or trial and error, the scientific method methodically explores the cosmos and systematically delivers novel ideas. It has accelerated discovery a thousandfold, if not a millionfold. The evolution of the scientific method is responsible for the exponential rise in progress we now enjoy. Without a doubt science has uncovered possibilities—and new ways of finding them—that neither biological nor cultural evolution could have invented alone.

Libraries, catalogs, cross-referencing, dictionaries, concordances, and the publishing of minute observations all blossomed, producing a new level of informational ubiquity—to the extent that today we don’t even notice that printing covers our visual landscape. The scientific method followed printing as a more refined way to deal with the exploding amount of information humans were generating. Via peer-reviewed correspondence and, later, journals, science offered a method of extracting reliable information, testing it, and then linking it to a growing body of other tested, interlinked facts. This newly ordered information—what we call science—could then be used to restructure the organization of matter. It birthed new materials, new processes for making stuff, new tools, and new perspectives. When the scientific method was applied to craft, we invented mass production of interchangeable parts, the assembly line, efficiency, and specialization.

By the 18th century, science had launched the Industrial Revolution, and progress was noticeable in the growing spread of cities, increasing longevity and literacy, and the acceleration of future discoveries. But there is a puzzle. The necessary ingredients of the scientific method are conceptual and fairly low tech: a way to record, catalog, and communicate written evidence and the time to experiment. Why didn’t the Greeks invent it? Or the Egyptians? A time traveler from today could journey back to that era and set up the scientific method in ancient Alexandria or Athens without much trouble. But would it catch on? Maybe not. Science is costly for an individual. Sharing results is of marginal benefit if you are chiefly seeking a better tool for today.


pages: 231 words: 64,734

Safe Haven: Investing for Financial Storms by Mark Spitznagel

Albert Einstein, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, asset allocation, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, book value, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, cognitive dissonance, commodity trading advisor, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, delayed gratification, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, fiat currency, financial engineering, Fractional reserve banking, global macro, Henri Poincaré, hindsight bias, Long Term Capital Management, Mark Spitznagel, Paul Samuelson, phenotype, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Schrödinger's Cat, Sharpe ratio, spice trade, Steve Jobs, tail risk, the scientific method, transaction costs, value at risk, yield curve, zero-sum game

It seemed too much of a compromise. He finds ways to furtively inflict his musical tastes on his coworkers (Mahler, mainly, with performances by von Karajan) and in the early days, as in a ritual, the conversations used to start and end with Karl Popper and central (Black Swan) asymmetries in the scientific method. There is this insistence that we are not in the business of trading, but partaking of an intellectual enterprise, that is, both applying proper inference and probability theory to the business world and, without any modesty, improving these fields according to feedback from markets. And there is all this German terminology, such as Gedankenexperiment.

After all, according to the American physicist Richard Feynman, “Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.” Well, practical results are precisely why we do what we do in investing and risk mitigation: to maximize the growth rate of wealth by lowering risk. And the best practices of the scientific method can actually help us with this. MODUS TOLLENS Aristotle is generally considered to be the earliest and foremost developer of the idea of deductive reasoning, or sullogismos. Deduction is “top‐down” logic, whereby general rules or premises are applied to particular cases or conclusions.

But neither it, nor anything else for that matter, can ever be used to verify a hypothesis as true. When we pair our proposed hypothesis with a minor premise that is an observable fact, we have a well‐constructed test of that hypothesis. Modus tollens, then, is the logical principle of the empirical sciences, and the scientific method itself; it allows us to clarify our ideas and move them away from mere metaphysics. Scientific rigor demands that we be able to pose, experimentally test, and ultimately falsify theories or conjectures in this way. When, like sleuths, we disqualify false theories whenever we can, then step by step we approach the truth.


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How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler by Ryan North

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Anton Chekhov, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, Douglas Hofstadter, Easter island, George Santayana, germ theory of disease, GPS: selective availability, Great Leap Forward, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, invention of radio, invention of the telegraph, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, megastructure, minimum viable product, moveable type in China, placebo effect, safety bicycle, sugar pill, the scientific method, time dilation, trade route, wikimedia commons, zoonotic diseases

But it’s important to remember even science has its limitations and is not an oracle of truth. In fact, science is merely: provisional, contingent, and our best effort so far. Here is the bad news: the scientific method can produce knowledge that is wrong. Here is the good news: the scientific method is still our best technology for uncovering, verifying, and refining correct knowledge, because what the scientific method allows us to do is make wrong knowledge gradually more correct. Usually, this refinement results in progressively more accurate theories—classical physics leading to relativity, leading to quantum physics, which leads to metaquantum ultraphysics5—but it does sometimes result in entire theories being thrown out.

This theory also predicted that a match in a sealed glass jar will eventually stop burning, but for different reasons: the oxygen in the jar is consumed and so the fire goes out, because oxygen fuels the chemical reaction that is fire. This is the more accurate theory of combustion that we still operate under today, but we could still be wrong. Or, more likely, we could still be more correct. Here’s how you produce knowledge using the scientific method. Figure 8: The scientific method, here rendered as a cool atomic-looking thing. An example: maybe you notice (as per step 1) that your corn didn’t grow well this year. For (2), you might ask, “Hey, what the heck, everyone, how come my corn didn’t grow well this year?” You might suspect the drought affected the corn’s growth (3), and so (4) decide to grow corn under controlled conditions, giving each plant different amounts of water but equal amounts of everything else you can think of (sunlight, fertilizer, etc.).

That’s why scientists talk about the theory of gravity (even though gravity itself clearly exists and can cause you to fall down the stairs), theories of climate change (even though it’s obvious our environment is not the same one our parents enjoyed, or that you’re enjoying right now), or the theory of time travel (even though it’s a fact that you’re clearly trapped in the past for reasons that cannot have any legal liability assigned). Note that the scientific method requires you to keep an open mind and be willing—at any time—to discard a theory that no longer fits the facts. This is not an easy thing to do, and many scientists have failed at it. Einstein* himself hated how his own theory of relativity argued against his preferred idea of a fixed and stable universe, and for years tried in vain to find some solution that reconciled them both. But if you succeed at following the scientific method, you will be rewarded, because you will have produced knowledge that is reproducible: that anyone can check by doing the same experiment themselves.


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The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity by Byron Reese

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, basic income, bread and circuses, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, business process, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cognitive bias, computer age, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, dark matter, DeepMind, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, estate planning, financial independence, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, flying shuttle, full employment, Hans Moravec, Hans Rosling, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Hargreaves, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, lateral thinking, life extension, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Lou Jepsen, Moravec's paradox, Nick Bostrom, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, OpenAI, pattern recognition, profit motive, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Rodney Brooks, Sam Altman, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, Timothy McVeigh, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Von Neumann architecture, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator

In 1620, Sir Francis Bacon published a book called Novum Organum (The New Method), which is regarded as the beginning of what we now call the scientific method. Bacon emphasized the firsthand study of nature along with careful observations and the recording of data. From that data, and only from that data, should one draw conclusions. While this isn’t exactly how we think of the scientific method today, Bacon was important because he proposed a way to systematize the acquisition of knowledge through observation. That’s a big idea, a world-changing idea. For up until this time, progress came in fits and starts, as the wheel was both literally and metaphorically reinvented again and again. With the scientific method, the data and conclusions that one person collects can later be used by others to advance knowledge further.

Today’s scientific method is a set of agreed-upon techniques for acquiring knowledge, and then distributing that knowledge in such a way that others can corroborate and build on top of it. It applies only to objects or phenomena of which measurement can be made. Objective measurement is essential because it allows others to reproduce a researcher’s findings, or, as is often the case, to be unable to reproduce them. The scientific method required affordable printing to work properly, which is probably why it wasn’t developed earlier in human history, and why science advanced ever faster as the cost of printing fell. The ancients had many extraordinary technological breakthroughs, but since they lacked the technology and a process for publishing and disseminating information about them, they were quickly forgotten.

In 1687, Newton, on whose shoulders we still stand, published Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, which describes the laws of motion and gravitation. In just a few formulas, Newton showed that even the planets themselves obey straightforward, mechanistic laws. It would be an oversimplification to give all the credit for our rapid technological advance to the scientific method. That was simply the last piece of a complex puzzle. As I’ve already pointed out, we had to have, among other things, imagination, a sense of time, and writing. In addition, we needed much more; to that list we might well add a low-cost way to distribute knowledge, widespread literacy, the rule of law, nonconfiscatory taxation, individual liberty, and a culture that promoted risk taking.


pages: 416 words: 106,582

This Will Make You Smarter: 150 New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking by John Brockman

23andMe, adjacent possible, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, biofilm, Black Swan, Bletchley Park, butterfly effect, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, cognitive load, congestion charging, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data acquisition, David Brooks, delayed gratification, Emanuel Derman, epigenetics, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, Flash crash, Flynn Effect, Garrett Hardin, Higgs boson, hive mind, impulse control, information retrieval, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, market design, Mars Rover, Marshall McLuhan, microbiome, Murray Gell-Mann, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, open economy, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, placebo effect, power law, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, random walk, randomized controlled trial, rent control, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Richard Thaler, Satyajit Das, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific management, security theater, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Stanford marshmallow experiment, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, sugar pill, synthetic biology, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen, Turing complete, Turing machine, twin studies, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

The people in this book lead some of the hottest fields; in these pages they are just giving you little wisps of what they are working on. But I hope you’ll be struck not only by how freewheeling they are willing to be, but also by the undertone of modesty. Several of the essays in this book emphasize that we see the world in deeply imperfect ways, and that our knowledge is partial. They have respect for the scientific method and the group enterprise precisely because the stock of our own individual reason is small. Amid all the charms to follow, that mixture of humility and daring is the most unusual and important. Preface: The Edge Question JOHN BROCKMAN Publisher and editor, Edge In 1981 I founded the Reality Club.

The scientific concept that most people would do well to understand and exploit is the one that almost defines science itself: the controlled experiment. When they are required to make a decision, the instinctive response of most nonscientists is to introspect, or perhaps call a meeting. The scientific method dictates that wherever possible we should instead conduct a suitable controlled experiment. The superiority of the latter approach is demonstrated not only by the fact that science has uncovered so much about the world but also, and even more powerfully, by the fact that such a lot of it—the Copernican Principle, evolution by natural selection, general relativity, quantum mechanics—is so mind-bendingly counterintuitive.

Due to the problems of costly distribution, most negative results have not been shared, thus limiting their potential to speed learning for others. But increasingly published negative results (which include experiments that succeed in showing no effects) are becoming another essential tool in the scientific method. Wrapped up in the idea of embracing failure is the related notion of breaking things to make them better—particularly complex things. Often the only way to improve a complex system is to probe its limits by forcing it to fail in various ways. Software, among the most complex things we make, is usually tested for quality by employing engineers to systematically find ways to crash it.


pages: 733 words: 179,391

Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought by Andrew W. Lo

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, Arthur Eddington, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bob Litterman, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, break the buck, Brexit referendum, Brownian motion, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized trading, confounding variable, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, democratizing finance, Diane Coyle, diversification, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, double helix, easy for humans, difficult for computers, equity risk premium, Ernest Rutherford, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, Fractional reserve banking, framing effect, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hans Rosling, Henri Poincaré, high net worth, housing crisis, incomplete markets, index fund, information security, interest rate derivative, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Hawkins, Jim Simons, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Meriwether, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, language acquisition, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, martingale, megaproject, merger arbitrage, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Neil Armstrong, Nick Leeson, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, p-value, PalmPilot, paper trading, passive investing, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, predatory finance, prediction markets, price discovery process, profit maximization, profit motive, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, RAND corporation, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, Shai Danziger, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, statistical arbitrage, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, stocks for the long run, subprime mortgage crisis, survivorship bias, systematic bias, Thales and the olive presses, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, too big to fail, transaction costs, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, ultimatum game, uptick rule, Upton Sinclair, US Airways Flight 1549, Walter Mischel, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

This solution has two parts: first, we must find a superior narrative; and second, we need to adopt it. Fortunately, we have an excellent technique to find superior narratives at hand: the scientific method. However, there’s no single cut-and-dried recipe for the scientific method. A field biologist would find the methods of the macroeconomist bizarre, and vice versa—in fact, these differences drive much of the infighting between the sciences, and through the hallowed halls of academia. Nevertheless, for most forms of scientific inquiry, we can break the scientific method down into four phases. First, we gather the empirical evidence. (This is especially difficult in economics, which historically has had either too little data, as in macroeconomics, or overwhelming oceans of data, as in financial economics.)

Unlike other ways of determining good narratives, for example, in a court of law, it’s very important in the scientific method that the hypothesis can be visibly proved wrong. And precisely because of the competitive nature of academic science, many people will try to do just that. If the hypothesis holds up under this onslaught, repeatedly verified in study after study, and continues to make good predictions, we can move the hypothesis from the status of a candidate narrative to that of a theory, which is as close as the scientific method will allow us to get to a fact, otherwise known as a good narrative. Once we come up with a good narrative, it still takes a certain degree of courage to adopt it.

As a result, economists have to rely on complicated statistical tests, looking for clear theoretical signals amidst the noise of reality, and we’re often frustrated in our attempts. But sometimes, we get lucky and come across “natural experiments” in the raw data, where just one factor has changed in exactly the spot we happen to be interested in. Then we can use the scientific method directly, by comparing the baseline situation, the control group, versus the changed situation, the experimental group. Fama and company found such a natural experiment in the stock market, and it’s a particularly elegant one. FFJR looked at the impact of a stock split on the price of the stock.


The Data Revolution: Big Data, Open Data, Data Infrastructures and Their Consequences by Rob Kitchin

Bayesian statistics, business intelligence, business process, cellular automata, Celtic Tiger, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, congestion charging, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data science, discrete time, disruptive innovation, George Gilder, Google Earth, hype cycle, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, late capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, longitudinal study, machine readable, Masdar, means of production, Nate Silver, natural language processing, openstreetmap, pattern recognition, platform as a service, recommendation engine, RFID, semantic web, sentiment analysis, SimCity, slashdot, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, smart grid, smart meter, software as a service, statistical model, supply-chain management, technological solutionism, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, transaction costs

.), with these various theoretical camps providing competing views on how best to make sense of the world. In other domains, such as the sciences, there is more unity around a scientific method, underpinned by hypothesis testing to verify or falsify theories. That is not to say, however, that how the scientific method is conceived and deployed does not periodically shift, or that there are few competing theories with respect to explaining particular phenomena (theories about phenomena can differ while sharing the same wider approach to scientific endeavour). Jim Gray, for example (as detailed in Hey et al. 2009), charts the evolution of science through four paradigms, the fourth of which he argues is in its infancy but is the result of the unfolding data revolution (see Table 8.1).

Such data-ist claims underpin much of the hype about big data within the business community, and they are generally expressed through an empiricist framing – that with enough volume, data can speak for themselves. Such empiricism is best embodied in the claims of Chris Anderson (2008), former editor-in-chief at Wired magazine, whose rallying call that big data signal ‘the end of theory’ struck a chord with many commentators. In a provocative piece, Anderson argues that ‘the data deluge makes the scientific method obsolete’; that the patterns and relationships contained within big data inherently produce meaningful and insightful knowledge about social, political and economic processes and complex phenomena. He argues: There is now a better way. Petabytes allow us to say: ‘Correlation is enough.’ We can stop looking for models.

Likewise, Lazer et al. (2009: 10–11) call for collaboration between ‘computationally literate social scientists and socially literate computer scientists’ (2009: 10–11), and with respect to business, Minelli et al. (2013) contend that data science teams should be coupled with business process experts to leverage appropriate insights (see also Table 9.1). Data-driven science Rather than being rooted in empiricism, data-driven science seeks to hold to the tenets of the scientific method, but is more open to using a hybrid combination of abductive, inductive and deductive approaches to advance the understanding of a phenomenon. It differs from the traditional, experimental deductive design in that it seeks to generate hypotheses and insights ‘born from the data’ rather than ‘born from the theory’ (Kelling et al. 2009: 613).


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In Our Own Image: Savior or Destroyer? The History and Future of Artificial Intelligence by George Zarkadakis

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, animal electricity, anthropic principle, Asperger Syndrome, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, British Empire, business process, carbon-based life, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, continuous integration, Conway's Game of Life, cosmological principle, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Edward Snowden, epigenetics, Flash crash, Google Glasses, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, income inequality, index card, industrial robot, intentional community, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, machine translation, millennium bug, mirror neurons, Moravec's paradox, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, off grid, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Plato's cave, post-industrial society, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, theory of mind, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y2K

The laws of nature With Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) in Italy and Francis Bacon (1561–1626) in England, Europe was ushered into the glorious era of scientific discovery by the late sixteenth century. Empiricism and the scientific method took over from mysticism. It was a historical watershed without precedence. Our species has been making observations of the natural world since prehistoric times. Effects were linked to causes. Causality in nature was evident, but not understood. Well into the early seventeenth century, natural phenomena were still attributed by many thinking people to supernatural causes. Divine providence was assumed to pull invisible strings behind every manifestation of nature. The scientific method provided an alternative, revolutionary way of understanding causality in nature.

Australian philosopher David Chalmers has defined the hard problem of consciousness by distinguishing it from ‘easier’ problems that could be explained by examining brain functions: for example, memory, attention or language. These ‘easier’ problems are by no means easy. The HBP project is going to keep itself very busy trying to solve them by applying the scientific method. But Chalmers made the point that there is a certain problem that cannot be explained by a purely materialistic view of the brain. This is the problem of subjective experience, sometimes called qualia. Take, for instance, the ‘redness’ of red wine. The colour we call ‘red’ is an electromagnetic wave radiation with a wavelength between 620 and 740 nanometres.

At the root of the hard problem that Chalmers, Nagel and others describe lies the Cartesian concept of subjectivity and its clash with the objective methods of reductionist science. Ever since Descartes separated the world of knowledge into two magisteria11 – science and religion – science evolved and triumphed by following a specific methodology called the scientific method, which we touched upon earlier. This method uses experiment as its main tool in posing questions and discovering truths about the material world. Experiments are objective, at least in principle. As we have seen, they are repeatable and can be verified by many independent experimenters. Their outcomes are therefore independent of their observers.12 To achieve this, experiments break down complex natural phenomena into smaller parts, on the assumption that if one is able to understand the parts one can also understand the whole, a process called reductionism.


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The Blockchain Alternative: Rethinking Macroeconomic Policy and Economic Theory by Kariappa Bheemaiah

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, cellular automata, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, constrained optimization, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, deskilling, Diane Coyle, discrete time, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Higgs boson, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, inventory management, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, large denomination, Large Hadron Collider, Lewis Mumford, liquidity trap, London Whale, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, offshore financial centre, packet switching, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, power law, precariat, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, private sector deleveraging, profit maximization, QR code, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, Real Time Gross Settlement, rent control, rent-seeking, robo advisor, Satoshi Nakamoto, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, seigniorage, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stuart Kauffman, supply-chain management, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the market place, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, Von Neumann architecture, Washington Consensus

As new ideas take hold, older beliefs are upgraded or discarded. Economics maybe an old discipline of study, but science shows us that we can still teach an old dog new tricks. Economic Entropy versus Economic Equilibrium Technology is generally studied as per the scientific method since science is the creative engine of technology. The scientific method was best described by the philosopher Karl Popper, who stated that any science should be scrutinized by decisive experimentation to determine a scientific law. As per this method, also known as Popperian falsifiability , the empirical truth of any scientific law cannot be verified beyond a shadow of a doubt and cannot be known with absolute certainty.

As banks try to harness the power of the blockchain by creating private blockchains, we find ourselves witnessing the same execution of events as when private companies tried to create intranets instead of simply using the Internet. Whether you are a fan of the bitcoin or the blockchain or both, having a nuanced or biased view on the subject needs to be developed using the scientific method. This is a new technology that has been in existence for less than a decade. But what it represents is a change in our perception of trust along with a change in the organization of authority from traditional hierarchical systems to network-centric flat systems. It allows us to redefine how money and currency derive their actual value and forces us to think about the rebalancing of power on a global socioeconomic scale.

So from an investigative perspective, it makes sense to explore the other extreme. Second, although Kashkari pushes for ending TBTF,14 his arguments are grounded in legislation and are challenged by others who base their statements on past laurels. Hence, Kashkari’s hypotheses need to be tested via the scientific method. Third, as it will be shown in the next sections of this chapter, the fragmentation is already underway, with and without the blessings of regulators. With these tasks in hindsight, we can now go about the challenge of understanding the fragmenting of an industry. To help us understand whether there are structural benefits to the fragmentation, we will need to see if this has occurred in the past in other sectors, as this provides us with some frame of reference.


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The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries

3D printing, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, call centre, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, Computer Numeric Control, continuous integration, corporate governance, disruptive innovation, experimental subject, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, hockey-stick growth, Kanban, Lean Startup, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, payday loans, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, pull request, reality distortion field, risk tolerance, scientific management, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, skunkworks, social bookmarking, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, Toyota Production System, transaction costs

I call this the “just do it” school of entrepreneurship after Nike’s famous slogan.1 Unfortunately, if the plan is to see what happens, a team is guaranteed to succeed—at seeing what happens—but won’t necessarily gain validated learning. This is one of the most important lessons of the scientific method: if you cannot fail, you cannot learn. FROM ALCHEMY TO SCIENCE The Lean Startup methodology reconceives a startup’s efforts as experiments that test its strategy to see which parts are brilliant and which are crazy. A true experiment follows the scientific method. It begins with a clear hypothesis that makes predictions about what is supposed to happen. It then tests those predictions empirically. Just as scientific experimentation is informed by theory, startup experimentation is guided by the startup’s vision.

The more pertinent questions are “Should this product be built?” and “Can we build a sustainable business around this set of products and services?” To answer those questions, we need a method for systematically breaking down a business plan into its component parts and testing each part empirically. In other words, we need the scientific method. In the Lean Startup model, every product, every feature, every marketing campaign—everything a startup does—is understood to be an experiment designed to achieve validated learning. This experimental approach works across industries and sectors, as we’ll see in Chapter 4. 4 EXPERIMENT I come across many startups that are struggling to answer the following questions: Which customer opinions should we listen to, if any?

The purpose of Part One was to explore the importance of learning as the measure of progress for a startup. As I hope is evident by now, by focusing our energies on validated learning, we can avoid much of the waste that plagues startups today. As in lean manufacturing, learning where and when to invest energy results in saving time and money. To apply the scientific method to a startup, we need to identify which hypotheses to test. I call the riskiest elements of a startup’s plan, the parts on which everything depends, leap-of-faith assumptions. The two most important assumptions are the value hypothesis and the growth hypothesis. These give rise to tuning variables that control a startup’s engine of growth.


pages: 270 words: 71,659

The Right Side of History by Ben Shapiro

Abraham Maslow, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, classic study, Donald Trump, Filter Bubble, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, income inequality, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, means of production, microaggression, Peace of Westphalia, Plato's cave, Ronald Reagan, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, W. E. B. Du Bois, white picket fence, women in the workforce

And that led him to the Pythagorean theorem, among other discoveries.15 Plato and Aristotle both believed in the notion of objective truth as well. But Plato and Aristotle disagreed with regard to what constituted objective truth: the Forms, or knowledge of the physical world. In the end, this disagreement would wind up creating the basis for the scientific method: deduction would present human beings with a scientific hypothesis; facts presented by empirical evidence would become the basis for judging that theory; the hypothesis would then be accepted or rejected or changed. Aristotle’s establishment of logical rigor with regard to empirical observation would provide the basis for all further scientific thought.

The development of Western science was rooted in the notion that man’s task was to celebrate God through knowledge of His creation. Contrary to the propaganda of a postmodern atheist movement, nearly every great scientist up until the age of Darwinism was religious. The Scholastic movement produced the earliest roots of the scientific method, all the way up through the discovery by Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) of a heliocentric solar system.24 Perhaps the greatest exponent of the Scholastic method was Roger Bacon (1219–1292), a Franciscan friar who devoted himself to understanding the natural world. Like Aquinas, Bacon was a devoted Aristotelian who suggested gathering facts before coming to conclusions.

Bacon wanted to turn the pursuit of knowledge toward “the benefit and use of men . . . for the glory of the Creator and the relief of man’s estate.”9 In tones that remind us of those of today’s modern social scientists, Bacon also suggested the use of science to determine the best mode of governance and ethics.10 Unlike modern social scientists, however, Bacon took his cue for governance and ethics from the Judeo-Christian tradition. While Bacon upheld the importance of the scientific method and a belief in the pure value of innovation to better the material lives of human beings, Bacon was no atheist. He derided the notion of a Godless universe in harsh terms, suggesting that while “a little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism, depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion.”11 Bacon wrote this prayer in Novum Organum: “let none be alarmed at the objection of the arts and sciences becoming depraved to malevolent or luxurious purposes and the like, for the same can be said of every worldly good: talent, courage, strength, beauty, riches, light itself, and the rest.


pages: 286 words: 92,521

How Medicine Works and When It Doesn't: Learning Who to Trust to Get and Stay Healthy by F. Perry Wilson

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Barry Marshall: ulcers, cognitive bias, Comet Ping Pong, confounding variable, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, data science, Donald Trump, fake news, Helicobacter pylori, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Louis Pasteur, medical malpractice, meta-analysis, multilevel marketing, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, p-value, personalized medicine, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, risk tolerance, selection bias, statistical model, stem cell, sugar pill, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes

In that circumstance, instead of allowing new data to adjust our understanding, we reject new data that doesn’t fit our understanding. Bayesian thinking forces us to grapple with new data, whether we like it or not. If this sounds a bit like the scientific method, it’s because it is. At least when the scientific method works correctly. (In later chapters, I’ll show you how the scientific method can go awry.) When it works, the scientific method is an iterative, stepwise process that inches us closer and closer to the truth about the world. Emanuel Rivers wrote his paper, and our beliefs about how to treat septic shock changed based on the data he showed us.

It is frustrating—frightening, even—to realize you were wrong, but it is necessary. What happened to me (and to Fauci) was scientific progress. Science is the process of discovering truth, and it is imperfect. Individual studies may lead us down unproductive or even harmful paths, but the use of the scientific method has transformed Medicine from an esoteric, quasi-mystical art to its current form, which, to our predecessors, would appear miraculous. While flip-flopping on medical advice can have the effect of reducing public trust in doctors, we should be more concerned about a dogmatic adherence to a principle or idea.

Is it my own bias manifesting “When you’re a hammer, all the world’s a nail”? Perhaps. But I hope not. Because Medicine isn’t politics. It isn’t faith. It isn’t tribal or partisan. It has been with us from the beginning—our deep ancestors trying, failing, and trying again to heal one another. It is the oldest form of compassion, the oldest form of empathy. The scientific method changed Medicine forever, making it more powerful, more perfect, and more valuable. But the gesture of a doctor placing a hand on the hand of a patient is the same now as it was fifty, five hundred, and five thousand years ago. It is no less powerful and no less sublime now than it was then.


Science...For Her! by Megan Amram

Albert Einstein, blood diamond, butterfly effect, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Dmitri Mendeleev, double helix, Google Glasses, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, pez dispenser, Schrödinger's Cat, Steve Jobs, Ted Kaczynski, the scientific method, Wall-E, wikimedia commons

This “I Wanna Dance with Somebody” singer should have been singing “I Wanna Die in Some Tubby!” Because she died in a bathtub! The Scientific Method * * * If you’re looking for a fun way to practice your chemistry, you’ve come on the right face! Use that one with boys! :) The only way to really grasp chemistry is to get hands-on. You’re not going to learn it just by reading about it or drinking a bottle of wine and kissing your gymnastics coach in the locker room. The scientific method is a process by which scientists try to test hypotheses. I’ve adapted some classic experiments to better fit a woman’s lifestyle.

• Healthy Cookin’ • Paula Deen’s Health-Food Cookbook • Household Chemicals • Household-Chemical Cocktails • Acids & Bases & Tigers & Lions, Oh My! • Alcohols • Bad Adjectives to Use at a Wine Tasting • The Science of Chemistry ;) • Sexiest Molecules • Who Wore It Best? Molecules Edition • The Periodic Table of the Elements • Periodic Table Settings • The Period! Ick! Table • Carb-On Feel the Noise! • The Scientific Method • Classic Science Experiments . . . for Her! • Science . . . for Her . . . for Lesbos! • Quiz: Why Did You Decide to Become a Lesbian? • Bondage!!!! ;) • Gases, Gases, Everywhere, but Not a Drop to Stink! • Nuclear Chemistry • Most Embarrassing Moments: Meltdown Edition • Air Pollution • Most Romantic Places to See Smog • Famous Chemists • Marie Curie vs.

Healthy Cookin’ Paula Deen’s Health-Food Cookbook A Lady on the Streets, but a Scientist Also on the Streets! Household Chemicals Acids & Bases & Tigers & Lions, Oh My! Alcohols The Science of Chemistry ;) Sexiest Molecules Who Wore It Best? The Periodic Table of the Elements The Period! Ick! Table Carb-On Feel the Noise! The Scientific Method Science . . . for Her . . . for Lesbos! Quiz: Why Did You Decide to Become a Lesbian? Bondage!!!! ;) Gases, Gases, Everywhere, but Not a Drop to Stink! Nuclear Chemistry Air Pollution Famous Chemists Chemistry Recap Introduction You’re back! OMG I’ve missed you so much, baby girl!!!


pages: 281 words: 79,958

Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives by Michael Specter

23andMe, agricultural Revolution, An Inconvenient Truth, Anne Wojcicki, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 13, Asilomar, autism spectrum disorder, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, clean water, Drosophila, Edward Jenner, food miles, Gregor Mendel, Helicobacter pylori, invention of gunpowder, John Elkington, Neil Armstrong, out of africa, personalized medicine, placebo effect, precautionary principle, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, Simon Singh, Skype, stem cell, synthetic biology, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, twin studies, Upton Sinclair, X Prize

INTRODUCTION Ten years ago, while walking through Harvard Yard, I saw a student wearing a button that said “Progressives against Scientism.” I had no idea what that meant, so I asked him. Sci entism, he explained, is the misguided belief that scientists can solve problems that nature can’t. He reeled off a series of technologies that demonstrated the destructiveness of what he called the “scientific method approach” to life: genetically modified foods, dams, nuclear power plants, and pharmaceuticals all made the list. We talked for a few minutes, then I thanked him and walked away. I didn’t understand how science might be responsible for the many scars humanity has inflicted upon the world, but students have odd intellectual infatuations, and I let it slip from my mind.

But there was another, more important reason for my hesitation: I had assumed these nagging glimpses of irrationality were aberrations, tiny pockets of doubt. Authority may be flawed, and science often fails to fulfill its promises. Nonetheless, I was convinced that people would come around to realizing that the “scientific method approach”—the disciplined and dispassionate search for knowledge—has been the crowning intellectual achievement of humanity. I guess I was in my own kind of denial, because even as things got worse I kept assuring myself that reason would prevail and a book like this would not be necessary.

Oprah Winfrey, for one, has often provided a forum for McCarthy on her show, but she intends to do more: in early 2009, Winfrey’s production company announced that it had hired McCarthy to host a syndicated talk show and write a blog, providing two new platforms from which she can preach her message of scientific illiteracy and fear. This antipathy toward the ideas of progress and scientific discovery represents a fundamental shift in the way we approach the world in the twenty-first century. More than at any time since Francis Bacon invented what we have come to regard as the scientific method (and Galileo began to put it to use), Americans fear science at least as fully as we embrace it. It is a sentiment that has turned our electrifying age of biological adventure into one of doubt and denial. There have always been people who are afraid of the future, of course—Luddites, ignorant of the possibilities of life on this planet and determined to remain that way.


pages: 297 words: 83,651

The Twittering Machine by Richard Seymour

4chan, anti-communist, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cal Newport, Californian Ideology, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, classic study, colonial rule, Comet Ping Pong, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, dark triade / dark tetrad, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, Google Chrome, Google Earth, hive mind, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of writing, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, Jon Ronson, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, Mohammed Bouazizi, moral panic, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, packet switching, patent troll, Philip Mirowski, post scarcity, post-industrial society, post-truth, RAND corporation, Rat Park, rent-seeking, replication crisis, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart cities, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, upwardly mobile, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

As in the financial markets, volatility adds value. The more chaos, the better. IV. From print capitalism to platform capitalism, the apostles of ‘big data’ see in this story nothing but human progress. The triumph of data heralds the end of ideology, the end of theory and even the end of the scientific method, according to former editor-in-chief of Wired, Chris Anderson.9 From now on, they say, rather than conducting experiments or generating theories to understand our world, we can learn everything from mammoth data-sets. For those in need of a progressive-sounding pitch, the advantage of making markets massively more legible is that it spells an end to market mysticism.

Google boss Eric Schmidt, exulting in the revolutionary potential of data, described it as ‘so powerful that nation-states will fight over how much data matters’.55 In an excitable piece for Wired, former editor Chris Anderson enthused that such a scale of data collection would soon render theory and even the scientific method obsolete: ‘with enough data, the numbers speak for themselves’.56 The bonus of big data is omniscience: ‘a full digital copy of our physical universe’, as scientists Carlo Ratti and Dirk Helbing put it.57 We will be able to see all of existence as a stream of electronic writing. And for a while, it was even possible to believe this, if one set aside just how much of the physical universe is unknown and potentially unknowable.

Google, unwilling to concede that its own work implied a theory, simply developed a model for extrapolating from correlations established by the sheer bulk of data. They never tried to work out what the causal relationship was between search terms and the outbreak of flu, because that was a theoretical problem. Ironically, because they were only interested in what worked, their method stopped working. Big data is no substitute for the scientific method. Far from having the magical cure, the pioneers of data extraction and analysis have contributed to today’s degraded ecologies of information and research. VI. If our existing language could adequately account for the rapid degradation of information, we might know what a solution could look like.


pages: 357 words: 110,072

Trick or Treatment: The Undeniable Facts About Alternative Medicine by Edzard Ernst, Simon Singh

animal electricity, Barry Marshall: ulcers, Berlin Wall, correlation does not imply causation, disinformation, false memory syndrome, Florence Nightingale: pie chart, germ theory of disease, John Snow's cholera map, Louis Pasteur, meta-analysis, microdosing, placebo effect, profit motive, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, Simon Singh, sugar pill, The Design of Experiments, the scientific method

In order to address these questions properly, we have divided the book into six chapters. Chapter 1 provides an introduction to the scientific method. It explains how scientists, by experimenting and observing, can determine whether or not a particular therapy is effective. Every conclusion we reach in the rest of this book depends on the scientific method and on an unbiased analysis of the best medical research available. So, by first explaining how science works, we hope to increase your confidence in our subsequent conclusions. Chapter 2 shows how the scientific method can be applied to acupuncture, one of the most established, most tested and most widely used alternative therapies.

Everything we know about the universe, from the components of an atom to the number of galaxies, is thanks to science, and every medical breakthrough, from the development of antiseptics to the eradication of smallpox, has been built upon scientific foundations. Of course, science is not perfect. Scientists will readily admit that they do not know everything, but nevertheless the scientific method is without doubt the best mechanism for getting to the truth. If you are a reader who is sceptical about the power of science, then we kindly request that you at least read Chapter 1. By the end of that first chapter, you should be sufficiently convinced about the value of scientific method that you will consider accepting the conclusions in the rest of the book.

You might have an unwavering belief that all alternative medicine is rubbish, or you might adamantly hold the opposite view, that alternative medicine offers a panacea for all our aches, pains and diseases. In either case, this is not the book for you. There is no point in even reading the first chapter if you are not prepared to consider the possibility that the scientific method can act as the arbiter of truth. In fact, if you have already made up your mind about alternative medicine, then it would be sensible for you to return this book to the bookshop and ask for a refund. Why on Earth would you want to hear about the conclusions of thousands of research studies when you already have all the answers?


Kanban in Action by Marcus Hammarberg, Joakim Sunden

Buckminster Fuller, business logic, call centre, continuous integration, en.wikipedia.org, fail fast, index card, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, Lean Startup, performance metric, place-making, systems thinking, the scientific method, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, Two Sigma

For every little step the team took, they first were asked for the expected outcome. Then they were asked what they learned from what happened. That’s the scientific method at play: developing a hypothesis, making a prediction of what will happen, performing an experiment, observing the data, and reflecting on the difference between the prediction and what happened. 10.3.3. Why does this work? Kanban Kata puts a strong focus on learning in a structured manner. It consists of three katas, or routines, if you like, that build on the scientific method. The nice part about using the scientific method is that no result is bad; it’s only a result. You’ll use the outcome to learn and to improve your next hypothesis.

Make process policies explicit— With explicit policies, you can start to have discussions around your process that are based on objective data instead of on what you think, feel, and have anecdotal evidence for. Implement feedback loops— This practice puts a focus on getting feedback from your process: for example, in what is called an operations review, which is a kind of retrospective for the process itself. Improve collaboratively, evolve experimentally (using models and the scientific method)—This practice encourages you to use models such as the Theory of Constraints or Lean to push your team toward further improvements. That’s three more practices added to the principles we’ve talked about so far. Note that this holds true for the Kanban Method of “incremental, evolutionary change for technology development/operations organizations,” and in that context the last three practices are important.

Although it’s great to make this ... umm ... explicit, we feel that it’s part of the principle of visualization. Implement feedback loops—This is part of the “manage flow” step for us. In order to help the work to flow, feedback loops are essential and should be sought and implemented where needed. Improve collaboratively, evolve experimentally (using models and the scientific method)— We wholeheartedly agree on the importance of this. But this mindset is so deeply rooted in the Lean principles that underlie kanban that we don’t think it’s a principle of kanban per se, but rather the environment and ecosystem that kanban springs from. To further complicate things, David J.


pages: 523 words: 61,179

Human + Machine: Reimagining Work in the Age of AI by Paul R. Daugherty, H. James Wilson

3D printing, AI winter, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, blockchain, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, circular economy, cloud computing, computer vision, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, digital twin, disintermediation, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, friendly AI, fulfillment center, future of work, Geoffrey Hinton, Hans Moravec, industrial robot, Internet of things, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, knowledge worker, Lyft, machine translation, Marc Benioff, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, personalized medicine, precision agriculture, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sensor fusion, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snow Crash, software as a service, speech recognition, tacit knowledge, telepresence, telepresence robot, text mining, the scientific method, uber lyft, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics

The Augmented Researcher: How Science Works in the Age of AI First, we need to step back to understand some basic principles. The scientific method is perhaps the most well-understood, widely deployed process in the world. Over centuries, it has come to be defined as a series of discrete, reproducible steps. First, ask questions and make observations. Next, devise hypotheses. After that, design an experiment to test predictions based on the hypotheses. Then, of course, run tests and collect data. Finally, develop generalized theories. As a process, the scientific method can be visualized cyclically. All that data and those general theories lead to more observation and further research, getting the ball rolling all over again.

All that data and those general theories lead to more observation and further research, getting the ball rolling all over again. Because the scientific method’s steps are so clear-cut, it’s no surprise that there are opportunities for artificial intelligence to change the shape of the process itself. While, so far, research institutions and companies involved in science have not fully overhauled the way science is done, some have successfully compressed or exploded particular scientific steps. The following sections look at AI disruptions at each stage of the scientific process—considering which tasks are best for people, which are best for machines, and how both work together.

There, in their own records, was validation of a causal connection, hidden in plain sight. “It was the first time that I know of that machines discovered new medical knowledge,” says Hill. “Straight from the data. There was no human involved in this discovery.”7 GNS Healthcare is showing that it’s possible, when AI is injected into the hypothesis phase of the scientific method, to find previously hidden correlations and causations. Moreover, use of the technology can result in dramatic cost savings. In one recent success, GNS was able to reverse-engineer—without using a hypothesis or preexisting assumptions—PCSK9, a class of drug that reduces bad cholesterol in the bloodstream.


pages: 200 words: 60,987

The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America by Steven Johnson

Albert Einstein, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, Danny Hillis, discovery of DNA, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Kevin Kelly, planetary scale, seminal paper, side project, South Sea Bubble, stem cell, Stewart Brand, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, zero-sum game

Western Europe began to emerge from an alcoholic haze that had lasted for centuries. Emerging from that centuries-long bender, armed with a belief in the scientific method and the conviction, inherited from Newtonian physics, that simple laws could be unearthed beneath complex behavior, the networked, caffeinated minds of the eighteenth century found themselves in a universe that was ripe for discovery. The everyday world was teeming with mysterious phenomena—air, fire, animals, plants, rocks, weather—that had never before been probed with the conceptual tools of the scientific method. This sense of terra incognita also helps explain why Priestley could be so innovative in so many different disciplines, and why Enlightenment culture in general spawned so many distinct paradigm shifts.

Priestley was a key participant in one of these cultural-phase transitions, what was described self-consciously at the time, by Kant and others, as the Enlightenment, a term that embraces both the widening of political and religious possibility in eighteenth-century Europe and the extensive application of the scientific method to problems that had previously been shrouded in darkness. There were literally dozens of paradigm shifts in distinct fields during Priestley’s lifetime, watershed moments of sudden progress where new rules and frameworks of understanding emerged. Priestley alone was a transformative figure in four of them: chemistry, electricity, politics, and faith.

We tend to talk about the history of ideas in terms of individual genius and broader cultural categories—the spirit of the age, the paradigm of research. But ideas happen in specific physical environments as well, environments that bring their own distinct pressures, opportunities, limitations, and happy accidents to the evolution of human understanding. Take Joseph Priestley out of Enlightenment culture, and deprive him of the scientific method, and his legendary streak no doubt disappears, or turns into something radically different. But take Priestley out of Meadow Lane, and deprive him of his hours at the brewery, and you would likely get a different story as well. Ideas are situated in another kind of environment as well: the information network.


pages: 147 words: 39,910

The Great Mental Models: General Thinking Concepts by Shane Parrish

Albert Einstein, anti-fragile, Atul Gawande, Barry Marshall: ulcers, bitcoin, Black Swan, colonial rule, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, delayed gratification, feminist movement, Garrett Hardin, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, John Bogle, Linda problem, mandelbrot fractal, Pepsi Challenge, Philippa Foot, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Ponzi scheme, Richard Feynman, statistical model, stem cell, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the map is not the territory, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem

Essentially, they were looking for the foundational knowledge that would not change and that we could build everything else on, from our ethical systems to our social structures. First principles thinking doesn’t have to be quite so grand. When we do it, we aren’t necessarily looking for absolute truths. Millennia of epistemological inquiry have shown us that these are hard to come by, and the scientific method has demonstrated that knowledge can only be built when we are actively trying to falsify it (see Supporting Idea: Falsifiability). Rather, first principles thinking identifies the elements that are, in the context of any given situation, non-reducible. First principles do not provide a checklist of things that will always be true; our knowledge of first principles changes as we understand more.

Its chief value is that it lets us do things in our heads we cannot do in real life, and so explore situations from more angles than we can physically examine and test for. Thought experiments are more than daydreaming. They require the same rigor as a traditional experiment in order to be useful. Much like the scientific method, a thought experiment generally has the following steps: Ask a question Conduct background research Construct hypothesis Test with (thought) experiments Analyze outcomes and draw conclusions Compare to hypothesis and adjust accordingly (new question, etc.) In the James/Allen experiment above, we started with a question: Who would win in a game of basketball?

As popular—and generally useful—as counter- and semi-factuals are, they are also the areas of thought experiment with which we need to use the most caution. Why? Because history is what we call a chaotic system. A small change in the beginning conditions can cause a very different outcome down the line. This is where the rigor of the scientific method is indispensable if we want to draw conclusions that are actually useful. The Trolley Experiment Thought experiments are often used to explore ethical and moral issues. When you are dealing with questions of life and death it is obviously not recommended to kill a bunch of people in order to determine the most ethical course of action.


Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models by Gabriel Weinberg, Lauren McCann

Abraham Maslow, Abraham Wald, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, anti-pattern, Anton Chekhov, Apollo 13, Apple Newton, autonomous vehicles, bank run, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Broken windows theory, business process, butterfly effect, Cal Newport, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, David Attenborough, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Dunning–Kruger effect, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, fake news, fear of failure, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, framing effect, friendly fire, fundamental attribution error, Goodhart's law, Gödel, Escher, Bach, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, housing crisis, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, illegal immigration, imposter syndrome, incognito mode, income inequality, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Nash: game theory, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, lateral thinking, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, LuLaRoe, Lyft, mail merge, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, nocebo, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, p-value, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Thiel, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, Potemkin village, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, premature optimization, price anchoring, principal–agent problem, publication bias, recommendation engine, remote working, replication crisis, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, school choice, Schrödinger's Cat, selection bias, Shai Danziger, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Streisand effect, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, systems thinking, The future is already here, The last Blockbuster video rental store is in Bend, Oregon, The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, uber lyft, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, urban planning, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, warehouse robotics, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, When a measure becomes a target, wikimedia commons

That’s because as the company grows, what is required of its executives changes, moving initially from building a product (design, creation, etc.) to building a company (managing people, defining structure, etc.), to building a sustainable business (financial models, managing managers, etc.). In such a rapidly changing environment, you need a method for adapting quickly. Luckily, science gives us such a mental model for making sure we stay among the “fittest”: the scientific method. Formally, the scientific method is a rigorous cycle of making observations, formulating hypotheses, testing them, analyzing data, and developing new theories. But you can also apply it simply by embracing an experimental mindset. The most successful (and adaptive) people and organizations are constantly refining how they work and what they work on to be more effective.

What type of exercise program can you really stick to? What can you change in your diet or daily routines to make you eat healthier? When a scientific mindset is applied continuously via experimentation, you will improve your chances of being the fittest (some pun intended). Natural selection and the scientific method are just the start. There are a host of natural laws that can help you understand the changes unfolding around you as well as how to adapt to them and even shape them. This chapter highlights many of these natural super models that can help you be more adaptive and manage change. DON’T FIGHT NATURE At some point you have likely heard someone paraphrase Isaac Newton’s first law of motion, often referred to as the law of inertia: “An object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.”

On the positive side, you can make better decisions with your life and career; on the negative side, you can be more resilient when setbacks and unfortunate events occur, and even help limit their negative effects. KEY TAKEAWAYS Adopt an experimental mindset, looking for opportunities to run experiments and apply the scientific method wherever possible. Respect inertia: create or join healthy flywheels; avoid strategy taxes and trying to enact change in high-inertia situations unless you have a tactical advantage such as discovery of a catalyst and a lot of potential energy. When enacting change, think deeply about how to reach critical mass and how you will navigate the technology adoption life cycle.


pages: 299 words: 98,943

Immortality: The Quest to Live Forever and How It Drives Civilization by Stephen Cave

Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, back-to-the-land, clean water, double helix, George Santayana, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Lao Tzu, life extension, planetary scale, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, stem cell, technoutopianism, the scientific method

Its practitioners developed life-extension techniques that are now, over two thousand years later, continuing to prosper: meditation, breathing exercises, the gentle gymnastics of tai chi and qigong, and the consumption of tea, ginseng and many other herbs and minerals. One of its core texts, known as The Yellow Emperor’s Inner Canon, remains the central source for Chinese traditional medicine. Until well into the Renaissance in Europe, there was no distinction between chemistry and alchemy or scientist and wizard. What we now see as the rigors of the scientific method, the antithesis of all superstition, emerged only slowly from the alchemical quest for immortality. Many of the great figures at the dawn of the scientific age, such as Robert Boyle and even Sir Isaac Newton, were steeped in alchemical teachings—Newton himself saw his contributions to alchemy as more important than his discoveries in physics.

Usually this magic stuff is a gift from God or gods; it might be equated with the soul or spirit, like the Egyptian ka; and it separates absolutely the living from the nonliving—men from mud, birds from rocks. But the pioneering philosophers and early scientists of the Enlightenment challenged this view, arguing that living things were natural phenomena, obeying the same rules that governed all matter. By careful study, they argued, we could understand those rules. To the founders of the scientific method, from René Descartes to Nicolas de Condorcet, man was a machine. Therefore just as a good watchmaker could ensure that a watch continues to run perfectly, so the physicians would one day be able to keep humans in perfect working order indefinitely. By the time Condorcet was writing in the late eighteenth century, this link between science, progress and indefinitely extended lifespans was well established.

Life expectancy in the France of his day, as in most of the rest of the world, was around thirty years. These people—your great-great-great-great-great-grandparents—lived in a world of grand cities and gunpowder, yet still their life expectancy was little better than that of cavemen. By the end of the nineteenth century, life expectancy had made the significant leap to over forty, as the scientific method began to be applied to questions of public hygiene and the practice of medicine. But then came the real breakthrough: if we fast-forward just a few more generations, children born at the end of the twentieth century in France, as in most of the Western world, could expect to live to over eighty years of age.


pages: 1,758 words: 342,766

Code Complete (Developer Best Practices) by Steve McConnell

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Buckminster Fuller, business logic, call centre, classic study, continuous integration, data acquisition, database schema, don't repeat yourself, Donald Knuth, fault tolerance, General Magic , global macro, Grace Hopper, haute cuisine, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, index card, inventory management, iterative process, Larry Wall, loose coupling, Menlo Park, no silver bullet, off-by-one error, Perl 6, place-making, premature optimization, revision control, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, seminal paper, slashdot, sorting algorithm, SQL injection, statistical model, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Turing machine, web application

Even better, the effective programmers who debug in one-twentieth the time used by the ineffective programmers aren't randomly guessing about how to fix the program. They're using the scientific method—that is, the process of discovery and demonstration necessary for scientific investigation. The Scientific Method of Debugging Here are the steps you go through when you use the classic scientific method: Gather data through repeatable experiments. Form a hypothesis that accounts for the relevant data. Design an experiment to prove or disprove the hypothesis. Prove or disprove the hypothesis. Repeat as needed. The scientific method has many parallels in debugging. Here's an effective approach for finding a defect: Stabilize the error.

Determine how to prove or disprove the hypothesis, either by testing the program or by examining the code. Prove or disprove the hypothesis by using the procedure identified in 2(c). Fix the defect. Test the fix. Look for similar errors. The first step is similar to the scientific method's first step in that it relies on repeatability. The defect is easier to diagnose if you can stabilize it—that is, make it occur reliably. The second step uses the steps of the scientific method. You gather the test data that divulged the defect, analyze the data that has been produced, and form a hypothesis about the source of the error. You then design a test case or an inspection to evaluate the hypothesis, and you either declare success (regarding proving your hypothesis) or renew your efforts, as appropriate.

General Approach to Debugging Do you use debugging as an opportunity to learn more about your program, mistakes, code quality, and problem-solving approach? Do you avoid the trial-and-error, superstitious approach to debugging? Do you assume that errors are your fault? Do you use the scientific method to stabilize intermittent errors? Do you use the scientific method to find defects? Rather than using the same approach every time, do you use several different techniques to find defects? Do you verify that the fix is correct? Do you use compiler warning messages, execution profiling, a test framework, scaffolding, and interactive debugging?


pages: 257 words: 77,030

A Manual for Creating Atheists by Peter Boghossian

Cass Sunstein, Easter island, Filter Bubble, Henri Poincaré, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, Nick Bostrom, Ray Kurzweil, selection bias, Socratic dialogue, stem cell, the scientific method

“But if faith in God requires independent scientific confirmation, what about the colossal faith our new atheists place in science itself?” —John Haught, God and the New Atheism (2008, p. 45) “Whether they admit to it or not, scientists have faith. It is, obviously, a rational faith that stems from their trust in the scientific method to reveal natural truth. But it is faith nonetheless. Scientists have faith that, based upon past successes, the scientific method will uncover natural truths yet to be discovered. They conduct experiments and make observations without knowing if they will discover something truly new, but they trust that if anything has yet to be discovered in the natural world, science will discover it.

In the latter case, there would thus be no basis for a reliable epistemological comparison. For example, let’s say people in society A prefer to use the Koran to come to knowledge and to understand reality, while people in society B prefer to use the scientific method. For the epistemological relativist these are just different ways to know the world. If a person uses the scientific method in an attempt to lawfully align his beliefs with reality, then he’d judge any other process—like using the Koran—to be not just inferior, but foolish. By extension, the same is true for the person who starts with the Koran. If one starts with the premises that the Koran is a perfect book and it is the best way to understand reality, then by this standard any other process will be judged to be inferior and misguided.


pages: 692 words: 127,032

Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America by Shawn Lawrence Otto

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, anthropic principle, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Brownian motion, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cepheid variable, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, commoditize, cosmological constant, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Dean Kamen, desegregation, different worldview, disinformation, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, energy security, Exxon Valdez, fudge factor, Garrett Hardin, ghettoisation, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Large Hadron Collider, Louis Pasteur, luminiferous ether, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, ocean acidification, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, sharing economy, smart grid, stem cell, synthetic biology, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, War on Poverty, white flight, Winter of Discontent, working poor, yellow journalism, zero-sum game

The goal of science is to create descriptions of reality that are independent of us and our opinions or beliefs. We call these descriptions knowledge. 3. To create this knowledge, we use the scientific method, which is a collection of several techniques, including observation, hypothesizing, induction, experimentation, unique prediction, recording, and critical peer review. These techniques have evolved over time and will likely continue to evolve. 4. Like our senses, the scientific method is fallible and often leads us astray. But it is the best method we have come up with so far, and it has proven to be very powerful. The religious right took issue with these claims when they conflicted with dogma or a literal reading of the Bible.

Inevitably this is uncomfortable, because the process compels us to give up, alter, or somehow intellectually sequester many comforting notions, notions that are often profoundly powerful because they are our most deeply rooted and awestruck explanations about the wonders of creation, the specialness of our identities, our history, and the possibility that our spirits may somehow live on after death. THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD How do we create knowledge? There is no one “scientific method”; rather, there is a collection of strategies that have proven effective in answering our questions about how things in nature really work. How do plants grow? What is stuff made of? How do viruses work? Why are montane voles promiscuous while prairie voles are loyal lifelong mates?

Is life an unbroken chain of genetic code, running down through the generations, endlessly recombining in new forms? Is it software? When does it become an individual with rights? Where do we draw the legal line? The moral line? Can we draw a line at all? Is that the right way to be thinking about it? In each of the above cases, new knowledge was gained by applying the scientific method of making careful observations and recording the data, then testing and drawing conclusions based on the results instead of on assumptions or beliefs, and then publishing those for others to review and attempt to disprove if they can. The knowledge gained through this incredible process gives us new power over the physical world, the power to assist or prevent pregnancy, but it also forces us to reevaluate intuitive assumptions and to refine and in some cases redefine the meanings of words and values we thought we understood.


pages: 460 words: 107,712

A Devil's Chaplain: Selected Writings by Richard Dawkins

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, butterfly effect, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, Desert Island Discs, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, epigenetics, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, gravity well, Gregor Mendel, Necker cube, out of africa, Peoples Temple, phenotype, placebo effect, random walk, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method

Medawar has become a sort of chief spokesman for ‘The Scientist’ in the modern world. He takes a less doleful view of the human predicament than is fashionable, believing that hands are for solving problems rather than for wringing. He regards the scientific method – in the right hands – as our most powerful tool for ‘finding out what is wrong with [the world] and then taking steps to put it right’. As for the scientific method itself, Medawar has a good deal to tell us, and he is well qualified to do so. Not that being a Nobel Prize-winner and a close associate of Karl Popper is in itself an indication that one will talk sense: far from it when you think of others in that category.

This has never struck me as a particularly profound or wise remark,1 but it comes into its own in the special case where the little learning is in philosophy (as it often is). A scientist who has the temerity to utter the t-word (‘true’) is likely to encounter a form of philosophical heckling which goes something like this: There is no absolute truth. You are committing an act of personal faith when you claim that the scientific method, including mathematics and logic, is the privileged road to truth. Other cultures might believe that truth is to be found in a rabbit’s entrails, or the ravings of a prophet up a pole. It is only your personal faith in science that leads you to favour your brand of truth. That strand of half-baked philosophy goes by the name of cultural relativism.

Those of us who have renounced one or another of the three ‘great’ monotheistic religions have, until now, moderated our language for reasons of politeness. Christians, Jews and Muslims are sincere in their beliefs and in what they find holy. We have respected that, even as we have disagreed with it. The late Douglas Adams put it with his customary good humour, in an impromptu speech in 199892 (slightly abridged): Now, the invention of the scientific method is, I’m sure we’ll all agree, the most powerful intellectual idea, the most powerful framework for thinking and investigating and understanding and challenging the world around us that there is, and it rests on the premise that any idea is there to be attacked. If it withstands the attack then it lives to fight another day, and if it doesn’t withstand the attack then down it goes.


pages: 378 words: 107,957

Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody by Helen Pluckrose, James A. Lindsay

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", affirmative action, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, centre right, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, conceptual framework, critical race theory, deplatforming, desegregation, Donald Trump, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, fake news, feminist movement, gentrification, germ theory of disease, Isaac Newton, late capitalism, meta-analysis, microaggression, moral panic, neurotypical, phenotype, sexual politics, Social Justice Warrior, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, transatlantic slave trade, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, women in the workforce

During the seventeenth century, medicine and anatomy, which had previously been modeled on the knowledge of the ancient Greeks, underwent a revolution and knowledge of the body advanced rapidly. The Scientific Revolution was the result of widespread questioning of received wisdom and the rapid proliferation of different kinds of knowledge production. The development of the scientific method in the nineteenth century was centered on skepticism and the need for increasingly rigorous testing and falsification. Beyond cynical “skepticism,” the postmodernists had concerns about the deaths of authenticity and meaning in modern society that also carried considerable weight, especially with French Theorists.

Knowledge, truth, meaning, and morality are therefore, according to postmodernist thinking, culturally constructed and relative products of individual cultures, none of which possess the necessary tools or terms to evaluate the others. At the heart of the postmodern turn is a reaction to and rejection of modernism and modernity.18 According to Enlightenment thinking, objective reality can be known through more or less reliable methods. Knowledge about objective reality produced by the scientific method enabled us to build modernity and permits us to continue doing so. For postmodernism, by contrast, reality is ultimately the product of our socialization and lived experiences, as constructed by systems of language. The sociologist Steven Seidman, who coined the term “the postmodern turn,” recognized the profundity of this change in 1994: “A broad social and cultural shift is taking place in Western societies.

Rather than seeing objective truth as something that exists and that can be provisionally known (or approximated) through processes such as experimentation, falsification, and defeasibility—as Enlightenment, modernist, and scientific thought would have it—postmodern approaches to knowledge inflate a small, almost banal kernel of truth—that we are limited in our ability to know and must express knowledge through language, concepts and categories—to insist that all claims to truth are value-laden constructs of culture. This is called cultural constructivism or social constructivism. The scientific method, in particular, is not seen as a better way of producing and legitimizing knowledge than any other, but as one cultural approach among many, as corrupted by biased reasoning as any other. Cultural constructivism is not the belief that reality is literally created by cultural beliefs—it doesn’t argue, for instance, that when we erroneously believed the Sun went around the Earth, our beliefs had any influence over the solar system and its dynamics.


pages: 261 words: 86,261

The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman by Richard P. Feynman, Jeffrey Robbins

Albert Einstein, Brownian motion, impulse control, index card, John von Neumann, Murray Gell-Mann, pattern recognition, Pepto Bismol, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, scientific worldview, the scientific method

More about education, more about crime; the scores on the tests are going down and there’s more people in prison; young people are committing crimes, we just don’t understand it at all. It just isn’t working, to discover things about these things by using the scientific method in the type of imitation which they are using now. Now whether the scientific method would work in these fields if we knew how to do it, I don’t know. It’s particularly weak in this way. There may be some other method. For example, to listen to the ideas of the past and the experience of people for a long time might be a good idea.

This is very, very important, so important that I would like to delay that aspect, and talk about that still further along in my speech. The question of doubt and uncertainty is what is necessary to begin; for if you already know the answer there is no need to gather any evidence about it. Well, being uncertain, the next thing is to look for evidence, and the scientific method is to begin with trials. But another way and a very important one that should not be neglected and that is very vital is to put together ideas to try to enforce a logical consistency among the various things that you know. It is a very valuable thing to try to connect this, what you know, with that, that you know, and try to find out if they are consistent.

And, although you may gain some temporary fame and excitement, you will not gain a good reputation as a scientist if you haven’t tried to be very careful in this kind of work. And it’s this type of integrity, this kind of care not to fool yourself, that is missing to a large extent in much of the research in Cargo Cult Science. A great deal of their difficulty is, of course, the difficulty of the subject and the inapplicability of the scientific method to the subject. Nevertheless, it should be remarked that this is not the only difficulty. That’s why the planes don’t land–but they don’t land. We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right.


pages: 393 words: 115,217

Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries by Safi Bahcall

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Astronomia nova, behavioural economics, Boeing 747, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, creative destruction, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dunbar number, Edmond Halley, Gary Taubes, Higgs boson, hypertext link, industrial research laboratory, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, Johannes Kepler, Jony Ive, knowledge economy, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mother of all demos, Murray Gell-Mann, PageRank, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, prediction markets, pre–internet, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, random walk, reality distortion field, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, six sigma, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, tulip mania, Wall-E, wikimedia commons, yield management

The report outlined the architecture of a new national research system. Within days of its publication, Bush’s report was hailed across the major news outlets. The New York Times, however, questioned its conclusions and patiently explained the nature of science to Bush (and his 41 MD and PhD coauthors): “The scientific method is always the same, whether it deals with radar or disease. Dr. Bush’s report ignores this fact.” The Times concluded by suggesting a better model: “Soviet Russia has approached this task more realistically.” BusinessWeek, in any event, which approvingly described Bush as “a practical businessman as well as a scholar,” stated that Endless Frontier was “epoch-making” and “must-reading for American businessmen.”

But for all human history up to that time, religious authorities or divine rulers or great-man philosophers decreed what was true and what was false. The idea that truth could be revealed to anyone was radical. Subversive. Its champions were often dismissed as unhinged. That idea, now known by its more modern name, the scientific method, is arguably the mother of all loonshots. The Chinese and Mughal emperors discovered the same lesson that surprised so many of their industrial descendants centuries later: missing loonshots can be fatal. LOONSHOT NURSERIES IN INDUSTRY AND HISTORY This book has been about creating conditions that encourage loonshots inside organizations.

We’ll see why Western Europe became the flourishing loonshot nursery of its time—and what that means for nations today, who wish to avoid the fate of those ancient empires. Let’s start by taking a closer look at that mother of all loonshots. EIGHT MINUTES THAT CHANGED THE WORLD The path to the idea of laws of nature—and the scientific method for revealing those laws—mirrored, for good reason, the path to heliocentrism: the notion that the earth moves around the sun rather than the other way around. If divine rulers could be wrong about the most elementary questions of heaven and earth, then we needed a new way to define and seek truth.


pages: 523 words: 112,185

Doing Data Science: Straight Talk From the Frontline by Cathy O'Neil, Rachel Schutt

Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, Augustin-Louis Cauchy, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, bike sharing, bioinformatics, computer vision, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data science, distributed generation, Dunning–Kruger effect, Edward Snowden, Emanuel Derman, fault tolerance, Filter Bubble, finite state, Firefox, game design, Google Glasses, index card, information retrieval, iterative process, John Harrison: Longitude, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, machine translation, Mars Rover, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, p-value, pattern recognition, performance metric, personalized medicine, pull request, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, selection bias, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, statistical model, stochastic process, tacit knowledge, text mining, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, X Prize

Let’s revise or at least add an overlay to make clear that the data scientist needs to be involved in this process throughout, meaning they are involved in the actual coding as well as in the higher-level process, as shown in Figure 2-3. Figure 2-3. The data scientist is involved in every part of this process Connection to the Scientific Method We can think of the data science process as an extension of or variation of the scientific method: Ask a question. Do background research. Construct a hypothesis. Test your hypothesis by doing an experiment. Analyze your data and draw a conclusion. Communicate your results. In both the data science process and the scientific method, not every problem requires one to go through all the steps, but almost all problems can be solved with some combination of the stages.

Also, while we’re asking fundamental questions like this, what’s the difference between a statistical model and a machine learning algorithm? Before we dive deeply into that, let’s add a bit of context with this deliberately provocative Wired magazine piece, “The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete,” published in 2008 by Chris Anderson, then editor-in-chief. Anderson equates massive amounts of data to complete information and argues no models are necessary and “correlation is enough”; e.g., that in the context of massive amounts of data, “they [Google] don’t have to settle for models at all.”

Every design choice you make can be formulated as an hypothesis, against which you will use rigorous testing and experimentation to either validate or refute. This process, whereby one formulates a well-defined hypothesis and then tests it, might rise to the level of a science in certain cases. Specifically, the scientific method is adopted in data science as follows: You hold on to your existing best performer. Once you have a new idea to prototype, set up an experiment wherein the two best models compete. Rinse and repeat (while not overfitting). Classifiers This section focuses on the process of choosing a classifier.


pages: 180 words: 55,805

The Price of Tomorrow: Why Deflation Is the Key to an Abundant Future by Jeff Booth

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate raider, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, dark matter, deep learning, DeepMind, deliberate practice, digital twin, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, full employment, future of work, game design, gamification, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, Hyman Minsky, hype cycle, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, late fees, low interest rates, Lyft, Maslow's hierarchy, Milgram experiment, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, oil shock, OpenAI, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, software as a service, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, winner-take-all economy, X Prize, zero-sum game

Religions of the world used the printing press to spread their beliefs, but it also set the stage for science-based reasoning. Authors could share their new ideas and have them tested and confirmed or refuted by others. The ability to do this, over time, developed into the scientific method. Although philosophers such as Aristotle (384–322 BCE) and Ibn al-Haytham (965–1040 CE) had used similar logic to describe the world around them, the process itself wasn’t generally accepted as such until the late nineteenth century. There is no one inventor of the scientific method. Like science itself, it continued to be refined thanks to the likes of Galileo, Bacon, Descartes, and Newton. The process involves 1) observation, including rigorous skepticism (to counter our cognitive biases); 2) formulating a hypothesis; 3) making a prediction that can be determined to be true or false; and 4) experiments and testing to determine the validity of the hypothesis.

The process involves 1) observation, including rigorous skepticism (to counter our cognitive biases); 2) formulating a hypothesis; 3) making a prediction that can be determined to be true or false; and 4) experiments and testing to determine the validity of the hypothesis. The process continually repeats, allowing better and better hypotheses to be tested and confirmed. Perhaps the most compelling thing about science and the scientific method is that it is almost never “good enough.” It is designed to continually bring in more evidence to prove existing understanding wrong and to correct it further. Error correction is the basis of all intelligence. As Karl Popper (1902–1994), one of the great twentieth-century philosophers of science, said, “All of our knowledge grows only through the correcting of our mistakes.”43 Some of the biggest revolutions in science actually come from small refinements of existing theories.


pages: 202 words: 58,823

Willful: How We Choose What We Do by Richard Robb

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alvin Roth, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Brexit referendum, capital asset pricing model, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, delayed gratification, diversification, diversified portfolio, effective altruism, endowment effect, Eratosthenes, experimental subject, family office, George Akerlof, index fund, information asymmetry, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, lake wobegon effect, loss aversion, market bubble, market clearing, money market fund, Paradox of Choice, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Peter Singer: altruism, Philippa Foot, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, Richard Thaler, search costs, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, survivorship bias, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, trolley problem, ultimatum game

Conviction in modern medicine goes together with an opposite constellation of beliefs: scientific evidence is the highest standard, and the system that generates this evidence and delivers therapies to patients can be trusted. And the third person, who believes events are in divine hands, might rely on the experience of previously answered prayers. She rejects the scientific method because she believes that God works in mysterious ways. The diversity of opinion in the world is astonishingly vast—far vaster than we would expect if everyone used beliefs merely as instruments to maximize results. Rather than formulating hypotheses, then checking them against empirical evidence to ensure we adopt only the most accurate ones, we pick beliefs that appeal to us.

How Beliefs Are Formed The American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce outlined four routes to adopting a belief: 1. A new belief X is consistent with the things one already knows. 2. An authority to which one has committed says that X is so. 3. X is the style of thing that one is inclined to believe. In Peirce’s words, X is “agreeable to reason.” 4. A new belief X, when subjected to the scientific method, corresponds to data in the world.3 Loosely speaking, beliefs formed according to the first three routes allow us to build a coherent identity. Acting on settled beliefs, even ones that run contrary to empirical evidence, is not irrational but for-itself. In Repetition, Kierkegaard asks, “What would life be if there were no repetition?

But many did not: the richer the family head becomes, the less interested she is in digging into the technical details that a person on the spot needs to know and that earned the fortune in the first place. And the larger family offices grow, the more they adopt the controls typical of institutional investors. Applying Peirce’s rules, we can see why institutional investors hesitated to buy low-priced, complex, illiquid bonds. The fourth, purposeful rule—one applies the scientific method; the belief corresponds to data in the world—couldn’t justify these investments. There were no data on similar events because nothing like this had ever happened before. Many looked to the Great Depression for precedent, but conditions were so different back then (asset-backed securities hadn’t even been invented) that it couldn’t provide much guidance.


pages: 429 words: 137,940

The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement - 30th Anniversary Edition by Eliyahu M. Goldratt

air freight, business climate, industrial robot, means of production, six sigma, Socratic dialogue, the scientific method, transfer pricing

I’m a physician, not a surgeon, In other words, I’m a thinker, not a doer. I say that facetiously, but as a physician, it’s all about diagnosis. And the whole process of diagnosis, whether it’s a patient or an organization, is the application of the scientific method. Eli Goldratt says that his Theory of Constraints is simply the application of the scientific method. So it’s almost natural that an advisor to a mining company—in terms of diagnosing what’s wrong and what to do about it—could be a physician. In fact, some of the teaching materials that the Goldratt Institute uses refer to the medical model.

The Theory of Constraints is about thinking processes, it’s a subset of logic. In other words, the scientific method. DW: Has any of this made you a better teacher of physicians? AV: Absolutely. Absolutely. I’ve told you that diagnosing a patient and diagnosing a business is the same thing. But a doctor learns to diagnose by watching other doctors. It’s not taught as a science. The processes of diagnosis are taught, but what might be called the philosophy of diagnosis is not taught as it is in the Theory of Constraints. The traditional approach is, watch what I do. The approach that I’ve since followed is, let’s look at how the scientific method works, then let’s see if we can apply this to a patient.

And I myself supplied the answer: How does one go about revealing the intrinsic order? Lou asked it as if it is a rhetorical question, as if the obvious answer is that it is impossible. But scientists do reveal the intrinsic order of things . . . and Jonah is a scientist. Somewhere in the scientific method lies the answer for the needed management techniques. It is obvious. But what can I do? I cannot read a book in physics, I don’t know enough mathematics to get through even the first page. But maybe I don’t need it. Jonah stressed that he wasn’t asking me to develop the methods, just to determine clearly what they should be.


pages: 398 words: 100,679

The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World From Scratch by Lewis Dartnell

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, clean water, cotton gin, Dava Sobel, decarbonisation, discovery of penicillin, Dmitri Mendeleev, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, global village, Haber-Bosch Process, invention of movable type, invention of radio, invention of writing, iterative process, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, Kim Stanley Robinson, lone genius, low earth orbit, mass immigration, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, nuclear winter, off grid, Oklahoma City bombing, Richard Feynman, safety bicycle, tacit knowledge, technology bubble, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Timothy McVeigh, trade route

Inspired by Feynman, I’d argue that the best way to help survivors of the Fall is not to create a comprehensive record of all knowledge, but to provide a guide to the basics, adapted to their likely circumstances, as well as a blueprint of the techniques necessary to rediscover crucial understanding for themselves—the powerful knowledge-generation machinery that is the scientific method. The key to preserving civilization is to provide a condensed seed that will readily unpack to yield the entire expansive tree of knowledge, rather than attempting to document the colossal tree itself. Which fragments, to paraphrase T. S. Eliot, are best shored against our ruins? The value of such a book is potentially enormous.

But at what point does a technologically progressing civilization reach a peak beyond which further advance brings diminishing returns? Perhaps a recovering civilization will reach equilibrium at a certain technological level, neither advancing further nor regressing, once it has achieved a stable economy, comfortable population size, and the ability to draw sustainably on natural resources. THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD This book is of course not a complete compendium of all the information you would need to rebuild your world from scratch. A great deal of material has necessarily been left out. We’ve mostly focused on inorganic chemistry, useful for making agricultural fertilizers or industrial reagents, rather than the synthesis or transformations of organic molecules.

For thermometers capable of operating at temperatures beyond the boiling point of mercury, for use in a kiln or furnace, for example, you will need to exploit other physical phenomena. Your investigations of electricity, for instance, will reveal that the resistance of a wire often increases with temperature. THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD—CONTINUED This, then, is the fundamental process for devising reliable means for measurement of any attribute. As the recovering civilization discovers strange new phenomena of nature, new fields of scientific research emerge. Means of isolating the properties of these phenomena and translating them into something that can be reliably measured must be devised before they can begin to be understood and exploited for technological applications.


pages: 322 words: 107,576

Bad Science by Ben Goldacre

Asperger Syndrome, classic study, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, disinformation, Edward Jenner, experimental subject, food desert, hygiene hypothesis, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, John Snow's cholera map, Louis Pasteur, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, nocebo, offshore financial centre, p-value, placebo effect, public intellectual, publication bias, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sugar pill, systematic bias, the scientific method, urban planning

The next stop on our journey is inevitably going to be statistics, because this is one area that causes unique problems for the media. But first, we need to go on a brief diversion. 13 Why Clever People Believe Stupid Things The real purpose of the scientific method is to make sure nature hasn’t misled you into thinking you know something you actually don’t know. Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Why do we have statistics, why do we measure things, and why do we count? If the scientific method has any authority—or as I prefer to think of it, ‘value’—it is because it represents a systematic approach; but this is valuable only because the alternatives can be misleading.

Blinding your patients to whether they had the active treatment or the placebo doesn’t cost money. Overall, doing research robustly and fairly does not necessarily require more money, it simply requires that you think before you start. The only people to blame for the flaws in these studies are the people who performed them. In some cases they will be people who turn their backs on the scientific method as a ‘flawed paradigm’; and yet it seems their great new paradigm is simply ‘unfair tests’. These patterns are reflected throughout the alternative therapy literature. In general, the studies which are flawed tend to be the ones that favour homeopathy, or any other alternative therapy; and the well-performed studies, where every controllable source of bias and error is excluded, tend to show that the treatments are no better than placebo.

These ‘clinical trials’ seemed to be a few anecdotes about how incredibly well her patients felt after seeing her. No controls, no placebo, no attempt to quantify or measure improvements. So Garrow made a modest proposal in a fairly obscure medical newsletter. I am quoting it in its entirety, partly because it is a rather elegantly written exposition of the scientific method by an eminent academic authority on the science of nutrition, but mainly because I want you to see how politely he stated his case: I also am a clinical nutritionist, and I believe that many of the statements in this book are wrong. My hypothesis is that any benefits which Dr McKeith has observed in her patients who take her living food powder have nothing to do with their enzyme content.


pages: 486 words: 148,485

Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error by Kathryn Schulz

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, car-free, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, conceptual framework, cosmological constant, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, David Sedaris, desegregation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, lake wobegon effect, longitudinal study, mandatory minimum, mirror neurons, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Ronald Reagan, six sigma, stem cell, Steven Pinker, subprime mortgage crisis, Tenerife airport disaster, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, trade route

But we have another, competing idea of progress as well—one that rests not on the elimination of error but, surprisingly, on its perpetuation. This idea began to emerge during the Scientific Revolution, through that era’s hallmark development, the scientific method. It is a measure of the method’s success (and its simplicity, in theory if not in practice) that, some 400 years later, virtually every reader of this book will have learned it in junior high school. The gist of the scientific method is that observations lead to hypotheses (which must be testable), which are then subjected to experiments (whose results must be reproducible). If all goes well, the outcome is a theory, a logically consistent, empirically tested explanation for a natural phenomenon.

error’s “grosser forms.” Sully, 186. Ralph Linton. Ralph Linton, “Error in Anthropology,” in Jastrow, ed., 298. that era’s hallmark development, the scientific method. Systematic methods for inquiring into the natural world have been around for ages: ancient Greek naturalists practiced a form of empiricism, and medieval Muslim scientists developed a method of inquiry that relied on experimentation to weigh competing hypotheses. But the scientific method as we understand it today was introduced to the world through the work of Francis Bacon in his 1620 Novum Organum, and René Descartes in his 1637 Discourse on the Method.

If all goes well, the outcome is a theory, a logically consistent, empirically tested explanation for a natural phenomenon. As an ideal of intellectual inquiry and a strategy for the advancement of knowledge, the scientific method is essentially a monument to the utility of error. Most of us gravitate toward trying to verify our beliefs, to the extent that we bother investigating their validity at all. But scientists gravitate toward falsification; as a community if not as individuals, they seek to disprove their beliefs. Thus, the defining feature of a hypothesis is that it has the potential to be proven wrong (which is why it must be both testable and tested), and the defining feature of a theory is that it hasn’t been proven wrong yet.


pages: 396 words: 117,149

The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World by Pedro Domingos

Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Arthur Eddington, backpropagation, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Benoit Mandelbrot, bioinformatics, Black Swan, Brownian motion, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, constrained optimization, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental subject, Filter Bubble, future of work, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Google Glasses, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, incognito mode, information retrieval, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Markoff, John Snow's cholera map, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, large language model, lone genius, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Narrative Science, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, NP-complete, off grid, P = NP, PageRank, pattern recognition, phenotype, planetary scale, power law, pre–internet, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, scientific worldview, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, the long tail, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white flight, yottabyte, zero-sum game

While the first company’s experts write a thousand rules to predict what its customers want, the second company’s algorithms learn billions of rules, a whole set of them for each individual customer. It’s about as fair as spears against machine guns. Machine learning is a cool new technology, but that’s not why businesses embrace it. They embrace it because they have no choice. Supercharging the scientific method Machine learning is the scientific method on steroids. It follows the same process of generating, testing, and discarding or refining hypotheses. But while a scientist may spend his or her whole life coming up with and testing a few hundred hypotheses, a machine-learning system can do the same in a fraction of a second.

Trusting in their powers of reasoning, the rationalists concocted theories of the universe that—to put it gently—did not stand the test of time, but they also invented fundamental mathematical techniques like calculus and analytical geometry. The empiricists were altogether more practical, and their influence is everywhere from the scientific method to the Constitution of the United States. David Hume was the greatest of the empiricists and the greatest English-speaking philosopher of all time. Thinkers like Adam Smith and Charles Darwin count him among their key influences. You could also say he’s the patron saint of the symbolists.

So how do you decide whether to believe what a learner tells you? Simple: you don’t believe anything until you’ve verified it on data that the learner didn’t see. If the patterns the learner hypothesized also hold true on new data, you can be pretty confident that they’re real. Otherwise you know the learner overfit. This is just the scientific method applied to machine learning: it’s not enough for a new theory to explain past evidence because it’s easy to concoct a theory that does that; the theory must also make new predictions, and you only accept it after they’ve been experimentally verified. (And even then only provisionally, because future evidence could still falsify it.)


pages: 397 words: 110,130

Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better by Clive Thompson

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Andy Carvin, augmented reality, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Benjamin Mako Hill, butterfly effect, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, compensation consultant, conceptual framework, context collapse, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, Deng Xiaoping, digital rights, discovery of penicillin, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Edward Thorp, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, Filter Bubble, folksonomy, Freestyle chess, Galaxy Zoo, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Henri Poincaré, hindsight bias, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, Ian Bogost, information retrieval, iterative process, James Bridle, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge worker, language acquisition, lifelogging, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, patent troll, pattern recognition, pre–internet, public intellectual, Richard Feynman, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Socratic dialogue, spaced repetition, superconnector, telepresence, telepresence robot, The future is already here, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Two Sigma, Vannevar Bush, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, X Prize, éminence grise

It’s dynamic, argumentative, collaborative, competitive, filled with flashes of crazy excitement and hours of drudgework, and driven by ego: our desire to be the one who figures it out, at least for now. Viewed this way, the scientific method is deeply relevant to everyday life, because it describes how to approach and solve problems. But in school, students are rarely asked to actually use the scientific method. Games, Steinkuehler says, are an ideal native environment for teaching the power of scientific rigor. If science seeks to uncover the invisible rules that govern the world around us, video games are simulated worlds with invisible rule sets just waiting to be uncovered.

Like many video games, Lineage is quite numeric—each attack shows a number toting up the damage done. After carefully collecting all their data, the teenagers used Excel to build a mathematical model that explained how the boss worked. Then they’d use the model to predict which attacks would be most likely to beat him. That’s when it hit Steinkuehler: the kids were using the scientific method. They’d think of a hypothesis, like “This boss is really susceptible to fire spells.” They’d collect evidence to see if the hypothesis was correct. If it wasn’t, they’d improve it until their hypothesis accounted for the observed data. “My head was spinning,” she tells me. When she met up with one of the kids, she asked him, “Do you realize that what you’re doing is the essence of science?”

That’s the scaling factor. This is, as the academic James Paul Gee describes it, “algebra talk.” Kids who normally couldn’t care less about science were conducting university-level analysis as part of their hobby. Steinkuehler now argues that video games are one of the best modern conduits to teach kids about the scientific method—why and how it works. As she points out, many kids hate science because it’s taught as a set of facts. Indeed, that’s how most adults see science: a bunch of guys in lab coats solemnly delivering information about How the World Works. But science isn’t about facts. It’s about the quest for facts—the process by which we hash through confusing thickets of ignorance.


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The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-But Some Don't by Nate Silver

airport security, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, availability heuristic, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boeing 747, book value, Broken windows theory, business cycle, buy and hold, Carmen Reinhart, Charles Babbage, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disinformation, diversification, Donald Trump, Edmond Halley, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, en.wikipedia.org, equity premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, Freestyle chess, fudge factor, Future Shock, George Akerlof, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, haute cuisine, Henri Poincaré, high batting average, housing crisis, income per capita, index fund, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Japanese asset price bubble, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Laplace demon, locking in a profit, Loma Prieta earthquake, market bubble, Mikhail Gorbachev, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Monroe Doctrine, mortgage debt, Nate Silver, negative equity, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oklahoma City bombing, PageRank, pattern recognition, pets.com, Phillips curve, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, power law, prediction markets, Productivity paradox, proprietary trading, public intellectual, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, savings glut, security theater, short selling, SimCity, Skype, statistical model, Steven Pinker, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, University of East Anglia, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wayback Machine, wikimedia commons

Andrew Gelman and Cosma Tohilla Shalizi, “Philosophy and the Practice of Bayesian Statistics,” British Journal of Mathematical and Statistical Psychology, pp. 1–31, January 11, 2012. http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/philosophy.pdf. 63. Although there are several different formulations of the steps in the scientific method, this version is mostly drawn from “APPENDIX E: Introduction to the Scientific Method,” University of Rochester. http://teacher.pas.rochester.edu/phy_labs/appendixe/appendixe.html. 64. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, Kindle edition). 65. Jacob Cohen, “The Earth Is Round (p<.05),” American Psychologist, 49, 12 (December 1994), pp. 997–1003. http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~maccoun/PP279_Cohen1.pdf. 66.

IBM estimates that we are generating 2.5 quintillion bytes of data each day, more than 90 percent of which was created in the last two years.36 This exponential growth in information is sometimes seen as a cure-all, as computers were in the 1970s. Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired magazine, wrote in 2008 that the sheer volume of data would obviate the need for theory, and even the scientific method.37 This is an emphatically pro-science and pro-technology book, and I think of it as a very optimistic one. But it argues that these views are badly mistaken. The numbers have no way of speaking for themselves. We speak for them. We imbue them with meaning. Like Caesar, we may construe them in self-serving ways that are detached from their objective reality.

Everyone can see the statistical patterns, and they are soon reflected in the betting line. The question is whether they represent signal or noise. Voulgaris forms hypotheses from his basketball knowledge so that he might tell the difference more quickly and more accurately. Voulgaris’s approach to betting basketball is one of the purer distillations of the scientific method that you’re likely to find (figure 8-7). He observes the world and asks questions: why are the Cleveland Cavaliers so frequently going over on the total? He then gathers information on the problem, and formulates a hypothesis: the Cavaliers are going over because Ricky Davis is in a contract year and is trying to play at a fast pace to improve his statistics.


pages: 287 words: 87,204

Erwin Schrodinger and the Quantum Revolution by John Gribbin

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, All science is either physics or stamp collecting, Arthur Eddington, British Empire, Brownian motion, double helix, Drosophila, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, Gregor Mendel, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, lateral thinking, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics, the scientific method, trade route, upwardly mobile

Of course, the person who is usually credited with developing the scientific method, and in particular with doing experiments with falling bodies, is Galileo Galilei (1564–1642)—although as it happens Galileo himself did not drop objects from the Leaning Tower of Pisa. He did experiments with balls rolling down inclined planes, and also interpreted the famous Leaning Tower experiment, actually carried out by a rival trying to disprove Galileo’s claim that a light object and a heavy object dropped at the same time would hit the ground together. Where, though, did Galileo learn the scientific method? He was certainly capable of working it out for himself; but if he needed any prodding in the right direction, he definitely got it.

Right at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the English physician and scientist1 William Gilbert (1544–1603) published a treatise on magnetism, De magnete, in which he not only gave a description of magnetic phenomena that was unsurpassed for two hundred years, but extended the understanding derived from his laboratory studies to explain the Earth’s magnetic field—a significant step out into the cosmos at that time. Gilbert also spelled out the basis of what became the scientific method: testing hypotheses by experiment and observation, and rejecting any ideas which do not stand up to those tests. Bizarre though it may seem to us, even in Gilbert’s day it was still common for philosophers to try to settle arguments about what we would regard as scientific matters—such as whether a heavy object falls faster than a lighter object—literally by argument, rather than by doing experiments.


pages: 304 words: 82,395

Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger, Kenneth Cukier

23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Black Swan, book scanning, book value, business intelligence, business process, call centre, cloud computing, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, dark matter, data science, double entry bookkeeping, Eratosthenes, Erik Brynjolfsson, game design, hype cycle, IBM and the Holocaust, index card, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, lifelogging, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, obamacare, optical character recognition, PageRank, paypal mafia, performance metric, Peter Thiel, Plato's cave, post-materialism, random walk, recommendation engine, Salesforce, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, systematic bias, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Turing test, vertical integration, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

The quest for exactitude began in Europe in the middle of the thirteenth century, when astronomers and scholars took on the ever more precise quantification of time and space—“the measure of reality,” in the words of the historian Alfred Crosby. If one could measure a phenomenon, the implicit belief was, one could understand it. Later, measurement was tied to the scientific method of observation and explanation: the ability to quantify, record, and present reproducible results. “To measure is to know,” pronounced Lord Kelvin. It became a basis of authority. “Knowledge is power,” instructed Francis Bacon. In parallel, mathematicians, and what later became actuaries and accountants, developed methods that made possible the accurate collection, recording, and management of data.

These hypotheses have often been derived from theories of the natural or the social sciences, which in turn help explain and/or predict the world around us. As we transition from a hypothesis-driven world to a data-driven world, we may be tempted to think that we also no longer need theories. In 2008 Wired magazine’s editor-in-chief Chris Anderson trumpeted that “the data deluge makes the scientific method obsolete.” In a cover story called “The Petabyte Age,” he proclaimed that it amounted to nothing short of “the end of theory.” The traditional process of scientific discovery—of a hypothesis that is tested against reality using a model of underlying causalities—is on its way out, Anderson argued, replaced by statistical analysis of pure correlations that is devoid of theory.

., “Machine Learning for the New York City Power Grid,” IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 34, no. 2 (2012), pp. 328–345 (http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/68634). [>] Messiness of the term “service box”—This list comes from Rudin et al., “21st-Century Data Miners Meet 19th-Century Electrical Cables.” Rudin quotation—From interview with Cukier, March 2012. [>] Anderson’s views—Chris Anderson, “The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete,” Wired, June 2008 (http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/16-07/pb_theory/). [>] Anderson’s backpedal—National Public Radio, “Search and Destroy,” July 18, 2008 (http://www.onthemedia.org/2008/jul/18/search-and-destroy/transcript/). [>] On choices influencing our analysis—danah boyd and Kate Crawford.


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The Burning Answer: The Solar Revolution: A Quest for Sustainable Power by Keith Barnham

Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Arthur Eddington, carbon footprint, credit crunch, decarbonisation, distributed generation, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, Ernest Rutherford, Higgs boson, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, Michael Shellenberger, Naomi Klein, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Ted Nordhaus, the scientific method, uranium enrichment, wikimedia commons

It took two decades of dedicated effort by research students and research associates at Imperial, staff at QuantaSol and JDSU, and collaborators at Sheffield University, IMEM Parma, CIP Ipswich and IQE Europe to develop the cell, and the nanostructures, using the scientific method. To produce output power from sunlight with 42.5 per cent efficiency, each electron (and each positron) has to experience a mere five jumps between valence and conduction bands, three of which are assisted by photons. Developing that cell with the scientific method, a restricted amount of funding and no national solar cell laboratory to help was a challenge. By contrast, every electron involved in photosynthesis has ten jumps between far more complex systems than valence and conduction bands.

Before examining the two options for converting carbon dioxide extracted from the air to produce solar fuels, I will give a simplified physicist’s overview of the very complicated chemistry that nature found to solve this problem. As far as we know, she found the solution by chance. With her example before us, and using the ingenuity of the scientific method rather than the random process of evolution, we can surely find a way to make direct air capture ‘economically viable’. What is photosynthesis? The best way to approach this extremely complex subject is by describing Joseph Priestley’s observations, which were fundamental to understanding photosynthesis.

Then, hundreds of millions of years later, this oxygen was needed when the most advanced form of life started burning the fossilised remains of the plants, algae and bacteria which had decayed deep underground, with potentially disastrous consequences. What can we learn from photosynthesis? This very simplified overview of photosynthesis should still enable us to learn some important lessons. First, if nature found such a complicated way to extract carbon dioxide from the air and turn it into plant fuel by chance, application of the scientific method will surely find a simpler and quicker way. Second, the two approaches to artificial photosynthesis that we will meet have taken inspiration from nature, but mimic it to different extents. Third, photosynthesis in plants directly produces a solar fuel, a carbohydrate, which the leaf needs to grow.


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Giving the Devil His Due: Reflections of a Scientific Humanist by Michael Shermer

Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, anti-communist, anti-fragile, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, Chelsea Manning, clean water, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, creative destruction, dark matter, deplatforming, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, Flynn Effect, germ theory of disease, Great Leap Forward, gun show loophole, Hans Rosling, heat death of the universe, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Higgs boson, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, income inequality, intentional community, invisible hand, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, Kim Stanley Robinson, laissez-faire capitalism, Laplace demon, luminiferous ether, Mars Society, McMansion, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, microaggression, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, moral panic, More Guns, Less Crime, Multics, Oklahoma City bombing, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, positional goods, power law, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Ronald Coase, Silicon Valley, Skype, social intelligence, Social Justice Warrior, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, transaction costs, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yogi Berra

This is so, no matter what the outcome of the race and IQ debate, that is, no matter whether the evidence eventually dictates a genetically caused deficit of nil or 5 or 10 or 20 IQ points.” That principle – the freedom to participate in the dialogue that the philosopher Karl Popper called “conjecture and refutation” – is at the heart of both the scientific method and the political process.7 The reason we need critical feedback from others is that our brains come equipped with a set of cognitive heuristics – or rules of thumb, or shortcuts – that help us navigate through the buzzing blurring confusion of information coming in through our senses. These heuristics are also known as cognitive biases because they often distort our percepts to fit preconceived concepts, and they are part of a larger process called “motivated reasoning,” in which no matter what belief system is in place – religious, political, economic, or social – they shape how we interpret information that comes through our senses and motivate us to reason our way to finding the world to be precisely the way we wish it were.

That process of generating new ideas and introducing them to your peers and the public where they can be skeptically scrutinized in the bright light of other minds is the only way to find out if you’ve come up with something true and important or if you’ve been immersed in self-deception. James Flynn hits the mark on this point when he writes, “I know of no alternative to the scientific method to maximize accumulation of truth about the physical world and the causes of human behavior. If scholars are to debate this issue, do we not want the best evidence possible – and this can only come from science.” What if it turns out that the primary cause of racial differences in IQ is the environment but, due to academic censorship of sensitive topics, the only people doing research in this area are those who believe that all such differences are to be found in our genes?

What if it turns out that the primary cause of racial differences in IQ is the environment but, due to academic censorship of sensitive topics, the only people doing research in this area are those who believe that all such differences are to be found in our genes? Where is the environmental refutation to the genetic conjecture? “There will be bad science on both sides of the debate,” Flynn admits. But “The only antidote I know for that is to use the scientific method as scrupulously as possible.” By way of example, Flynn says he discovered his eponymous effect – the “Flynn Effect” that IQ points have been increasing on average about three points every ten years for almost a century9 – by reading Arthur Jensen’s research on IQ and “g” (the general intelligence factor), which no one else noticed because of their reluctance to give any credence to Jensen’s work as a result of his association with the genetic position on racial differences in IQ.


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The Panic Virus: The True Story Behind the Vaccine-Autism Controversy by Seth Mnookin

Albert Einstein, autism spectrum disorder, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disinformation, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, illegal immigration, index card, Isaac Newton, John Gilmore, loss aversion, meta-analysis, mouse model, neurotypical, pattern recognition, placebo effect, precautionary principle, Richard Thaler, Saturday Night Live, selection bias, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

One tactic was to promote themselves as insurrectionist truth tellers doing battle with an establishment more concerned with defending its turf than with improving people’s lives. The success of such a gambit depended on the public’s misunderstanding of the approach scientists rely on to understand the world. The steps of the scientific method are the same whether you’re a sixth grader prepping for a science fair or a physicist proposing a new framework for the universe: Observations lead to hypotheses, hypotheses are tested by experimentation, results are analyzed, conclusions are submitted for publication, and the whole process undergoes peer review.

(To be fair, for a typical twelve-year-old, “publication and peer review” usually means “write it up on a piece of poster board and appeal to your teacher for a good grade.”) It’s a formula so central to the very definition of science that it’s easy to assume it has been accepted as gospel throughout history. That, however, is not the case. The scientific method is actually a relatively new construct, the product of several millennia worth of arguments about the merits of purely hypothetical analysis versus the observation of the world outside ourselves. Aristotle, who believed the only way to truly understand the universe was through a set of abstract “first principles,” was a proponent of the first camp; the tenth-century Persian polymath Ibn-al Haytham, whose evidence-based experiments disproved Aristotle’s speculative theory of light and vision, showed the advantages of the second.

Until the authors of a given theory have provided a detailed explanation of exactly how they got their results, they’re essentially telling the rest of the world to accept their conclusions on faith—which puts them back on the side of the ideologues who define “truth” as whatever they happen to believe at the moment. This emphasis on disproving what your colleagues had previously believed to be accurate can make listening in on scientific debates feel a little like eavesdropping on a newly divorced couple arguing over child visitation rights. The realities of the scientific method also present an uncomfortable challenge for anyone tasked with explaining to the public why this inherent open-endedness doesn’t negate the high degree of certainty that accompanies widely accepted conclusions. The combination of ambiguity and authority implicit in science is hard enough to understand if you are sitting across the table from a scientist; it is an exponentially more challenging point to convey when filtered through media outlets that eschew nuance and depth in favor of attention-grabbing declarations. 35 A Special Master is someone who has been granted the authority to carry out a course of action designated by a court.


The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect by Judea Pearl, Dana Mackenzie

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Asilomar, Bayesian statistics, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, driverless car, Edmond Halley, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Isaac Newton, iterative process, John Snow's cholera map, Loebner Prize, loose coupling, Louis Pasteur, Menlo Park, Monty Hall problem, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, personalized medicine, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, Plato's cave, prisoner's dilemma, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, selection bias, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, The Design of Experiments, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Turing test

Second, Bayes assumed that L is determined mechanically by shooting a billiard ball from a greater distance, say L*. In this way he bestowed objectivity onto P(L) and transformed the problem into one where prior probabilities are estimable from data, as we see in the teahouse and cancer test examples. In many ways, Bayes’s rule is a distillation of the scientific method. The textbook description of the scientific method goes something like this: (1) formulate a hypothesis, (2) deduce a testable consequence of the hypothesis, (3) perform an experiment and collect evidence, and (4) update your belief in the hypothesis. Usually the textbooks deal with simple yes-or-no tests and updates; the evidence either confirms or refutes the hypothesis.

Wright, to his great credit, understood the enormous stakes and stated in no uncertain terms, “In treating the model-free approach (3) as preferred alternative… Karlin et al. are urging not merely a change in method, but an abandonment of the purpose of path analysis and evaluation of the relative importance of varying causes. There can be no such analysis without a model. Their advice to anyone with an urge to make such an evaluation is to repress it and do something else.” Wright understood that he was defending the very essence of the scientific method and the interpretation of data. I would give the same advice today to big-data, model-free enthusiasts. Of course, it is okay to tease out all the information that the data can provide, but let’s ask how far this will get us. It will never get us beyond the first rung of the Ladder of Causation, and it will never answer even as simple a question as “What is the relative importance of various causes?”

Lind established, as conclusively as anybody could at that time, that a diet of citrus fruit prevented sailors from developing this dread disease. By the early 1800s, scurvy had become a problem of the past for the British navy, as all its ships took to the seas with an adequate supply of citrus fruit. This is usually the point at which history books end the story, celebrating a great triumph of the scientific method. It seems very surprising, then, that this completely preventable disease made an unexpected comeback a century later, when British expeditions started to explore the polar regions. The British Arctic Expedition of 1875, the Jackson-Harmsworth Expedition to the Arctic in 1894, and most notably the two expeditions of Robert Falcon Scott to Antarctica in 1903 and 1911 all suffered greatly from scurvy.


pages: 110 words: 6,180

The Visual Miscellaneum: A Colorful Guide to the World's Most Consequential Trivia by David McCandless

Desert Island Discs, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the scientific method

So when someone “speaks the truth”, what they are saying is actually an assemblage of their cultural background, their schooling, and the thoughts and opinions they’ve absorbed from their environment. In a way, you could say that their culture is speaking them. For that reason, in postmodern times, it becomes more accurate and safer to assemble truth with the help of other people, rather than just decide it independently. A clear example of this is the scientific method. Any scientist can do an experiment and declare a discovery about the world. But teams of other scientists must verify or “peer-review” that truth before it’s safe to accept it. The truth here has been assembled by many people. The truth has become social. All the time, though, there is an understanding that even this final “truth” may well just be temporary or convenient, a place-holder to be changed or binned later on.


pages: 304 words: 88,773

The Ghost Map: A Street, an Epidemic and the Hidden Power of Urban Networks. by Steven Johnson

call centre, clean water, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Dean Kamen, digital map, double helix, edge city, Ford Model T, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, Google Earth, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, John Nash: game theory, John Snow's cholera map, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, mass immigration, megacity, mutually assured destruction, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, pattern recognition, peak oil, side project, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the scientific method, trade route, unbiased observer, working poor

Latta’s approach differed from the modern treatment only in terms of quantity: liters of water are necessary to ensure a full recovery. Tragically, Latta’s insight was lost in the swarming mass of cholera cures that emerged in the subsequent decades. Despite all the technological advances of the Industrial Age, Victorian medicine was hardly a triumph of the scientific method. Reading through the newspapers and medical journals of the day, what stands out is not just the breadth of remedies proposed, but the breadth of people involved in the discussion: surgeons, nurses, patent medicine quacks, public-health authorities, armchair chemists, all writing the Times and the Globe (or buying classified advertising there) with news of the dependable cure they had concocted.

The basic technique of population statistics—measuring the incidence of a given phenomenon (disease, crime, poverty) as a percentage of overall population size—had entered the mainstream of scientific and medical thought only in the previous two decades. Epidemiology as a science was still in its infancy, and many of its basic principles had yet to be established. At the same time, the scientific method rarely intersected with the development and testing of new treatments and medicines. When you read through that endless stream of quack cholera cures published in the daily papers, what strikes you most is not that they are all, almost without exception, based on anecdotal evidence. What’s striking is that they never apologize for this shortcoming.

The first is to embrace—as a matter of philosophy and public policy—the insights of science, in particular the fields that descend from the great Darwinian revolution that began only a matter of years after Snow’s death: genetics, evolutionary theory, environmental science. Our safety depends on being able to predict the evolutionary path that viruses and bacteria will take in the coming decades, just as safety in Snow’s day depended on the rational application of the scientific method to public-health matters. Superstition, then and now, is not just a threat to the truth. It’s also a threat to national security. The second is to commit ourselves anew to the kinds of public-health systems that developed in the wake of the Broad Street outbreak, both in the developed world and the developing: clean water supplies, sanitary waste-removal and recycling systems, early vaccination programs, disease detection and mapping programs.


pages: 293 words: 88,490

The End of Theory: Financial Crises, the Failure of Economics, and the Sweep of Human Interaction by Richard Bookstaber

asset allocation, bank run, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, bitcoin, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, cellular automata, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, constrained optimization, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, dark matter, data science, disintermediation, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, epigenetics, feminist movement, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, geopolitical risk, Henri Poincaré, impact investing, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Conway, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, market clearing, market microstructure, money market fund, Paul Samuelson, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Piper Alpha, Ponzi scheme, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, risk/return, Robert Solow, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, sovereign wealth fund, the map is not the territory, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing machine, Turing test, yield curve

He believed that if economics could not explain market crises and “detect and exhibit every kind of periodic fluctuation,” then it was not a complete theory.17 The inquiry into the causes of phenomena as complex as commercial crises could not approach the rigor or mathematical purity of a science unless Jevons purged this subject of all traces of human emotion, unless he assumed—even if he could not prove—that some physical cause was acting on events others might describe as socially driven. Without some observable natural phenomenon to serve as causal agent, commercial crises threatened to become uninterpretable, limiting the claim of economics to be a science. Because Jevons patterned his economic methods after the scientific methods used for studying the natural world, he looked for a natural phenomenon as the anchor for his study of otherwise unexplainable crises. This led him to theorize that sunspots were the culprit.18 He was determined to link sunspot periodicity to the periodicity of commercial crises. And Britain had certainly been subject to them, most recently the 1845–1850 railway mania bubble, which, like all bubbles, did not end well.

You can do all sorts of gymnastics to find a set of stable preferences to encompass this, but I can point to any number of other context-driven preferences, and by the time you adjust to take all of them into account you have left economics in the dust; you have a model of the human psyche. If this dynamic is inevitable, then we have lost an essential part of what is necessary for economics to appeal to the scientific method. Economics operates as if we are like MGonz, like a “goddamn robot,” and it will present a reasonable view of our behavior and preferences if we live in such a contextless world. The fact of humanity is an impediment. That characteristic might not matter in the short term or in a stable world, but times of crisis are not such a world.

Jevons accepted Walras as an ally and promised to spread the news of his Elements of Pure Economics, though in the end he did so only halfheartedly. 17. Jevons and Foxwell (1884), 4. 18. A treatment of Jevons’ interest in crises and his pursuit of sunspots as the explanation is in Poovey (2008), especially 275–83. 19. His reasoning in considering sunspots has a logical structure that echoes in the scientific methods of economics even today. He wrote (Jevons and Foxwell 1884, 194–95): It is a well-known principle of mechanics that the effects of a periodically varying cause are themselves periodic, and usually go through their phases in periods of time equal to those of the cause. There is no doubt that the energy poured upon the earth’s surface in the form of sunbeams is the principal agent in maintaining life here.


pages: 165 words: 50,798

Intertwingled: Information Changes Everything by Peter Morville

A Pattern Language, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, augmented reality, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Black Swan, business process, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, Computer Lib, disinformation, disruptive innovation, folksonomy, holacracy, index card, information retrieval, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, Kanban, Lean Startup, Lyft, messenger bag, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, Nelson Mandela, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Project Xanadu, quantum entanglement, RFID, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, single source of truth, source of truth, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, zero-sum game

We’d pick a road in the fork only to loop back around. But this process improved quality enormously. By creating a safe space-time in which actions and decisions aren’t binding, we defused self-justification for a while. Of course, we often lack the luxury of space-time. This limits collaboration and the scientific method. When thorny questions arise, folks love to suggest A/B testing. Sometimes that’s a great idea, but often the complexity and connectedness of the system make it unfeasible. It’s difficult to isolate variables, and we can’t always judge long term efficacy based upon the initial response. Users adapt to change over time.

These are the questions we must ask. Not so long ago, our ways of knowing were different. Before the printing press, we relied heavily upon personal experience and our senses, using evidence and induction to find the truth. In time, we extended our senses with instruments and formalized trial-and-error as the scientific method. We added to our empirical ways with deduction, using reason and logic to mathematically prove the truth. To absorb second-hand knowledge, we had to do it in person. Cultural wisdom was embodied in rituals, habits, laws, and myths. Power, authority, and trust were centered in the community.


pages: 193 words: 51,445

On the Future: Prospects for Humanity by Martin J. Rees

23andMe, 3D printing, air freight, Alfred Russel Wallace, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, Benoit Mandelbrot, biodiversity loss, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, carbon tax, circular economy, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, decarbonisation, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, Dennis Tito, distributed ledger, double helix, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Great Leap Forward, Higgs boson, Hyperloop, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, mandelbrot fractal, mass immigration, megacity, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, quantitative hedge fund, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart grid, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanislav Petrov, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, supervolcano, technological singularity, the scientific method, Tunguska event, uranium enrichment, Walter Mischel, William MacAskill, Yogi Berra

One beaver says to the other: ‘I didn’t actually build it, but it’s based on my idea’. And I like to remind my theorist colleagues that the Swedish engineer Gideon Sundback, who invented the zipper, made a bigger intellectual leap than most of us ever will. Scientists are widely believed to follow a distinctive procedure that’s described as the scientific method. This belief should be laid to rest. It would be truer to say that scientists follow the same rational style of reasoning as lawyers or detectives in categorising phenomena and assessing evidence. A related (and indeed damaging) misperception is the widespread presumption that there is something especially ‘elite’ about the quality of their thought.

Rees, “Cosmology and the Mulitverse, in Universe or Multiverse, ed. Bernard Carr (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 11.  John Polkinghorne, Science and Theology (London: SPCK/Fortress Press, 1995). CHAPTER 5. CONCLUSIONS   1.  E. O. Wilson, Letters to a Young Scientist (New York: Liveright, 2014).   2.  Karl Popper’s key work on the scientific method is The Logic of Scientific Discovery (London: Routledge, 1959)—a translation of the original German version published in 1934. In the intervening years, Popper enhanced his reputation with his deeply impressive contribution to political theory: The Open Society and Its Enemies.   3.  P. Medawar, The Hope of Progress (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1973), 69.   4.  


pages: 161 words: 51,919

What's Your Future Worth?: Using Present Value to Make Better Decisions by Peter Neuwirth

backtesting, big-box store, Black Swan, collective bargaining, discounted cash flows, en.wikipedia.org, financial engineering, Long Term Capital Management, Rubik’s Cube, Skype, the scientific method

All econometric models, and much of the projections that economists (and those who would use Big Data to predict the future) make, are based on the philosophical principle of “induction,” specifically that the accumulation of empirical data will allow us to form better and better theories about how the world works and that these theories can then be used to make predictions to be tested by subsequent observations. It is the basis for the scientific method that we all learned about in school and many of us use regularly in our daily lives. In no way do I want to say that the scientific method is wrong or that induction is not a powerful and useful tool, but in my view when such a tool is available we must be careful not to try to overgeneralize its applicability and use it for purposes for which it was never intended.


pages: 161 words: 49,972

The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War by Malcolm Gladwell

Albert Einstein, feminist movement, Isaac Newton, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, TED Talk, the scientific method, wikimedia commons

William von Eggers Doering’s quotations are from William von Eggers Doering, interview by James J. Bohning, Philadelphia, PA, and Cambridge, MA, November 1990 and May 1991, Center for Oral History, Science History Institute, available at https://oh.sciencehistory.org/oral-histories/doering-william-von-eggers. Louis Fieser’s quotations are from Louis F. Fieser, The Scientific Method: A Personal Account of Unusual Projects in War and in Peace (New York: Reinhold, 1964). For more information about the birth of napalm, see Robert M. Neer, Napalm: An American Biography (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2015). “After some considerable…for London”: Charles L. McNichols and Clayton D.

Hershberg (not pictured) conducted experiments with combustible gels that led to the invention of napalm. Photo credit: HUP Fieser, Louis (25). Harvard University Archives The first napalm bomb test was conducted on July 4, 1942, behind Harvard Business School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Photo credit: Photograph courtesy of Harvard University Archives/Louis Fieser, The Scientific Method To analyze the power of incendiary bombs, a perfect replica of a Japanese village was built at the Dugway Proving Ground, in Utah, in 1943. Photo credit: Courtesy of JapanAirRaids.org In January of 1945, Major General Curtis E. LeMay (left) replaced Brigadier General Haywood Hansell Jr.


pages: 879 words: 233,093

The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis by Jeremy Rifkin

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, animal electricity, back-to-the-land, British Empire, carbon footprint, classic study, collaborative economy, death of newspapers, delayed gratification, distributed generation, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, feminist movement, Ford Model T, global village, Great Leap Forward, hedonic treadmill, hydrogen economy, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, off grid, off-the-grid, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, Recombinant DNA, scientific management, scientific worldview, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, social intelligence, supply-chain management, surplus humans, systems thinking, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, working poor, World Values Survey

Still, many of us have difficulty accepting the idea of reality as the collective understandings we create about the world around us by dint of the relationships we enter. That’s in large part because we were weaned on the “scientific method,” which informed us that objective reality exists and human beings are capable of knowing it by becoming detached observers—the exact opposite of the embodied approach to reality. Francis Bacon, the pre-Enlightenment English philosopher, wrote of a new way to understand and order reality in his master work, the Novum Organum. Bacon outlined what would later be called the scientific method. Impatient with the ancient Greek approach to science with its emphasis on the “why” of things, Bacon turned his attention to the “how” of things.

In this sense, collaborative learning transforms the classroom into a laboratory for empathic expression which, in turn, enriches the educational process. TEACHING EMPATHIC SCIENCE If we were going to look for ground zero in the teaching of the conventional Enlightenment model of classroom education, it would be the inculcation of the scientific method—an approach to learning that has been nearly deified in the centuries that have followed the European Enlightenment. Children are introduced to the scientific method in middle school and informed that it is the only accurate process by which to gather knowledge and learn about the real world around us. Students are instructed that the best way to investigate phenomena and discover truths is by objective observation.

Bacon’s method, which was heavily influenced by the new ideas about “perspective” that were revolutionizing art, is based on the idea that the only way to know reality is to remove oneself and create a neutral barrier so that a disembodied mind can observe and make value-free judgments about its workings. Bacon was convinced that the scientific method was a powerful new mental tool that would allow the human mind to “conquer and subdue” nature and “shake her to her foundations.” The goal of the new science, said Bacon, was to “establish and extend the power of dominion of the human race itself over the universe.”30 Bacon and the rationalist philosophers who followed him believed that nature is little more than a storehouse of valuable resources and that the only relationship that counted was the exercise of power over it.


pages: 327 words: 103,336

Everything Is Obvious: *Once You Know the Answer by Duncan J. Watts

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active measures, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black Swan, business cycle, butterfly effect, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, collapse of Lehman Brothers, complexity theory, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, discovery of DNA, East Village, easy for humans, difficult for computers, edge city, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, framing effect, Future Shock, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Santayana, happiness index / gross national happiness, Herman Kahn, high batting average, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, industrial cluster, interest rate swap, invention of the printing press, invention of the telescope, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, lake wobegon effect, Laplace demon, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, medical malpractice, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, oil shock, packet switching, pattern recognition, performance metric, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, prediction markets, pre–internet, RAND corporation, random walk, RFID, school choice, Silicon Valley, social contagion, social intelligence, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, ultimatum game, urban planning, Vincenzo Peruggia: Mona Lisa, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, X Prize

In science, we accept that if we want to learn how the world works, we need to test our theories with careful observations and experiments, and then trust the data no matter what our intuition says. And as laborious as it can be, the scientific method is responsible for essentially all the gains in understanding the natural world that humanity has made over the past few centuries. But when it comes to the human world, where our unaided intuition is so much better than it is in physics, we rarely feel the need to use the scientific method. Why is it, for example, that most social groups are so homogeneous in terms of race, education level, and even gender? Why do some things become popular and not others?

What is perhaps less appreciated about the history of science is that it is also filled with examples of initially simple and elegant formulations becoming increasingly more complex and inelegant as they struggle to bear the burden of empirical evidence. Arguably, in fact, it is the capacity of the scientific method to pursue explanatory power, even at the cost of theoretical elegance and parsimony, where its real strength lies. 17. For Berlin’s full analysis of the differences between science and history, and the impossibility of remaking the latter in the image of the former, see Berlin (1960). 18.


Calling Bullshit: The Art of Scepticism in a Data-Driven World by Jevin D. West, Carl T. Bergstrom

airport security, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Wiles, Anthropocene, autism spectrum disorder, bitcoin, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, computer vision, content marketing, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, deepfake, delayed gratification, disinformation, Dmitri Mendeleev, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, epigenetics, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, experimental economics, fake news, Ford Model T, Goodhart's law, Helicobacter pylori, Higgs boson, invention of the printing press, John Markoff, Large Hadron Collider, longitudinal study, Lyft, machine translation, meta-analysis, new economy, nowcasting, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, p-value, Pluto: dwarf planet, publication bias, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social graph, Socratic dialogue, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical model, stem cell, superintelligent machines, systematic bias, tech bro, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, twin studies, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, When a measure becomes a target

University professors, including one of the authors of this book, discussed the paper in their courses. Startup companies based around data analytics inserted the Nature paper into their pitch decks. When you have Google-scale data, argued Wired editor Chris Anderson, “the numbers speak for themselves.” The scientific method was no longer necessary, he argued; the huge volumes of data would tell us everything we need to know. Data scientists didn’t need years of epidemiological training or clinicians to diagnose flu symptoms. They just need enough data to “nowcast”*12 the flu and inform the CDC where to deliver Tamiflu.

If the Google Flu Trends algorithm had to predict flu cases for only the first two years, we would still be writing about its triumph. When asked to extend beyond this time period, it failed. Sound familiar? Yep, this is overfitting. The machine likely focused on irrelevant nuances of that time period. This is where the scientific method can help. It is designed to develop theory that hyper-focuses on the key elements driving the spread of the flu, while ignoring the inconsequential. Search terms might be good indicators of those key elements, but we need a theory to help us generalize beyond two years of predictions. Without theory, predictions based on data rely on mere correlations.

“Monsanto Weedkiller Roundup Was ‘Substantial Factor’ in Causing Man’s Cancer, Jury Says.” The New York Times. March 19, 2019. CHAPTER 8: CALLING BULLSHIT ON BIG DATA “Advances in AI Are Used to Spot Signs of Sexuality.” The Economist. September 9, 2017. Anderson, Chris. “The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete.” Wired. June 23, 2008. Babbage, Charles. Passages from the Life of a Philosopher. London: Longman and Co., 1864. Bloudoff-Indelicato, Mollie. “Have Bad Handwriting? The U.S. Postal Service Has Your Back.” Smithsonian. December 23, 2015. Bradley, Tony. “Facebook AI Creates Its Own Language in Creepy Preview of Our Potential Future.”


The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can't Think the Way We Do by Erik J. Larson

AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, Black Swan, Bletchley Park, Boeing 737 MAX, business intelligence, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, driverless car, Elon Musk, Ernest Rutherford, Filter Bubble, Geoffrey Hinton, Georg Cantor, Higgs boson, hive mind, ImageNet competition, information retrieval, invention of the printing press, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Hawkins, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, Loebner Prize, machine readable, machine translation, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, retrograde motion, self-driving car, semantic web, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, superintelligent machines, tacit knowledge, technological singularity, TED Talk, The Coming Technological Singularity, the long tail, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Turing machine, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Yochai Benkler

We are transitioning to something e­ lse, which ­w ill be smarter and better. Notice that the story is not testable; we just have to wait around and see. If the predicted year of true AI’s coming is false, too, another one can be forecast, a few de­cades into the ­f uture. AI in this sense is unfalsifiable and thus—­according to the accepted rules of the scientific method—­unscientific. Note that I’m not saying that true AI is impossible. As Stuart Russell and other AI researchers like to point out, twentieth-­century T he S uperintelligence E rror 43 scientists such as Ernest Rutherford thought that building an atomic bomb was impossible, but Leo Szilard figured out how nuclear chain reactions work—­a mere twenty-­four hours ­after Rutherford pronounced the idea dead.8 It’s a good reminder not to bet against science.

In his ­later years, he wrote alone in his home, complaining that he was hungry and cold, 96 T he P rob­lem of I nference too poor to afford fuel for the stove. His few friends worried about him and managed to get him a series of lectures at Harvard on the foundations of logic, in which he explained the types of logical inference with a framework that he thought undergirded the scientific method—­a program for thinking clearly. Among the attendees was William James, the famous phi­los­o­pher and early psychologist at Harvard, who ­later confessed he ­d idn’t understand the lectures completely—­that the mathe­matics attached to Peirce’s pictures and diagrams w ­ ere beyond his ken.

Published in arXiv, 2013. 9. Viktor Mayer-­Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier, Big Data: A Revolution That W ­ ill Transform How We Live, Work, and Think (New York: Eamon Dolan / Mari­ner Books, 2014), 6. N O T E S T O P A G E S 14 5 – 17 3 293 10. Chris Anderson, “The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete,” Wired, June 23, 2008. 11. Gil Press, “Big Data is Dead. Long Live Big Data AI,” Forbes, July 1, 2019. 12. Th ­ ese can all be recorded as answers to yes / no questions in a data structure (called a vector) containing “1” for yes and “0” for no. Thus {1,1,1,0,0,1} is a feature vector to be supplied as input to a learning algorithm (the “learner”). ­


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Big Bang by Simon Singh

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, All science is either physics or stamp collecting, Andrew Wiles, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Astronomia nova, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, Brownian motion, carbon-based life, Cepheid variable, Chance favours the prepared mind, Charles Babbage, Commentariolus, Copley Medal, cosmic abundance, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, dark matter, Dava Sobel, Defenestration of Prague, discovery of penicillin, Dmitri Mendeleev, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Edward Charles Pickering, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, Erwin Freundlich, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, fudge factor, Hans Lippershey, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, horn antenna, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Index librorum prohibitorum, information security, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Karl Jansky, Kickstarter, Louis Daguerre, Louis Pasteur, luminiferous ether, Magellanic Cloud, Murray Gell-Mann, music of the spheres, Olbers’ paradox, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Paul Erdős, retrograde motion, Richard Feynman, scientific mainstream, Simon Singh, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, time dilation, unbiased observer, Wilhelm Olbers, William of Occam

The Big Bang model of the universe was developed over the last hundred years, and this was only possible because twentieth-century breakthroughs were built upon a foundation of astronomy constructed in previous centuries. In turn, these theories and observations of the sky were set within a scientific framework that had been assiduously crafted over two millennia. Going back even further, the scientific method as a path to objective truth about the material world could start to blossom only when the role of myths and folklore had begun to decline. All in all, the roots of the Big Bang model and the desire for a scientific theory of the universe can be traced right back to the decline of the ancient mythological view of the world.

When the planet is far from the Sun the radius vector is much longer, but it has a slower speed so it covers a smaller section of the circumference in the same time. Kepler’s ellipses provided a complete and accurate vision of our Solar System. His conclusions were a triumph for science and the scientific method, the result of combining observation, theory and mathematics. He first published his breakthrough in 1609 in a huge treatise entitled Astronomia nova, which detailed eight years of meticulous work, including numerous lines of investigation that led only to dead ends. He asked the reader to bear with him: ‘If thou art bored with this wearisome method of calculation, take pity on me who had to go through with at least seventy repetitions of it, at a very great loss of time.’

Lemaître was determined to discourage the Pope from making proclamations about cosmology, partly to halt the embarrassment that was being caused to supporters of the Big Bang, but also to avoid any potential difficulties for the Church. If the Pope—caught up as he was by his enthusiasm for the Big Bang model—were to endorse the scientific method and utilise it to support the Catholic Church, then this policy might rebound if new scientific discoveries contradicted Biblical teachings. Lemaître contacted Daniel O’Connell, director of the Vatican Observatory and the Pope’s science advisor, and suggested that together they try to persuade the Pope to keep quiet on cosmology.


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The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution by David Wootton

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, book value, British Empire, classic study, clockwork universe, Commentariolus, commoditize, conceptual framework, Dava Sobel, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, fudge factor, germ theory of disease, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Lippershey, interchangeable parts, invention of gunpowder, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, lateral thinking, lone genius, Mercator projection, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Philip Mirowski, placebo effect, QWERTY keyboard, Republic of Letters, social intelligence, spice trade, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

London: T Creede, 1605. Child, William. Wittgenstein. London: Routledge, 2011. Christianson, John Robert. On Tycho’s Island: Tycho Brahe, Science and Culture in the Sixteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Christie, Thony. ‘Nobody Invented the Scientific Method’. 29 August 2012. http://thonyc.wordpress.com/2012/08/29/nobody-invented-the-scientific-method/ (accessed 10 December 2014). Cicero, Marcus Tullius. De natura deorum: Academica. Ed. H Rackham. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1933. Cieslak-Golonka, Maria and Bruno Morten. ‘The Women Scientists of Bologna’. American Scientist 88 (2000): 68–73.

The most striking example of this approach in action is Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Air-pump (1985), generally acknowledged as the most influential work in the discipline since Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions.xlix The new history of science offered, in Steven Shapin’s phrase, a social history of truth.l Scientific method, it was now argued, kept changing, so that there was no such thing as the scientific method: a famous book by Paul Feyerabend was entitled Against Method,li its catchphrase ‘Anything goes’; it was followed by Farewell to Reason.78 Some philosophers and nearly all anthropologists agreed: standards of rationality were, they insisted, local and highly variable.79 But we must reject the Wittgensteinian notion that truth is simply consensus, a notion incompatible with an understanding of one of the fundamental things science does, which is to show that a consensus view must be abandoned when it is at odds with the evidence.lii The classic text here is Galileo’s ‘Letter to Christina of Lorraine’ (1615) in defence of Copernicanism.

As Kuhn rightly put it, ‘Scientific development is like Darwinian evolution, a process driven from behind rather than pulled toward some fixed goal towards which it grows ever closer.’54 §9 The problem with the relativists is that they explain bad science and good science, phrenology and nuclear physics, in exactly the same way – advocates of ‘the strong programme’ explicitly insist on this equivalence.xxv The problem with the realists is that they assume there is nothing peculiar about the method and structure of science. According to them the scientific method is somehow natural, like walking, not artificial, like a watch. This book will look, I trust, realist to relativists and relativist to realists: that is how it is meant to look. It stands in the tradition of Kuhn’s 1991 lecture ‘The Trouble with the Historical Philosophy of Science’. There Kuhn criticized the relativists (who had taken much of their inspiration from his own work), saying that their mistake was taking the traditional view of scientific knowledge too much for granted.


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The Startup Way: Making Entrepreneurship a Fundamental Discipline of Every Enterprise by Eric Ries

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AOL-Time Warner, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Ben Horowitz, billion-dollar mistake, Black-Scholes formula, Blitzscaling, call centre, centralized clearinghouse, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, connected car, corporate governance, DevOps, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, hockey-stick growth, index card, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, loss aversion, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, minimum viable product, moral hazard, move fast and break things, obamacare, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer, place-making, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, skunkworks, Steve Jobs, TechCrunch disrupt, the scientific method, time value of money, Toyota Production System, two-pizza team, Uber for X, universal basic income, web of trust, Y Combinator

As we discussed in Chapter 3, every startup is first and foremost about vision. The goal of Lean Startup is to find the fastest possible path to realizing this vision. The specifics of how to arrive at the answers will, of course, look different for each project but will follow the same basic steps, employing the scientific method to systematically break down the plan into its component parts through rapid experimentation. LEAN STARTUP AT THE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION In August of 2013, President Obama announced that he was in search of a better way to hold colleges and universities accountable for their performance in serving students.

Our goal as leaders should be: If a project fails, it’s on the project founder. The entrepreneur didn’t deliver the results. He or she allowed it to die — not some higher-up manager. Taking responsibility for that failure is harder in the short term, but failing with honor is a skill.9 And it takes advantage of the most important lesson of the scientific method: If you can’t fail, you can’t learn. Experimenting rapidly, teams learn for themselves what’s important, and the lessons teams learn—about customers, about the market, about themselves—are much more profound than they would be otherwise. And many failed projects—think back to Amazon’s Fire phone from Chapter 1—lay the foundation for future successes. 5.

Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers and Challengers (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2010). 10. fastcompany.com/​3068931/​why-this-ceo-appointed-an-employee-to-change-dumb-company-rules. CHAPTER 7 1. Also along for the ride, doing a lot of critical and difficult legwork were Aubrey Smith, Tony Campbell, Marilyn Gorman, and Steve Liguori. 2. playbook.cio.gov/. 3. inc.com/​steve-blank/​key-to-success-getting-out-of-building.html. 4. Students of the scientific method may be concerned that we are not teaching teams the importance of a falsifiable hypothesis. It’s true that I generally save this bit of theory for a more advanced session, but keep in mind that startup arrogance actually works in our favor here. The idea that every single person on the planet will love my product is the ultimate in easily falsified hypotheses. 5. davidgcohen.com/​2011/​08/​28/​the-mentor-manifesto/. 6.


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Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future by Paul Mason

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Alfred Russel Wallace, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, Bernie Madoff, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, capital controls, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Claude Shannon: information theory, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Graeber, deglobalization, deindustrialization, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Downton Abbey, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, eurozone crisis, factory automation, false flag, financial engineering, financial repression, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, game design, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, guns versus butter model, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market clearing, means of production, Metcalfe's law, microservices, middle-income trap, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, post-industrial society, power law, precariat, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, RFID, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, scientific management, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Stewart Brand, structural adjustment programs, supply-chain management, technological determinism, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Transnistria, Twitter Arab Spring, union organizing, universal basic income, urban decay, urban planning, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, wages for housework, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Yochai Benkler

We want to know why, during a million repetitions of their normal lifecycles, small variations can emerge and then, suddenly, massive change. Theories allow us to describe the reality we can’t see. And they allow us to predict. All forms of economics accept the need for theory. But the difficulty of finding one, and confronting its implications, led economics in the late nineteenth century to retreat from the scientific method. Q: Why can’t I ‘see’ value, surplus value and labour time? If they don’t show up in the accounts of companies, and professional economists don’t acknowledge them, aren’t they just a mental construct? A: A more sophisticated way of putting it would be to say, as the Cambridge economist Joan Robinson did in the 1960s, that the labour-theory is ‘metaphysical’ – a mental construct whose existence could never be disproved.

The labour shortage also made technological innovation necessary. The new technologies that underpinned the rise of merchant capitalism were the ones that stimulated commerce (printing and accountancy), the creation of tradable wealth (mining, the compass and fast ships) and productivity (mathematics and the scientific method). Present throughout the whole process is something that looks incidental to the old system – money and credit – but which is destined to become the basis of the new system. Many laws and customs are actually shaped around ignoring money; in high feudalism credit is seen as sinful. So when money and credit burst through the boundaries and create a market system, it feels like a revolution.

At key moments, though tentatively at first, the state switched from hindering the change to promoting it. There won’t be exact parallels in the transition to postcapitalism but the rough parallels are there. The thing that is corroding capitalism, barely rationalized by mainstream economics, is information. The equivalent of the printing press and the scientific method is information technology and its spillover into all other forms of technology, from genetics to healthcare to agriculture to the movies. The modern equivalent of the long stagnation of late feudalism is the stalled fifth Kondratieff cycle, where instead of rapidly automating work out of existence, we are reduced to creating bullshit jobs on low pay, and many economies are stagnating.


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Under the Knife: A History of Surgery in 28 Remarkable Operations by Arnold van de Laar Laproscopic Surgeon

Albert Einstein, Apollo 13, Ayatollah Khomeini, clean water, Great Leap Forward, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Louis Pasteur, Neil Armstrong, placebo effect, the scientific method, wikimedia commons

A diagnosis of ileus is more probable if a CT scan shows possible indications of the disease, but less probable if the patient displays no symptoms and even less probable if a surgeon sees no reason to operate. Then Karl Popper introduced the principle of falsifiability and the scientific method. He stated that the truth cannot be discovered. We can only develop a theory of the truth, and then only if we observe one crucial condition: the theory must be formulated in such a way that it can be refuted. This became the basis of all modern medical science. In daily clinical practice, the scientific method works as follows: a clear treatment plan is set in motion for a patient as quickly as possible, based on a working diagnosis. That working diagnosis is based on a falsifiable theory of reality.

For example, that the patient had been suffering from diarrhoea for a week before the inflammation occurred, which makes the diagnosis less likely. What lies behind this mutual lack of understanding is a philosophical distinction between deduction and induction, two ways of discovering the truth through logic. Historically, the deductive is older than the inductive method, but both were replaced in the philosophy of science by the scientific method, developed by Karl Popper in 1934. During the Middle Ages, it was widely believed that human knowledge had already reached its zenith in the golden age of classical antiquity. Doctors and surgeons therefore based their work uncritically on the wisdom of the Greek philosopher Aristotle and the Roman gladiator physician Galen, two men who, with hindsight, did not stand out as providing their theses with a solid foundation in fact.


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Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat by Bee Wilson

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, British Empire, cotton gin, Easter island, Fellow of the Royal Society, General Motors Futurama, Great Leap Forward, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, Kitchen Debate, lateral thinking, Louis Pasteur, refrigerator car, scientific management, sexual politics, the scientific method, Upton Sinclair, Wall-E

People in this second group are more likely to think that what they are doing is scientific, the idea being that the more we can measure and pin cooking down, the more like science it will be. Both groups are probably deluding themselves. Artistic cooks do far more measuring than they admit. And cooking-by-numbers cooks are much less scientific than they pretend. Cooking by numbers is based on a subtle misunderstanding of the scientific method. The popular view of “science” is one of unswerving formulas and a set of final answers. In this reading, scientific cooking would be able to come up, once and for all, with the definitive formula for, say, bechamel sauce: how many grams of flour, butter, and milk, the exact temperature at which it should cook, the diameter of the pan, the precise number of seconds for which it should simmer and the number of revolutions of your whisk as it cooks: cooking by numbers.

Nathan Myhrvold in Modernist Cuisine weighs everything, gram for gram, even water, yet advises that salt is “to taste.” Similarly, Heston Blumenthal measures the dry-matter content in his potatoes but does not measure the salt and pepper in his signature mashed potatoes. This underscores the point that no kitchen formula can ever be definitive. The scientific method is far more open-ended than is generally allowed. It is not a dogmatic set of numbers but a process of forming and testing conjectures based on experience using controlled experiments, which then throw up new conjectures. The process of cooking supper every night can certainly be understood in this light.

By the second or third time, the numbers are less important because you have started to trust your own senses. After all, Rodgers remarks, you do not need to measure “the exact amount of sugar or milk you add to your coffee or tea.” Numbers, therefore, are crucial, but never the whole story. There is a world outside of measuring in the kitchen. Part of the scientific method is accepting that not everything is within the domain of science. I am fond enough of my measuring devices—there’s a quiet contentment in peering at that classic Pyrex measuring cup trying to see if stock for a pilaf has reached the 600 ml mark; or watching the dial swing around on a candy thermometer when making fudge; or using a tape measure to verify the diameter of biscotti dough.


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Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet by Klaus Schwab, Peter Vanham

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, air traffic controllers' union, Anthropocene, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, Asperger Syndrome, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, company town, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, cyber-physical system, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, digital divide, don't be evil, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, move fast and break things, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, precariat, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, transfer pricing, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

But before we try to make up for those errors in our economic development though, we must first ask: Is another development path already available? And to what extent can it be found in the East, in the rise of Asia? Notes 1 Kuznets was born in Pinsk, then part of the Russian Empire. Nowadays, Pinsk is part of Belarus. 2 “Political Arithmetic: Simon Kuznets and the Empirical Tradition in Economics”, Chapter 5: The Scientific Methods of Simon Kuznets, Robert William Fogel, Enid M. Fogel, Mark Guglielmo, Nathaniel Grotte, University of Chicago Press, p. 105, https://www.nber.org/system/files/chapters/c12917/c12917.pdf. 3 A direct quotation of Kuznets’ autobiography for the Nobel Prize committee. The Nobel Prize, “Simon Kuznets Biographical,” 1971, https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1971/kuznets/biographical/. 4 “GDP: A brief history,” Elizabeth Dickinson, Foreign Policy, January 2011, https://foreignpolicy.com/2011/01/03/gdp-a-brief-history/. 5 Ibidem. 6 “Beyond GDP: Economists Search for New Definition of Well-Being,” Der Spiegel, September 2009, https://www.spiegel.de/international/business/beyond-gdp-economists-search-for-new-definition-of-well-being-a-650532.html. 7 Phone interview with Diane Coyle by Peter Vanham, August 18, 2019. 8 Measured in constant 2010 US dollars. 9 World Bank, GDP Growth (annual %), 1961–2018, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG. 10 “What's a Global Recession,” Bob Davis, The Wall Street Journal, April 2009, https://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2009/04/22/whats-a-global-recession/. 11 United States Census Bureau, International Data Base, September 2018, https://www.census.gov/data-tools/demo/idb/informationGateway.php. 12 “World Economic Outlook,” International Monetary Fund, Updated July 2019, https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WEO/Issues/2019/07/18/WEOupdateJuly2019. 13 “World Economic Outlook,” International Monetary Fund, April 2019, Appendix A https://www.imf.org/~/media/Files/Publications/WEO/2019/April/English/text.ashx?

World Economic Forum, http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_White_Paper_We_Will_Live_to_100.pdf. 34 “Labor Productivity and Costs,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, https://www.bls.gov/lpc/prodybar.htm. 35 “Decoupling of Wages from Productivity,” OECD, Economic Outlook, November 2018, https://www.oecd.org/economy/outlook/Decoupling-of-wages-from-productivity-november-2018-OECD-economic-outlook-chapter.pdf. 36 “Some Notes on the Scientific Methods of Simon Kuznets,” Robert Fogel, National Bureau of Economic Research, December 1987, https://www.nber.org/papers/w2461.pdf. 37 “Global Inequality is Declining—Largely Thanks to China and India,” Zsolt Darvas, Bruegel Institute, April 2018, https://bruegel.org/2018/04/global-income-inequality-is-declining-largely-thanks-to-china-and-india/. 38 “Upper-Middle-Income Countries,” World Bank, https://datahelpdesk.worldbank.org/knowledgebase/articles/906519-world-bank-country-and-lending-groups. 39 “China Lifts 740 Million Rural Poor Out of Poverty Since 1978,” Xinhua, September 2018, http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2018-09/03/c_137441670.htm. 40 “Minneapolis Fed, “Income and Wealth Inequality in America, 1949–2016,” https://www.minneapolisfed.org/institute/working-papers-institute/iwp9.pdf. 41 “Piketty's Inequality Story in Six Charts,” John Cassidy, The New Yorker, March 2014, https://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/pikettys-inequality-story-in-six-charts. 42 “World Inequality Report, 2018,” https://wir2018.wid.world/files/download/wir2018-summary-english.pdf. 43 The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class, Guy Standing, 2011, https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/the-precariat-9781849664561/. 44 Interview with Kalle Lasn by Peter Vanham, Vancouver, Canada, March 2012. 45 “World Inequality Report, 2018,” https://wir2018.wid.world/files/download/wir2018-summary-english.pdf. 46 “How Unequal Is Europe?

DataSetCode=HEALTH_STAT. 57 “Global Social Mobility Index 2020: Why Economies Benefit from Fixing Inequality,” World Economic Forum, January 2020, https://www.weforum.org/reports/global-social-mobility-index-2020-why-economies-benefit-from-fixing-inequality. 58 “Fair Progress? Economic Mobility across Generations around the World, 2018,” The World Bank, https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/poverty/publication/fair-progress-economic-mobility-across-generations-around-the-world. 59 “ibidem”. 60 “Some Notes on the Scientific Methods of Simon Kuznets,” Robert Fogel, NBER, December 1987, https://www.nber.org/papers/w2461.pdf. 61 These two sentences are adapted from “The World Economic Forum, A Partner in Shaping History, The First 40 Years, 1971-2010,” http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_First40Years_Book_2010.pdf. 62 The Limits to Growth, p. 51, http://www.donellameadows.org/wp-content/userfiles/Limits-to-Growth-digital-scan-version.pdf. 63 Ibidem, p.53. 64 Ibidem, p.71. 65 “Earth Overshoot Day,” Global Footprint Network, https://www.overshootday.org/newsroom/press-release-july-2019-english/. 66 “Delayed Earth Overshoot Day Points to Opportunities to Build Future in Harmony with Our Finite Planet,” Global Footprint Network, August 2020, https://www.overshootday.org/newsroom/press-release-august-2020-english/. 67 “Statistical Review of World Energy 2019, Primary Energy,” BP, https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/energy-economics/statistical-review-of-world-energy/primary-energy.html. 68 “Fossil Fuels, Fossil Fuels in Electricity Production,” Our World in Data, https://ourworldindata.org/fossil-fuels. 69 “Statistical Review of World Energy 2019, Primary Energy,” BP, https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/energy-economics/statistical-review-of-world-energy/primary-energy.html. 70 “Global Resources Outlook 2019,” http://www.resourcepanel.org/reports/global-resources-outlook. 71 “Water Scarcity,” UN Water, 2018, https://www.unwater.org/water-facts/scarcity/. 72 “ibidem” 73 World Economic Forum, 2016: https://www.weforum.org/press/2016/01/more-plastic-than-fish-in-the-ocean-by-2050-report-offers-blueprint-for-change/. 74 “22 of World's 30 Most Polluted Cities are in India, Greenpeace Says,” The Guardian, March 2019. 75 AirVisual https://www.airvisual.com/world-most-polluted-cities. 76 “Soil Pollution: A Hidden Reality,” Rodríguez-Eugenio, N., McLaughlin, M., and Pennock, D., FAO, 2018, http://www.fao.org/3/I9183EN/i9183en.pdf. 77 “Extinctions Increasing at Unprecedented Pace, UN Study Warns,” Financial Times, May 2019, https://www.ft.com/content/a7a54680-6f28-11e9-bf5c-6eeb837566c5. 78 “ibidem”. 79 UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2018, https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2018/07/sr15_headline_statements.pdf. 80 “New Climate Predictions Assess Global Temperatures in Coming Five Years,” World Meteorological Organization, July 2020, https://public.wmo.int/en/media/press-release/new-climate-predictions-assess-global-temperatures-coming-five-years. 81 “Here Comes the Bad Season: July 2019 Is Likely to Be the Hottest Month Ever Measured,” The Atlantic, https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/07/july-2019-shaping-be-warmest-month-ever/594229/. 82 Telebasel, Sich entleerende Gletschertasche lässt Bach in Zermatt hochgehen, https://telebasel.ch/2019/06/11/erneut-ein-rekordheisser-hochsommer-verzeichnet/. 83 “Migration, Climate Change and the Environment, A Complex Nexus,” UN Migration Agency IOM, https://www.iom.int/complex-nexus#estimates. 84 “ibidem”. 85 “Burning Planet: Climate Fires and Political Flame Wars Rage,” World Economic Forum, January 2020, https://www.weforum.org/press/2020/01/burning-planet-climate-fires-and-political-flame-wars-rage. 86 “Our house is still on fire and you’re fuelling the flames, World Economic Forum Agenda, January 2020, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/01/greta-speech-our-house-is-still-on-fire-davos-2020/. 3 The Rise of Asia The view from the Sham Chun River in Southern China offers a stark contrast.


pages: 460 words: 107,454

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet by Klaus Schwab

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, air traffic controllers' union, Anthropocene, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, Asperger Syndrome, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, company town, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, cyber-physical system, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, digital divide, don't be evil, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, move fast and break things, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, precariat, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, transfer pricing, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

But before we try to make up for those errors in our economic development though, we must first ask: Is another development path already available? And to what extent can it be found in the East, in the rise of Asia? Notes 1 Kuznets was born in Pinsk, then part of the Russian Empire. Nowadays, Pinsk is part of Belarus. 2 “Political Arithmetic: Simon Kuznets and the Empirical Tradition in Economics”, Chapter 5: The Scientific Methods of Simon Kuznets, Robert William Fogel, Enid M. Fogel, Mark Guglielmo, Nathaniel Grotte, University of Chicago Press, p. 105, https://www.nber.org/system/files/chapters/c12917/c12917.pdf. 3 A direct quotation of Kuznets’ autobiography for the Nobel Prize committee. The Nobel Prize, “Simon Kuznets Biographical,” 1971, https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1971/kuznets/biographical/. 4 “GDP: A brief history,” Elizabeth Dickinson, Foreign Policy, January 2011, https://foreignpolicy.com/2011/01/03/gdp-a-brief-history/. 5 Ibidem. 6 “Beyond GDP: Economists Search for New Definition of Well-Being,” Der Spiegel, September 2009, https://www.spiegel.de/international/business/beyond-gdp-economists-search-for-new-definition-of-well-being-a-650532.html. 7 Phone interview with Diane Coyle by Peter Vanham, August 18, 2019. 8 Measured in constant 2010 US dollars. 9 World Bank, GDP Growth (annual %), 1961–2018, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG. 10 “What's a Global Recession,” Bob Davis, The Wall Street Journal, April 2009, https://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2009/04/22/whats-a-global-recession/. 11 United States Census Bureau, International Data Base, September 2018, https://www.census.gov/data-tools/demo/idb/informationGateway.php. 12 “World Economic Outlook,” International Monetary Fund, Updated July 2019, https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WEO/Issues/2019/07/18/WEOupdateJuly2019. 13 “World Economic Outlook,” International Monetary Fund, April 2019, Appendix A https://www.imf.org/~/media/Files/Publications/WEO/2019/April/English/text.ashx?

World Economic Forum, http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_White_Paper_We_Will_Live_to_100.pdf. 34 “Labor Productivity and Costs,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, https://www.bls.gov/lpc/prodybar.htm. 35 “Decoupling of Wages from Productivity,” OECD, Economic Outlook, November 2018, https://www.oecd.org/economy/outlook/Decoupling-of-wages-from-productivity-november-2018-OECD-economic-outlook-chapter.pdf. 36 “Some Notes on the Scientific Methods of Simon Kuznets,” Robert Fogel, National Bureau of Economic Research, December 1987, https://www.nber.org/papers/w2461.pdf. 37 “Global Inequality is Declining—Largely Thanks to China and India,” Zsolt Darvas, Bruegel Institute, April 2018, https://bruegel.org/2018/04/global-income-inequality-is-declining-largely-thanks-to-china-and-india/. 38 “Upper-Middle-Income Countries,” World Bank, https://datahelpdesk.worldbank.org/knowledgebase/articles/906519-world-bank-country-and-lending-groups. 39 “China Lifts 740 Million Rural Poor Out of Poverty Since 1978,” Xinhua, September 2018, http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2018-09/03/c_137441670.htm. 40 “Minneapolis Fed, “Income and Wealth Inequality in America, 1949–2016,” https://www.minneapolisfed.org/institute/working-papers-institute/iwp9.pdf. 41 “Piketty's Inequality Story in Six Charts,” John Cassidy, The New Yorker, March 2014, https://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/pikettys-inequality-story-in-six-charts. 42 “World Inequality Report, 2018,” https://wir2018.wid.world/files/download/wir2018-summary-english.pdf. 43 The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class, Guy Standing, 2011, https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/the-precariat-9781849664561/. 44 Interview with Kalle Lasn by Peter Vanham, Vancouver, Canada, March 2012. 45 “World Inequality Report, 2018,” https://wir2018.wid.world/files/download/wir2018-summary-english.pdf. 46 “How Unequal Is Europe?

DataSetCode=HEALTH_STAT. 57 “Global Social Mobility Index 2020: Why Economies Benefit from Fixing Inequality,” World Economic Forum, January 2020, https://www.weforum.org/reports/global-social-mobility-index-2020-why-economies-benefit-from-fixing-inequality. 58 “Fair Progress? Economic Mobility across Generations around the World, 2018,” The World Bank, https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/poverty/publication/fair-progress-economic-mobility-across-generations-around-the-world. 59 “ibidem”. 60 “Some Notes on the Scientific Methods of Simon Kuznets,” Robert Fogel, NBER, December 1987, https://www.nber.org/papers/w2461.pdf. 61 These two sentences are adapted from “The World Economic Forum, A Partner in Shaping History, The First 40 Years, 1971-2010,” http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_First40Years_Book_2010.pdf. 62 The Limits to Growth, p. 51, http://www.donellameadows.org/wp-content/userfiles/Limits-to-Growth-digital-scan-version.pdf. 63 Ibidem, p.53. 64 Ibidem, p.71. 65 “Earth Overshoot Day,” Global Footprint Network, https://www.overshootday.org/newsroom/press-release-july-2019-english/. 66 “Delayed Earth Overshoot Day Points to Opportunities to Build Future in Harmony with Our Finite Planet,” Global Footprint Network, August 2020, https://www.overshootday.org/newsroom/press-release-august-2020-english/. 67 “Statistical Review of World Energy 2019, Primary Energy,” BP, https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/energy-economics/statistical-review-of-world-energy/primary-energy.html. 68 “Fossil Fuels, Fossil Fuels in Electricity Production,” Our World in Data, https://ourworldindata.org/fossil-fuels. 69 “Statistical Review of World Energy 2019, Primary Energy,” BP, https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/energy-economics/statistical-review-of-world-energy/primary-energy.html. 70 “Global Resources Outlook 2019,” http://www.resourcepanel.org/reports/global-resources-outlook. 71 “Water Scarcity,” UN Water, 2018, https://www.unwater.org/water-facts/scarcity/. 72 “ibidem” 73 World Economic Forum, 2016: https://www.weforum.org/press/2016/01/more-plastic-than-fish-in-the-ocean-by-2050-report-offers-blueprint-for-change/. 74 “22 of World's 30 Most Polluted Cities are in India, Greenpeace Says,” The Guardian, March 2019. 75 AirVisual https://www.airvisual.com/world-most-polluted-cities. 76 “Soil Pollution: A Hidden Reality,” Rodríguez-Eugenio, N., McLaughlin, M., and Pennock, D., FAO, 2018, http://www.fao.org/3/I9183EN/i9183en.pdf. 77 “Extinctions Increasing at Unprecedented Pace, UN Study Warns,” Financial Times, May 2019, https://www.ft.com/content/a7a54680-6f28-11e9-bf5c-6eeb837566c5. 78 “ibidem”. 79 UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2018, https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2018/07/sr15_headline_statements.pdf. 80 “New Climate Predictions Assess Global Temperatures in Coming Five Years,” World Meteorological Organization, July 2020, https://public.wmo.int/en/media/press-release/new-climate-predictions-assess-global-temperatures-coming-five-years. 81 “Here Comes the Bad Season: July 2019 Is Likely to Be the Hottest Month Ever Measured,” The Atlantic, https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/07/july-2019-shaping-be-warmest-month-ever/594229/. 82 Telebasel, Sich entleerende Gletschertasche lässt Bach in Zermatt hochgehen, https://telebasel.ch/2019/06/11/erneut-ein-rekordheisser-hochsommer-verzeichnet/. 83 “Migration, Climate Change and the Environment, A Complex Nexus,” UN Migration Agency IOM, https://www.iom.int/complex-nexus#estimates. 84 “ibidem”. 85 “Burning Planet: Climate Fires and Political Flame Wars Rage,” World Economic Forum, January 2020, https://www.weforum.org/press/2020/01/burning-planet-climate-fires-and-political-flame-wars-rage. 86 “Our house is still on fire and you’re fuelling the flames, World Economic Forum Agenda, January 2020, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/01/greta-speech-our-house-is-still-on-fire-davos-2020/. 3 The Rise of Asia The view from the Sham Chun River in Southern China offers a stark contrast.


pages: 230 words: 61,702

The Internet of Us: Knowing More and Understanding Less in the Age of Big Data by Michael P. Lynch

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Amazon Mechanical Turk, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, bitcoin, Cass Sunstein, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive load, crowdsourcing, data science, Edward Snowden, Firefox, Google Glasses, hive mind, income inequality, Internet of things, John von Neumann, meta-analysis, Nate Silver, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, patient HM, prediction markets, RFID, sharing economy, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Twitter Arab Spring, WikiLeaks

The same thing could be said for understanding—except even more so. And that’s important, because understanding is what keeps the “human” in what I earlier called the digital human. The End of Theory? In 2008, Chris Anderson, then editor of Wired, wrote a controversial and widely cited editorial called “The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete.” Anderson claimed that what we are now calling big data analytics was overthrowing traditional ways of doing science: This is a world where massive amounts of data and applied mathematics replace every other tool that might be brought to bear. Out with every theory of human behavior, from linguistics to sociology.

., 75 dictionaries, 21–22 digital form of life, xviii, 3–20 as abstract and depersonalized, 41–50 caveats about, 184–88 as a construction, 70–74, 83–86, 187 defined, 10 limitations of, 16 understanding in, 153–78 see also Internet of Us digital groups, 118–19 digital knowledge: caveats about, 184–88 dependence on, xvi–xviii, 5, 12, 21–26, 31, 36, 179 distribution of, 113 education and, 148–54 full and equal participation in, 146 as interconnective, 184–88 international access rates for, 135, 144–45 massive proliferation of, 8, 11–12, 32, 56, 128 network of, 111–32 as power, 9, 98–99, 186 ready accessibility of, 3–4, 23, 30, 42, 56, 113–16, 135–36, 141, 149, 153, 180 speed of, 23, 29–30, 42, 135 using alternative sources to, 21–23 see also Google-knowing dinosaurs, 66 discursive knowledge, 169 “divided line” graph of knowledge, 126 DNA identification techniques, 93–94 Dreyfus, Hubert, 168, 171 drugs: abilities changed by, 173 SIM life compared to, 77 Duke University, 152 earthquakes, emotional epicenters of, 160–61 eavesdropping, 101 Ebola, 16 economy, 111, 162 as digitally dependent, 7–8, 9 free-market, 145 full and equal participation in, 146 globalization of, 139, 142 of knowledge, 138–45 manufacturing in, 138–39 prediction markets in, 122–23 education: cheapening of, 152–53 crisis in, 149–50 as epistemic resource, 143, 145 information technology and, 148–54 old model of, 151–52 U.S. hegemony in, 149 education bubble, 149, 152 education systems, 35–36 edX, 150 Einstein, Albert, 175, 177 elections, 120–23 emails, 81 emotion, reasoning vs., 51–55 “End of Theory, The: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete” (Anderson), 156–57 Enlightenment, 33–34, 58–59 environment: interacting with, 174 receptive tracking of, 27–30, 131 “environmental luck,” 203 epilepsy, 168 epistêmê, 14, 170, 172 epistemic economy, 147–48 epistemic equality, 138–48, 150, 187 epistemic inclusivity, 135–36 epistemic inequality, 142–48, 201 epistemic injustice, 146–48, 201 epistemic principles, 14, 47, 50, 55, 57, 60 as democratic, 62, 135–36 epistemic resources, 143–45 epistemic trust, 195 epistemology, defined, see epistemic principles Epistemology and Cognition (Goldman), 194 Essay concerning Human Understanding, An (Locke), 35 ethical values: changes in, 53–54 democratic, 58 and fragmentation, 44 technology and, xvii, 6, 89–90 “eureka” moment, 176, 177 Eurocentrism, 162 Euthyphro (Plato), 165–66, 172 evangelicals, 47–49 evidence, in change of belief, 54–55 expectations: in changing of social constructs, 72–73 conclusions colored by, 29–30, 160 theoretical, 159 of truth, 79–80 experience: as foundation for knowledge, 127, 131 in hands-on movements, 173–74 illusion and reality in, 18–19 procedural knowledge in, 172–73 understanding through, 16, 173–74 experts, expertise: knowledge based on, 15, 35–38, 120, 139–40 outsourcing of, 141–42 in predicting, 122–23 in problem solving, 137 understanding and, 170–71 explanation, 165–67, 182 extended mind hypothesis, 115 fabric metaphor, for structure of beliefs, 129 Facebook, xvii, 8, 24, 43, 72, 124 hegemony of, 146 as simulacrum, 16 tracking by, 105 fact-checking, 46–47, 56, 85, 130 falsehoods, 77–83 “fast thinking” processes, 29–30 FBI, data searched by, 99 fiction, 79–80 fingerprints, 93 FISA, see Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act fishbowls, digital life compared to, 91 Fishburne, Laurence, 18–19 Flanagan, Owen, 73–74 Floridi, Luciano, 10, 69–71 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA; 1978), 88 court of, 99, 109 form of life: defined, 10 philosophy in, 17–18 Forms (Platonic), 126 foundationalism, Cartesian, 126–29, 131 Fox News, 43 fragmentation: of reason, 148 threat of, 4, 41–63 Freebase, 151 freedom of choice, autonomy of decision vs., 102 French Revolution, 58 Freud, Sigmund, 184 Fricker, Miranda, 146–48, 201 Galileo, 34, 68 Galton, Francis, 120 games, gaming, 20, 191 gatekeeping, 128, 134, 146 gender, 162 in marriage, 53–54, 72 in problem solving, 137 Georgetown University, 77–78 Gilbert, Margaret, 117–19, 200 Glass, Ira, 78 Glaucon, 54 Glauconian reasoning, 54–55, 56–58 global economy, 139, 142, 152 global warming, 56, 100, 124, 144, 185, 198 Goldberg, Sandy, 115 Goldman, Alvin, 194 Google, 5, 23, 30, 113, 128, 130, 135, 163, 174, 182, 203 business model of, 9 data collection and tracking by, 90, 155–56, 158, 161 as hypothetical “guy,” 24 monopolization by, 145–46 propaganda disseminated on, 66 in reinforcement of one’s own beliefs, 56 Google Complete, 155 Google Flu Trends, 158, 183 Google Glass, 149, 186 Google-knowing, xvi, 21–40, 25 defined, 23 limitations of, 174, 180 reliance on, 6–7, 23, 25–26, 30–31, 36, 113, 116, 153, 163, 179–80 Google Maps, 116 Google Street View, 23 Gordon, Lewis, 148 gorilla suit experiment, 30 government: autonomy limited by, 109 closed politics of, 144–45 data mining and analysis used by, 9, 90–91, 93, 104, 107 online manipulation used by, 81 purpose of, 38 transparency of, 137–38 Greece, classical philosophy of, 13, 47, 166–67, 171–72 Grimm, Stephen, 164 Guardian, 81 Gulf of Mexico, oil spill in, 118 H1N1 flu outbreak, tracking of, 158 Haidt, Jonathan, 51–54, 56, 57, 60, 196–97 Halpern, Sue, 106 Harvard Law Review, 89 Hazlett, Allan, 49 HBO GO, 145 Heidegger, Martin, 177 Hemingway, Mark, 46 Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS), 61 Hippocrates, 13 hive-mind, 4, 136 HM (patient), 168–69 Hobbes, Thomas, 38, 109 holiness, logical debate over, 166–67 homosexuality, changing attitudes toward, 53–54 Houla massacre, 83 Howe, Jeff, 136 Huffington Post, 43 human dignity: autonomy and, 58, 59–60 information technology as threat to, 187 interconnectedness and, 184–88 privacy and, 101–9 human rights, 54, 60 digital equality as, 142–48 protection of, 145 Hume, David, 48 hyperconnectivity, 184–88 identity: digital reshaping of, 73–74 manufactured online, 80–81 “scrubbing” of, 74 illegal searches, 93 illusion, distinguishing truth from, 67–74 incidental data collection, 95–96, 99 inclusivity, 135–37 income inequality, 142 inference, 29, 60, 172 information: accuracy and reliability of, 14, 27–30, 39–40, 44–45 collected pools of, 95–100, 107–9 distribution vs. creation of, 24 immediate, unlimited access to, 3–4, 23, 30, 42, 56, 113–16, 135–36, 141, 149, 153, 180 as interconnective, 184–88 vs. knowledge, 14 sorting and filtering of, 12, 26–29, 44–45, 127–28 information age, 111 information analysis, techniques of, 8–9 information cascades, 36, 66, 121 defined, 32 information coordination problem, 38–39, 56 information “glut,” 9–10, 44 information privacy, 94–100 and autonomy, 102–7 information sharing, coordination in, 4–5 information technology: costs of, 145 data trail in, 9 democratization through, 133–38, 148 devices and platforms of, xvii–xviii, 3, 7–8, 10, 41–43, 69, 70, 77–78, 90–91, 106–7, 144, 148–49, 156, 180, 185–87 disquieting questions about, 6 in education, 148–54 experience vs., 173–74 hypothetical loss of, 5 paradox of, 6, 12, 179 pool of data in, 95–100 surveillance and, 89–109 typified and dephysicalized objects in, 69 unequal distribution of, 144–45 see also Internet of Things information theory, 12 infosphere: defined, 10 feedback loop of social constructs in, 72–73 network of, 180 pollution of, 148 vastness of, 128 InnoCentive, 136–37, 141 institutions, cooperative, 60–61 intellectual labor, 139–40 International Telecommunications Union, 135 Internet: author’s experiment in circumventing, 21–24, 25, 35 in challenges to reasonableness, 41–63 changes wrought by, xv–xviii, 6–7, 10–11, 23, 180, 184–88 as a construction, 69 cost and profit debate over, 145 as epistemic resource, 143–45 expectations of, 80–83 as force for cohesion and democracy, 55–63 freedom both limited and enhanced by, 92–93 international rates of access to, 135, 144–45 monopolization and hegemony in, 145–46 as network, 111–13 “third wave” of, 7 see also World Wide Web; specific applications Internet of Everything, 184 Internet of Things: blurring of online and offline in, 71 defined, 7–8 integration of, 10 shared economy in, 140–41 threat from, 107, 153, 184–88 Internet of Us, digital form of life as, 10, 39, 73, 83–86, 106, 179–88 interracial marriage, 54 interrogation techniques, 105 In the Plex (Levy), 5–6 Intrade, 122–23, 136 intuition, 15, 51–53 iPhone, production of, 77–78, 80, 139, 144 IQ, 52 Iraq, 83 Iraq War, 137 ISIS, 128 isolation, polarization and, 42–43 I think, I exist, 127 James, William, 11 Jefferson, Thomas, 143 Jeppesen, Lars Bo, 137 joint commitments, defined, 117–18 journalism, truth and, 84 judgment, 51–55, 57 collective vs. individual, 117, 120–25 justice, 54 “just so” stories, 27–28 Kahneman, Daniel, 29, 51 Kant, Immanuel, 34, 58–60, 62, 85 Kitcher, Philip, 182 knowing-which, as term, 171 knowledge: in big data revolution, 87–190 changing structure of, 125–32 common, 117–19 defined and explained, xvii, 12–17 democratization of, 133–38 digital, see digital knowledge; Google-knowing distribution of, 134–35, 138, 141 diverse forms of, 130 economy of, 138–45 hyperconnectivity of, 184–88 individual vs. aggregate, 120–24 information vs., 14 Internet revolution in, xv–xviii minimal definition of, 14–15 as networked, 111–32 new aspects in old problems of, 1–86, 90 personal observation in, 33–35 political economy of, 133–54 as power, 9, 98–99, 133, 185–86 practical vs. theoretical, 169, 172 procedural, 167–74 recording and storage of, 127–28 reliability of sources of, 14, 27–31, 39–40, 44–45, 114–16 as a resource, 38–39 shared cognitive process in attainment of, 114–25 three forms of, 15–17 three simple points about, 14–17 truth and, 19, 126 understanding vs. other forms of, 6, 16–17, 90, 154, 155–73, 181 value and importance of, 12–13 knowledge-based education, 61 Kodak camera, 89 Koran, 48, 61 Kornblith, Hilary, 194 Krakauer, John, 169 Kuhn, Thomas, 159–60 Lakhani, Karim, 137 Larissa, Greece, 13, 15, 182 Leonhardt, David, 122–23 Levy, Steven, 5–6 liberals, 43 libraries, 22, 134, 153–54 of Alexandria, 8 digital form of life compared to, xvi, 17, 20, 44–45, 56, 63, 128 as epistemic resource, 145 Google treated as, 24 “Library of Babel” (Borges), 17 “Lies, Damned Lies, and ‘Fact-Checking’: The Liberal Media’s Latest Attempt to Control the Discourse” (Hemingway), 46 Lifespan of a Fact, The (D’Agata), 79 literacy, 35, 134 literal artifacts: defined, 69 social artifacts and, 71, 72 lobectomy, 168 Locke, John, 33–36, 39, 60, 67–70, 85, 127, 143 “Locke’s command,” 33–34 London Underground, mapping of, 112–13 machines, control by, 116 “mainstream” media, 32 censorship of, 66 majority rule, 120 manipulation: data mining and, 97, 104–6 of expectations, 80–82 persuasion and, 55, 57–58, 81–83, 86 manuals, 22 manufacturing, 138–39 maps, 21–22 marine chronometer, 137 marketing: bots in, 82 Glauconian, 58 targeted, 9, 90, 91, 105 marriage: changing attitudes toward, 53–54 civil vs. religious, 58–59 as social construct, 72 martial arts, 170 mass, as primary quality, 68 Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), 150–53 mathematics, in data analysis, 160, 161 Matrix, The, 18–19, 75 Mayer-Schönberger, Viktor, 8, 158–59 measles vaccine, 7, 124 Mechanical Turk, 136, 141 media, 134 diversity in, 42 opinion affected by, 53 sensationalist, 77 memory: accessing of, 114, 115 in educational models, 152 loss of, 168–69 superceded by information technology, xv–xvi, 3, 4, 6, 94, 149 trust in, 28, 33 Meno, 13 merchandising, online vs. brick and mortar, 70 Mercier, Hugo, 54 metrics, 112 Milner, Brenda, 168–69 mirror drawing experiment, 169 misinformation, 6–7, 31–32 in support of moral truth, 78–80, 82 mob mentality, 32–33 MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), 150–53 moral dumbfounding, 52 morality, moral values, xvii, 6, 44, 53–54, 195 “Moses Illusion,” 29–30 motor acuity, mastery of, 170–71, 173 motor skills, 167–74 Murray, Charles J., 147 music, as dephysicalized object, 69–70 Nagel, Thomas, 84 naming, identification by, 94 narrative license, truth and falsehood in, 78–79 National Endowment for the Humanities, 61 National Science Foundation, 61 Nature, 158, 161 Netflix, 69, 145 Net neutrality, defined, 145 netography, 112–13 of knowledge, 125–32 networked age, 111 networks, 111–32 collective knowledge of, 116–25, 180 knowledge reshaped and altered by, 125–32, 133, 140 in problem solving, 136 use of term, 111–12 neural system, 26 neural transplants, 3, 5 Neurath, Otto, 128–29 neuromedia, 3–5, 12, 17–19, 113–14, 132, 149, 168, 180–82, 184 limitations of, 174 as threat to education, 153–54 Newton, Isaac, 175 New Yorker, 25, 26 New York Times, 122, 174 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 111 Nobel laureates, 149 noble lie, 83, 86 nonfiction, 79–80 NPR, 78, 80 NSA: alleged privacy abuses by, 98–100, 138 data mining by, 9, 91, 95–96, 108, 167 proposed limitations on, 109 Ntrepid, 81 nuclear weapons technology, xvii nullius in verba (take nobody’s word for it), 34 Obama, Barack, 7, 100 administration, 109 objectivity, objective truth, 45, 74 as anchor for belief, 131 in constructed world, 83–86 as foundation for knowledge, 127 observation, 49, 60 affected by expectations, 159–60 behavior affected by, 91, 97 “oceanic feeling,” 184 “offlife,” 70 OkCupid, 157 “onlife,” 70 online identity creation, 73–74 online ranking, 119–21, 136 open access research sharing sites, 135–36 open society: closed politics vs., 144–45 values of, 41–43, 62 open source software, 135 Operation Earnest Voice, 81 Operation Ivy, ix opinion: knowledge vs., 13, 14, 126 in online ranking, 119–20 persuasion and, 50–51 truth as constructed by, 85–86 optical illusions, 67 Oracle of Delphi, 16–17, 171 Outcome-Based Education (OBE), 61–62 ownership, changing concept of, 73 ox, experiment on weight of, 120 Oxford, 168 Page, Larry, 5–6 Panopticon, 91, 92, 97 perception: acuity of, 173 distinguishing truth in, 67–74 expectations and, 159–60 misleading, 29–30, 67 as relative, 67–68 perceptual incongruity, 159–60 personal freedom, 101 persuasion, 50–51, 54–55, 56–58 by bots, 82 phone books, 22 phone data collection, 95, 108 photography: privacy and, 89, 93 sexually-explicit, 99 photo-sharing, manipulation in, 82–83 Plato, 13–14, 16–17, 54, 59, 83, 126, 165–67 polarization, 7 herd mentality in, 66 isolated tribes in, 43–46 politics, 162, 196 accessibility in, 23 activism in, 66, 67 bias in, 43–46 closed, 144–45 elections in, 120–23 of knowledge, 133–54 opposition to critical thinking in, 61–62 persuasion in, 57–58, 82–83 power in, 86, 133 prediction market in, 122–23 Politifact, 46 Popper, Karl, 41–43 Postman, L.


pages: 227 words: 62,177

Numbers Rule Your World: The Hidden Influence of Probability and Statistics on Everything You Do by Kaiser Fung

Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Andrew Wiles, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, business cycle, call centre, correlation does not imply causation, cross-subsidies, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, edge city, Emanuel Derman, facts on the ground, financial engineering, fixed income, Gary Taubes, John Snow's cholera map, low interest rates, moral hazard, p-value, pattern recognition, profit motive, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, statistical model, the scientific method, traveling salesman

The problem of false alarms demonstrated that some group differences were not caused by test developers but by differential ability, elevating the need to untangle the two factors. Henceforth, the mere existence of a racial gap should not automatically implicate item writers in the creation of unfair tests. While the initial foray into the scientific method turned out bad science, it nevertheless produced some good data, paving the way to rampant technical progress. By 1987, Anrig could turn his back on the Golden Rule procedure because the team at ETS had achieved the breakthrough needed to unravel the two factors. Simply put, the key insight was to compare like with like.

If Rosenthal chose to absorb a higher false-positive rate—as much as one in a hundred is typical—he could reduce the chance of a false negative, which is the failure to expose dishonest store owners. This explains why he could reject the no-fraud hypothesis for western Canada as well, even though the odds of 1 in 2.3 million were higher.) The Power of Being Impossible Statistical thinking is absolutely central to the scientific method, which requires theories to generate testable hypotheses. Statisticians have created a robust framework for judging whether there is sufficient evidence to support a given hypothesis. This framework is known as statistical testing, also called hypothesis testing or significance testing. See De Veaux’s textbook Stats: Data and Models for a typically fluent introduction to this vast subject.


Logically Fallacious: The Ultimate Collection of Over 300 Logical Fallacies (Academic Edition) by Bo Bennett

Black Swan, book value, butterfly effect, clean water, cognitive bias, correlation does not imply causation, Donald Trump, equal pay for equal work, Neil Armstrong, Richard Feynman, side project, statistical model, sunk-cost fallacy, the scientific method

I thoroughly examine (i.e. rip apart) this argument at http://www.relationshipwithreason.com/articles/philosophy/14-pascal-s-wager-the-epitome-of-irrational-rationalism Least Plausible Hypothesis Description: Choosing more unreasonable explanations for phenomena over more defensible ones. In judging the validity of hypotheses or conclusions from an observation, the scientific method relies upon the Principle of Parsimony, also known as Occam’s Razor, which states, all things being equal, the simplest explanation of a phenomenon that requires the fewest assumptions is the preferred explanation until it can be disproved. This is very similar to the far-fetched hypothesis, but the hypotheses are generally more within reason (i.e. no leprechauns involved).

Depak did expanded on his assertion here, relied on the argument by gibberish in order to make what sounded like scientific claims, which in fact, were not. According to everything we know about quantum physics, information cannot travel faster than light – otherwise it could create a time travel paradox. Exception: Making a scientific claim about quantum physics, using the scientific method, is not fallacious. Tip: Pick up an introductory book to quantum physics, it is not only a fascinating subject, but you will be well prepared to ask the right questions and expose this fallacy when used. Questionable Cause cum hoc ergo propter hoc (also known as: ignoring a common cause, neglecting a common cause, confusing correlation and causation, confusing cause and effect, false cause, third cause, juxtaposition [form of], reversing causality/wrong direction [form of]) Description: Concluding that one thing caused another, simply because they are regularly associated.


pages: 406 words: 115,719

The Case Against Sugar by Gary Taubes

Albert Einstein, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, epigenetics, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Gary Taubes, Isaac Newton, meta-analysis, microbiome, phenotype, pre–internet, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, selection bias, seminal paper, the new new thing, the scientific method, Works Progress Administration

This is a risk in any human endeavor. When Francis Bacon pioneered the scientific method almost four hundred years ago, he was hoping to create a methodology of critical or rational thinking that would minimize this all-too-human characteristic of avoiding evidence that disagrees with any preconceptions we might have formed.*1 Without rigorous tests, as many as necessary, beliefs and preconceptions will persevere because it’s always easier to believe that a single test has been flawed, or even a few of them, than it is to accept that our belief had been incorrect. The scientific method protects against this tendency; it does not eradicate it

CHAPTER 9 WHAT THEY DIDN’T KNOW I wish there were some formal courses in medical school on Medical Ignorance; textbooks as well, although they would have to be very heavy volumes. LEWIS THOMAS, “Medicine as a Very Old Profession,” 1985 Over the past four hundred years, thinking on the scientific method has distilled the concept down to two words: “hypothesis” and “test.” If we want to establish reliable knowledge—that what we think is true really is—this is the process that must be followed. In the words of the philosopher of science Karl Popper, “The method of science is the method of bold conjectures and ingenious and severe attempts to refute them.”


Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking by Michael Bhaskar

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, call centre, carbon tax, charter city, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cognitive load, Columbian Exchange, coronavirus, cosmic microwave background, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, cyber-physical system, dark matter, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, discovery of penicillin, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Edward Jenner, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, energy security, energy transition, epigenetics, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, Eroom's law, fail fast, false flag, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, GPT-3, Haber-Bosch Process, hedonic treadmill, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, hive mind, hype cycle, Hyperloop, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, James Watt: steam engine, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, liberation theology, lockdown, lone genius, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megacity, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, minimum viable product, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Gell-Mann, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, nuclear winter, nudge unit, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, post-truth, precautionary principle, public intellectual, publish or perish, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, skunkworks, Slavoj Žižek, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, techlash, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, total factor productivity, transcontinental railway, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, When a measure becomes a target, X Prize, Y Combinator

Consider the Scientific Revolution of Copernicus, Brahe and Kepler, the birth of modern science, arguably the most important moment in human existence since the Neolithic Revolution.11 At its heart were potent conceptual tools that introduced a self-sustaining process of ideation: the creation of concepts like ‘discovery’, ‘fact’, ‘experiment’, ‘law of nature’, ‘hypothesis’ and ‘theory’ established the mental architecture for what eventually became known as the scientific method.12 Without this framework, nothing else about modern science – and arguably the modern world – would make much sense. Important too was a set of intellectual tools like calculus, Cartesian graphs, algebra and probabilistic mathematics. But the revolution was also galvanised by novel instruments.

Second, it shows how even at a comparatively early stage, AI has enormous potential to make significant, useful discoveries improbable with the old toolset. AI changes how we will think and imagine in future. Trillions of experiments can be run in days, for example, a fundamental gear shift in the scientific method. This kind of discovery doesn't require a prior theory or hypothesis, but arrives at conclusions through a vast process of trial and error, a kind of ‘radical empiricism’. It also applies to how we invent.28 Antibiotic resistance, for example, one of the biggest challenges in medicine, is being attacked with a similar strategy: there could be 1060 drug-like molecules, and finding the ones that work is a formidable challenge without AI.

The Decline of Science in Corporate R&D’, NBER Working Paper No. w20902 Arora, Ashish, Belenzon, Sharon, Patacconi, Andrea, and Suh, Jungkyu (2020), ‘The Changing Structure of American Innovation: Some Cautionary Remarks for Economic Growth’, Innovation Policy and the Economy, Vol. 20 Asimov, Isaac (2016), Foundation (first published 1951), London: HarperVoyager Assael, Yannis, Sommerschield, Thea, and Prag, Jonathan (2019), ‘Restoring ancient text using deep learning: a case study on Greek epigraphy’, arXiv, 1910.06262 Azoulay, Pierre (2012), ‘Turn the scientific method on ourselves’, Nature, 484, pp. 31–2 Azoulay, Pierre, and Li, Danielle (2020), ‘Scientific Grant Funding’, NBER Working Paper 26889 Azoulay, Pierre, Graff Zivin, Joshua S., and Fons-Rosen, Christian (2019), ‘Does Science Advance One Funeral at a Time?’, American Economic Review, Vol. 109 No. 8, pp. 2889–2920 Azoulay, Pierre, Graff Zivin, Joshua S., and Manso, Gustavo (2011), ‘Incentives and creativity: evidence from the academic life sciences’, The RAND Journal of Economics, Vol. 42, No. 3 pp. 527–54 Bahcall, Safi (2019), Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas that Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries, New York: St Martin's Press Baker, Monya (2016), ‘1,500 scientists lift the lid on reproducibility’, Nature 533, 452–4 Banerjee, Abhijit V., and Esther Duflo (2019), Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems, London: Allen Lane Beck, Ulrich (1992), Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, London: SAGE Belot, Henry (2018), ‘Nobel Prize winner Peter Doherty criticises national interest test on research funding’, ABC, accessed 31 October 2018, available at https://amp.abc.net.au/article/10450504 Berkes, Enrico and Gaetani, Ruben (2019), ‘The Geography of Unconventional Innovation’, Rotman School of Management Working Paper No. 3423143 Bessen, James E., Denk, Erich, Kim, Joowon, and Righi, Cesare (2020), ‘Declining Industrial Disruption’, Boston Univ.


pages: 206 words: 70,924

The Rise of the Quants: Marschak, Sharpe, Black, Scholes and Merton by Colin Read

Abraham Wald, Albert Einstein, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, Black-Scholes formula, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, collateralized debt obligation, correlation coefficient, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, discovery of penicillin, discrete time, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, Henri Poincaré, implied volatility, index fund, Isaac Newton, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, margin call, market clearing, martingale, means of production, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Paul Samuelson, price stability, principal–agent problem, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, RAND corporation, random walk, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, stochastic process, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Chicago School, the scientific method, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, Works Progress Administration, yield curve

Indeed, my appreciation for technical analysis came from my university studies toward a Bachelor of Science degree in physics, followed immediately by a PhD in economics. However, as I began to teach economics and finance, I realized that the analytic tools of physics that so pervaded modern economics have strayed too far from explaining this important dimension of human financial decision-making. To better understand the interplay between the scientific method, economics, human behavior, and public policy, I continued with my studies toward a Master of Accountancy in taxation, an MBA, and a Juris Doctor of Law. As I taught the economics of intertemporal choice, the role of money and financial instruments, and the structure of the banking and financial intermediaries, I recognized that my students had become increasingly fascinated with investment banking and Wall Street.

First, the development of the mean and variance characterization of returns, then the use of William Sharpe’s CAPM to determine the risk-adjusted value of individual securities, and then, finally, the BlackScholes equation for the pricing of derivatives, in both the static form, and in the more dynamic context developed by Robert Merton, in just a couple of decades endowed personal finance with the tools necessary to create a science out of an art form. With the confidence, or sometimes perhaps with the false confidence, of the scientific method, finance developed rapidly. Soon, finance became a top industry, and even constituted one out of every three dollars of profit in the USA by 2006. The era of financial theory, and its integration into financial markets, had arrived. And the academic world took notice. Nobel Prizes are now granted to financial theory discoveries almost as often as to the rest 179 180 The Rise of the Quants of the study of economics.


pages: 235 words: 65,885

Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines by Richard Heinberg, James Howard (frw) Kunstler

Adam Curtis, addicted to oil, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Asilomar, back-to-the-land, carbon tax, classic study, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, demographic transition, ending welfare as we know it, energy transition, Fractional reserve banking, greed is good, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, land reform, Lewis Mumford, means of production, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, the built environment, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, urban planning

(Quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli, who was known for his abhorrence of sloppy thinking, once famously commented that another scientist’s work was “not even wrong.”) Grammar and logic give us the basis for making comprehensible statements about the world; linking logic with empirical evidence helps us formulate true statements and recognize when statements are false. This, again, is a long-standing practice: millennia before the scientific method was codified, people relied on feedback between language and sensory data to develop an accurate understanding of the world. Are the salmon running yet? Let’s go look. However, not all possible statements could be checked empirically. If someone said, “These berries taste good,” that was at least a matter for investigation, even if everyone didn’t agree.

Yet however strong the temptation to engage in it, magical thinking when tied to religion failed to provide much practical help in industry or commerce. As these limits came to be appreciated, and as industry and commerce expanded, philosophers and students of nature began to construct the formalized system of inquiry known as the scientific method. Here was a way to obtain verifiable knowledge of the physical world; better still, it was knowledge that could often be used to practical effect. The method came to hand at a propitious time: wealth was flowing to Europe from the rest of the world due to colonization and slavery; meanwhile the development of metallurgy and simple heat engines had proceeded to the point where the energy of fossil fuels could be put to widespread use.


pages: 281 words: 71,242

World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech by Franklin Foer

artificial general intelligence, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, big-box store, Buckminster Fuller, citizen journalism, Colonization of Mars, computer age, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Google Glasses, Haight Ashbury, hive mind, income inequality, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, move fast and break things, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, PageRank, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ray Kurzweil, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, strong AI, supply-chain management, TED Talk, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Upton Sinclair, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, yellow journalism

Their machines assimilated all the lessons of past searches, using these learnings to more precisely deliver the desired results. For the entirety of human existence, the creation of knowledge was a slog of trial and error. Humans would dream up theories of how the world worked, then would examine the evidence to see whether their hypotheses survived or crashed upon their exposure to reality. Algorithms upend the scientific method—the patterns emerge from the data, from correlations, unguided by hypotheses. They remove humans from the whole process of inquiry. Writing in Wired, Chris Anderson argued: “We can stop looking for models. We can analyze the data without hypotheses about what it might show. We can throw the numbers into the biggest computing clusters the world has ever seen and let statistical algorithms find patterns where science cannot.”

The essence of the algorithm is entirely uncomplicated: John MacCormick, Nine Algorithms That Changed the Future (Princeton University Press, 2012), 3–4. “We can stop looking for models. We can analyze the data without hypotheses”: Chris Anderson, “The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete,” Wired, June 23, 2008. Walmart’s algorithms found that people desperately buy strawberry Pop-Tarts: Constance L. Hays, “What Wal-Mart Knows About Customers’ Habits,” New York Times, November 14, 2004. Sweeney conducted a study that found that users with African American names: Latanya Sweeney, “Discrimination in Online Ad Delivery,” Communications of the ACM 56, no. 5 (May 2013): 44–54.


pages: 243 words: 65,374

How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson

A. Roger Ekirch, Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, big-box store, British Empire, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, clean water, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, Ford Model T, germ theory of disease, Hans Lippershey, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, invention of air conditioning, invention of the printing press, invention of the telescope, inventory management, Jacquard loom, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, Live Aid, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, machine readable, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megacity, Menlo Park, Murano, Venice glass, planetary scale, refrigerator car, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, techno-determinism, the scientific method, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, walkable city, women in the workforce

I should mention one additional element of the book’s focus: The “we” in this book, and in its title, is largely the “we” of North Americans and Europeans. The story of how China or Brazil got to now would be a different one, and every bit as interesting. But the European/North American story, while finite in its scope, is nonetheless of wider relevance because certain critical experiences—the rise of the scientific method, industrialization—happened in Europe first, and have now spread across the world. (Why they happened in Europe first is of course one of the most interesting questions of all, but it’s not one this book tries to answer.) Those enchanted objects of everyday life—those lightbulbs and lenses and audio recordings—are now a part of life just about everywhere on the planet; telling the story of the past thousand years from their perspective should be of interest no matter where you happen to live.

Pamphlets and treatises from alleged heretics like Galileo could circulate ideas outside the censorious limits of the Church, ultimately undermining its authority; at the same time, the system of citation and reference that evolved in the decades after Gutenberg’s Bible became an essential tool in applying the scientific method. But Gutenberg’s creation advanced the march of science in another, less familiar way: it expanded possibilities of lens design, of glass itself. For the first time, the peculiar physical properties of silicon dioxide were not just being harnessed to let us see things that we could already see with our own eyes; we could now see things that transcended the natural limits of human vision.


pages: 746 words: 239,969

Green Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

company town, double helix, escalation ladder, gravity well, Herman Kahn, Kim Stanley Robinson, means of production, oil shale / tar sands, phenotype, scientific management, skunkworks, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons

“The goal of your kind of science is the establishment of laws, of regularities, of exactness and certainty. You want things explained. You want to answer the whys, all the way back to the big bang. You’re a reductionist. Parsimony and elegance and economy are values for you, and if you can make things simpler that’s a real achievement, right?” “But that’s the scientific method itself,” Sax objected. “It’s not just me, it’s how nature itself works. Physics. You do it yourself.” “There are human values imbedded in physics.” “I’m not so sure.” He held out a hand to stop her for a second. “I’m not saying there are no values in science. But matter and energy do what they do.

He needed a science of history, but unfortunately there was no such thing. History is Lamarckian, Arkady used to say, a notion that was ominously suggestive given the pseudospeciation caused by the unequal distribution of the gerontological treatments; but it was no real help. Psychology, sociology, anthropology, they were all suspect. The scientific method could not be applied to human beings in any way that yielded useful information. It was the fact-value problem stated in a different way; human reality could only be explained in terms of values. And values were very resistant to scientific analysis: Isolation of factors for study, falsifiable hypotheses, repeatable experiments— the entire apparatus as practiced in lab physics simply could not be brought to bear.

It was a real science; it had discovered, there among the contingency and disorder, some valid general principles of evolution— development, adaptation, complexification, and many more specific principles as well, confirmed by the various subdisciplines. What he needed were similar principles influencing human history. The little reading he did in historiography was not encouraging; it was either a sad imitation of the scientific method, or art pure and simple. About every decade a new historical explanation revised all that had come before, but clearly revisionism held pleasures that had nothing to do with the actual justice of the case being made. Sociobiology and bioethics were more promising, but they tended to explain things best when working on evolutionary time scales, and he wanted something for the past hundred years, and the next hundred.


pages: 428 words: 121,717

Warnings by Richard A. Clarke

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, active measures, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, anti-communist, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, carbon tax, cognitive bias, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, corporate governance, CRISPR, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, deep learning, DeepMind, discovery of penicillin, double helix, Elon Musk, failed state, financial thriller, fixed income, Flash crash, forensic accounting, friendly AI, Hacker News, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge worker, Maui Hawaii, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, money market fund, mouse model, Nate Silver, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, OpenAI, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart grid, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stuxnet, subprime mortgage crisis, tacit knowledge, technological singularity, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tunguska event, uranium enrichment, Vernor Vinge, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, Y2K

They have the self-confidence to be first but not the arrogance that would interfere with their understanding of the nuances of the data. *QUESTIONERS: Most Cassandras tend to disbelieve anything that has not been empirically derived and repeatedly tested. They also tend to doubt their own work initially, especially when it predicts disaster. This characteristic is more than just a belief in the scientific method. Rather, they challenge what is generally accepted until it is proven to their satisfaction. They are the philosophical descendants of Pyrrho of Elis, a philosopher in ancient Greece who accompanied Alexander the Great to India. There Pyrrho learned from Indian philosophers who challenged everything.

Why would the IPCC not focus on the effects of melting polar ice? Hansen believes that “scientific reticence,” i.e., restraint in coming to a controversial conclusion, is hindering communication with the public about the dangers of global warming. Policy makers need to recognize that, he said. “Scientific reticence may be a consequence of the scientific method. Success in science depends on objective skepticism. Caution, if not reticence, has its merits.” He allowed that reticence at the IPCC “is probably a necessary characteristic, given that the IPCC document is produced as a consensus among most nations in the world and represents the views of thousands of scientists.”

At least, as he observed, one government has acted by slightly opening its treasury, enough to map many of the possible asteroid threats. No government, however, has acted to give Earth a comprehensive defense system that can rapidly spring into action to deflect a large and threatening object, were one to be found. Morrison himself exhibits many of the traits of a Cassandra. He is a renowned expert, uses the scientific method, and is data driven. He was the first to see something and say something about it, loudly. Although a government employee, he influenced the system to get Congress to tell his agency what to do. He has not experienced the criticism of his colleagues as overtly as others. No one doubts that he’s right, but some have other priorities.


pages: 1,073 words: 314,528

Strategy: A History by Lawrence Freedman

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Blue Ocean Strategy, British Empire, business process, butterfly effect, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, circulation of elites, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, collective bargaining, complexity theory, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, defense in depth, desegregation, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, endowment effect, escalation ladder, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, framing effect, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Ida Tarbell, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, lateral thinking, linear programming, loose coupling, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, mental accounting, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Nelson Mandela, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, scientific management, seminal paper, shareholder value, social contagion, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, strikebreaker, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Davenport, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Torches of Freedom, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, ultimatum game, unemployed young men, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Vilfredo Pareto, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

The approach can be discerned from his definition of strategy as “all enemy movements out of the enemy’s cannon range or range of vision,” so that tactics covered what happened within that range.10 His observations on tactics were considered to have merit, but much to his chagrin his description of the “new war system” was ignored by Prussian generals. Whatever the scientific method might bring to the battlefield, when it came to deciding on the moment, form, and conduct of battle, much would depend on the general’s own judgment—perhaps more a matter of character, insight, and intuition than careful calculation and planning. When battle was joined, the theory could say little because of the many variables in play.

In particular “a science like economics” could show the way to a “genuine analytical method.”7 The idea that the resolution of strategic problems depended on intellect and analysis rather than character and intuition fit in with the trend to subject all human decisions to the dictates of rationality and the application of science. It was given more urgency by the potentially catastrophic consequences of misjudgment in the nuclear age. The scientific method as a means of interpreting large amounts of disparate data had proved itself in Britain in the Second World War. It first made a mark when used to determine the best way to employ radar in air defense. As one of the key figures in the British program noted, the methodology used was closer to classical economics than physics, although economists were not directly engaged.8 During the course of the war, operations research—as the new field came to be known—made major strides in support of actual operations, including working out the safest arrangement for convoys in the face of submarine attack or choosing targets for air raids.9 Mathematicians and physicists made more of an impact in the United States, notably those who became involved in the Manhattan Project, the organization which had led to the production of the first atomic bomb.

Dewey decided not to go to the 1904 Congress to which Weber had been invited and so the two did not meet (although he met James at Harvard). Weber would have been aware of Dewey’s work because of the overlap, at least in some core themes, with his own. They were on similar tracks in their appreciation of the scientific method, their focus on the relationship of thought to action, and their stress on the need to judge actions by consequence as much as intent. There were also crucial differences between the two. While Dewey did not take seriously attempts to separate fact from value, Weber insisted upon it. While Dewey saw democracy as inclusive and participatory, for Weber the value of democracy was as a means of electing a proper leader from a wide pool and ensuring a degree of accountability.


pages: 272 words: 76,089

Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium by Carl Sagan

addicted to oil, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, classic study, clean water, cosmic abundance, dark matter, demographic transition, Exxon Valdez, F. W. de Klerk, germ theory of disease, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invention of radio, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, pattern recognition, planetary scale, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, stem cell, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, zero-sum game

Suppose further that what is required to prevent or mitigate the catastrophe is expensive: expensive in fiscal and intellectual resources, but also in challenging our way of thinking—that is, politically expensive. At what point do the pol-icymakers have to take the scientific prophets seriously? There are ways to assess the validity of the modern prophecies—because in the methods of science, there is an error-correcting procedure, a set of rules that have repeatedly worked well, sometimes called the scientific method. There are a number of tenets (I've outlined some of them in my book The Demon-Haunted World): Arguments from authority carry little weight ("Because I said so" isn't good enough); quantitative prediction is an extremely good way to sift useful ideas from nonsense; the methods of analysis must yield other results fully consistent with what else we know about the Universe; vigorous debate is a healthy sign; the same conclusions have to be drawn independently by competent competing scientific groups for an idea to be taken seriously; and so on.

No matter how stringent the protections of the people might be in constitutions or common law, there would always be a temptation, Jefferson thought, for the powerful, the wealthy, and the unscrupulous to undermine the ideal of government run by and for ordinary citizens. The antidote is vigorous support for the expression of unpopular views, widespread literacy, substantive debate, a common familiarity with critical thinking, and skepticism of pronouncements of those in authority—which are all also central to the scientific method. * After outlining traditional Christian views of women from patristic times to the Reformation, the Australian philosopher John Passmore (Man's Responsibility for Nature: Ecological Problems and Western Traditions [New York: Scrib-ner's, 1974]) concludes that Kinder, Kiiche, Kircher "as a description of the role of women is not an invention of Hitler's, but a typical Christian slogan." 252 • Billions and Billions THE REVELATIONS OF SCIENCE Every branch of science has made stunning advances in the twentieth century.


pages: 274 words: 75,846

The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You by Eli Pariser

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, A Pattern Language, adjacent possible, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, Apple Newton, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Black Swan, borderless world, Build a better mousetrap, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, disintermediation, don't be evil, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, fundamental attribution error, Gabriella Coleman, global village, Haight Ashbury, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Metcalfe’s law, Netflix Prize, new economy, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, power law, recommendation engine, RFID, Robert Metcalfe, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social graph, social software, social web, speech recognition, Startup school, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Nordhaus, The future is already here, the scientific method, urban planning, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

Karl Popper, one of the preeminent philosophers of science, made it his life’s mission to try to sort out the problem of induction, as it came to be known. While the optimistic thinkers of the late 1800s looked at the history of science and saw a journey toward truth, Popper preferred to focus on the wreckage along the side of the road—the abundance of failed theories and ideas that were perfectly consistent with the scientific method and yet horribly wrong. After all, the Ptolemaic universe, with the earth in the center and the sun and planets revolving around it, survived an awful lot of mathematical scrutiny and scientific observation. Popper posed his problem in a slightly different way: Just because you’ve only ever seen white swans doesn’t mean that all swans are white.

hl=en. 201 better and better: Nikki Tait, “Google to translate European patent claims,” Financial Times, Nov. 29, 2010, accessed Feb. 9, 2010, www.ft.com/cms/s/0/02f71b76-fbce-11df-b79a-00144feab49a.html. 202 “what to do with them”: Danny Sullivan, phone interview with author, Sept. 10, 2010. 202 “flash crash”: Graham Bowley, “Stock Swing Still Baffles, with an Ominous Tone,” New York Times, Aug. 22, 2010, accessed Feb. 8, 2010, www.nytimes.com/2010/08/23/business/23flash.html. 202 provocative article in Wired: Chris Anderson, “The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete,” Wired, June 23, 2008, accessed Feb. 10, 2010, http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/16-07/pb_theory. 203 greatest achievement of human technology: Hillis quoted in Jennifer Riskin, Genesis Redux: Essays in the History and Philosophy of Artificial Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 200. 204 “advertiser-funded media”: Marisol LeBron, “ ‘Migracorridos’: Another Failed Anti-immigration Campaign,” North American Congress of Latin America, Mar. 17, 2009, accessed Dec. 17, 2010, https://nacla.org/node/5625. 205 characters using the companies’ products throughout: Mary McNamara, “Television Review: ‘The Jensen Project,’ ” Los Angeles Times, July 16, 2010, accessed Dec. 17, 2010, http://articles.latimes. com/2010/jul/16/entertainment/la-et-jensen-project-20100716. 205 product-placement hooks throughout: Jenni Miller, “Hansel and Gretel in 3D?


pages: 280 words: 74,559

Fully Automated Luxury Communism by Aaron Bastani

"Peter Beck" AND "Rocket Lab", Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, capital controls, capitalist realism, cashless society, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, computer vision, CRISPR, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deep learning, dematerialisation, DIY culture, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Future Shock, G4S, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Gregor Mendel, housing crisis, income inequality, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kuiper Belt, land reform, Leo Hollis, liberal capitalism, low earth orbit, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, market fundamentalism, means of production, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, new economy, off grid, pattern recognition, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, post scarcity, post-work, price mechanism, price stability, private spaceflight, Productivity paradox, profit motive, race to the bottom, rewilding, RFID, rising living standards, Robert Solow, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sensor fusion, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, SoftBank, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the built environment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transatlantic slave trade, Travis Kalanick, universal basic income, V2 rocket, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, working-age population

By the 1870s it was this relationship between knowledge and technology which drove what Drucker labelled the ‘Productivity Revolution’. The father of this revolution was Frederick Taylor, an American mechanical engineer and pioneer in scientific management. Until Taylor, whose professional life took off in the 1880s, the scientific method had never been applied to the study of work in order to maximise output. Yet within a few short decades this became a dogma – massively expanding productivity and improving the standard of living for the average worker. After the rise of ‘Taylorism’, at least according to Drucker, value became more about the continued refinement and application of information than about labour, land or capital.

Besides the issue of war in both his homeland and abroad – relative constants prior to the twentieth century but particularly severe in the 1640s – his was also a world absent of modern medicine and where adult men rarely lived beyond forty. By the mid-1800s, however, that had changed as the application of the scientific method to healthcare and hygiene saw the mortality rate of infants and children sharply decline. Previously high fertility rates, combined with more children surviving to adulthood, inevitably meant unprecedented population growth among those countries at the forefront of the Second Disruption. The implications of this were profound.


pages: 366 words: 76,476

Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One's Looking) by Christian Rudder

4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bitcoin, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, data science, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, fake it until you make it, Frank Gehry, Howard Zinn, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Snow's cholera map, lifelogging, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nate Silver, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, p-value, power law, pre–internet, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, race to the bottom, retail therapy, Salesforce, selection bias, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, Twitter Arab Spring, two and twenty

You know the shape only through aggregation. What’s more, reduction and repetition are fundamental to the long history of science, not just data science and not just computer science, but capital-S Science, the ageless human enterprise. Experiments are built upon reducing a process to a single, manageable facet. The scientific method needs a control, and you can’t get it without cutting complexity to the bald core and saying this, this, is what matters. Only once you’ve simplified the question can you test it over and over again. Whether at a lab bench or a laptop, most of the knowledge we possess was acquired like this, by reduction.

Since it was the most recent result, that’s what ended up in the book. As interesting a tool as it is, the black box of Google’s autocomplete (and Google Trends, for that matter) is an example of one of the worst things about today’s data science—its opaqueness. Corroboration, so important to the scientific method, is difficult, because so much information is proprietary (and here OkCupid is as guilty as anyone). Even as most social media companies trumpet the hugeness and potential of their data, the bulk of it has stayed off-limits to the larger world. Data sets currently move through the research community like yeti—I have a bunch of interesting stuff but I can’t say from where; I heard someone at Temple has tons of Amazon reviews; I think L has a scrape of Facebook.


Chasing My Cure: A Doctor's Race to Turn Hope Into Action; A Memoir by David Fajgenbaum

Atul Gawande, Barry Marshall: ulcers, crowdsourcing, data science, Easter island, friendly fire, medical residency, personalized medicine, phenotype, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, the scientific method

I tried to put my health concerns aside and enjoy this precious time with my growing family. * * * — I’m an empiricist. I trust my eyes. That’s not exactly a bold statement coming from a doctor and researcher. Western medicine in the twenty-first century is all about evidence. It’s sort of a package deal: the white coat, the stethoscope, and the scientific method. When you’re in the healing business, what you really do is test, test some more, test some more, test some more, and—if you’re lucky—test a little bit more. You’re a professional results gatherer. Every once in a while, one of those results comes back hot: an effective treatment. A new drug.

And her innate gravitational pull to help those in need meant that she worked long hours to turn simple numbers into meaningful insights that could save patients’ lives. Dustin Shilling, who had just completed his PhD in neuroscience, instilled a healthy skepticism of so-called breakthroughs. As an Alzheimer’s researcher, he had learned all too well about the importance of the scientific method and interrogating results before getting too excited. He pushed for, and contributed his time toward, developing large-scale studies with meticulously detailed designs. The kinds of studies that could stand up in a field as complicated as Alzheimer’s or Castleman disease. Jason Ruth, a PhD student studying cancer biology, was my friend before he was my colleague.


pages: 244 words: 73,700

Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism by Amanda Montell

barriers to entry, behavioural economics, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, classic study, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, fake news, financial independence, Girl Boss, growth hacking, hive mind, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Keith Raniere, Kickstarter, late capitalism, lockdown, loss aversion, LuLaRoe, Lyft, multilevel marketing, off-the-grid, passive income, Peoples Temple, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, QAnon, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Social Justice Warrior, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, tech bro, the scientific method, TikTok, uber lyft, women in the workforce, Y2K

If brainwashing were real, says Moore, “we would expect to see many more dangerous people running around, planning to carry out reprehensible schemes.” Simply put, you cannot force someone to believe something they absolutely do not on any level want to believe by using some set of evil techniques to “wash” their brain. Secondly, Moore argues, brainwashing presents an untestable hypothesis. For a theory to meet the standard criteria of the scientific method, it has to be controvertible; that is, it must be possible to prove the thing false. (For example, as soon as objects start traveling faster than the speed of light, we’ll know that Einstein got his Theory of Special Relativity wrong.) But you can’t prove that brainwashing doesn’t exist. The minute you say someone is “brainwashed,” the conversation ends there.

As much as I’d like to take full intellectual credit for my exquisitely sensitive scam nose, I know that my disdain for pyramid schemes likely correlates to the fact that I am privileged enough to have no urgent need for their promises. Sociologists also say that higher education and training in the scientific method generally make people less gullible. And for better or for worse, so does being in a bad mood. In several experiments, researchers found that when someone is in a good mood, they become more innocent and unsuspecting, while feeling grumpy makes one better at sensing deception. Which has to be the most curmudgeonly superpower I’ve ever heard.


pages: 244 words: 73,966

Brief Peeks Beyond: Critical Essays on Metaphysics, Neuroscience, Free Will, Skepticism and Culture by Bernardo Kastrup

active measures, cellular automata, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, conceptual framework, dark matter, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, phenotype, placebo effect, quantum entanglement, retail therapy, scientific worldview, sugar pill, systems thinking, the scientific method

The Universe, thus, is God’s body. As such, nature is a perfectly valid subject of study for theology, in exactly the same way that the human nervous system is a perfectly valid subject of study for psychiatry. Coyne could counter all this by saying that we already have the natural sciences for studying nature, and that the scientific method is much better suited for this purpose. This is as strictly correct as it misses the point entirely: theology is an attempt to see past the mere images and make inferences about the subjective processes behind those images; it is an attempt to see past the ‘brain scan’ and infer how it ‘feels to feel’ love in a direct way; it is an attempt to see past the footprints and understand where the hiker wants to go, as well as why he wants to go there.

There may be unanswered questions regarding abstract parallel universes and alternate realities, but we assume that most of the facets of concrete life have been explained by rational scientific theories, from the weather to health, to psychology, to social dynamics. We believe unquestioningly that the Faustian power of rationality, skepticism and the application of the scientific method have answered – or are on the cusp of answering – all questions of any practical relevance to our daily lives. But is that really so? What reasons do we actually have to believe it? Could it be that the apparent runaway success of science – and, more generally, of our rational faculties – is as much illusory as it is factual?


pages: 342 words: 72,927

Transport for Humans: Are We Nearly There Yet? by Pete Dyson, Rory Sutherland

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Black Swan, Boeing 747, BRICs, butterfly effect, car-free, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, choice architecture, cognitive bias, cognitive load, coronavirus, COVID-19, Crossrail, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decarbonisation, demand response, Diane Coyle, digital map, driverless car, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, fake news, functional fixedness, gender pay gap, George Akerlof, gig economy, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Greta Thunberg, Gödel, Escher, Bach, high-speed rail, hive mind, Hyperloop, Induced demand, informal economy, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, low cost airline, Lyft, megaproject, meta-analysis, Network effects, nudge unit, Ocado, overview effect, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, pneumatic tube, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Rory Sutherland, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, selection bias, Skype, smart transportation, social distancing, South Sea Bubble, systems thinking, TED Talk, the map is not the territory, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, Veblen good, When a measure becomes a target, yield management, zero-sum game

Behavioural science fills in blind spots and adds colour to what existing maps leave out. It can add a diagnosis to existing reasoning, detecting potholes, dead ends and icebergs ahead, and creating new and alternative routes. This is true regardless of what happens in the world. Behavioural science has relied upon the scientific method (itself only five centuries old) to establish the facts about how people perceive, think, feel and behave. Only in the past decades has the wealth of evidence accumulated and been made accessible to solving real-world challenges. We see parallels here with the emergence of music theory and notation: both provide the fundamental truths, the agreed principles and a common language with which practitioners can exchange their ideas.

This might come from a senior leader having studied psychology or it could simply come from a determination to put customer needs first. Invest in a team At one level, ‘thinking behaviourally’ is a good start, but using a science merely as a perspective is limiting and quite risky. The discipline is a specialism; it follows the scientific method of theory, hypothesis, research, implementation and evaluation. Thanks to universities, courses and specialist organizations, you can now find people who are trained in social sciences and practitioners who are fluent in behaviour change models and frameworks. They approach problems through a process of analysis and idea generation that takes the guesswork out of applying behavioural science.


Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values by Robert M. Pirsig

Albert Einstein, always be closing, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Lao Tzu, Parkinson's law, the scientific method

The question is then asked: Does this eighteen-year-old person have a thought in his head? If so, where does it come from? How does he get it? Hume would have answered that the eighteen-year-old had no thoughts whatsoever, and in giving this answer would have defined himself as an empiricist, one who believes all knowledge is derived exclusively from the senses. The scientific method of experimentation is carefully controlled empiricism. Common sense today is empiricism, since an overwhelming majority would agree with Hume, even though in other cultures and other times a majority might have differed. The first problem of empiricism, if empiricism is believed, concerns the nature of “substance.”

This is the driest country yet. I want to talk now about truth traps and muscle traps and then stop this Chautauqua for today. Truth traps are concerned with data that are apprehended and are within the boxcars of the train. For the most part these data are properly handled by conventional dualistic logic and the scientific method talked about earlier, back just after Miles City. But there’s one trap that isn’t the truth trap of yes-no logic. Yes and no-this or that-one or zero. On the basis of this elementary two-term discrimination, all human knowledge is built up. The demonstration of this is the computer memory which stores all its knowledge in the form of binary information.

Aristotle attacked this belief, saying that the dialectic was only suitable for some purposes to enquire into men’s beliefs, to arrive at truths about eternal forms of things, known as Ideas, which were fixed and unchanging and constituted reality for Plato. Aristotle said there is also the method of science, or “physical” method, which observes physical facts and arrives at truths about substances, which undergo change. This duality of form and substance and the scientific method of arriving at facts about substances were central to Aristotle’s philosophy. Thus the dethronement of dialectic from what Socrates and Plato held it to be was absolutely essential for Aristotle, and “dialectic” was and still is a fulcrum word. Phćdrus guessed that Aristotle’s diminution of dialectic, from Plato’s sole method of arriving at truth to a “counterpart of rhetoric,” might be as infuriating to modern Platonists as it would have been to Plato.


pages: 462 words: 129,022

People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent by Joseph E. Stiglitz

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, antiwork, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carried interest, central bank independence, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, DeepMind, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disinformation, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global supply chain, greed is good, green new deal, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, late fees, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Peter Thiel, postindustrial economy, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, two-sided market, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, working-age population, Yochai Benkler

Universities also do not give equal weight to theories that the world is flat, to the phlogiston theories in chemistry, or to gold bugs in economics. There are some ideas that deservedly do not receive equal weight in higher education.34 It would be malpractice to teach outdated ideas that have been repeatedly disproved by the scientific method. So far, the universities have withstood the siege. But one can only imagine what will happen to America’s economy and our standing in the world were Trump and the others waging this war to succeed. Our position in the vanguard of innovation would quickly recede. Already, others are taking advantage of Trump’s anti-immigrant and anti-science stance: Canada and Australia, for instance, are actively trying to recruit talented students and create research institutions and laboratories to provide viable alternatives to those of Silicon Valley.

We especially believe in equality of opportunity and justice, and in democracy—not the one dollar one vote system that we have become but the one person one vote system that we learned about in school. We believe in tolerance, letting others do as they please as long as they don’t harm others. We believe in science and technology, and the scientific method—keys to understanding the universe and the increase in our standards of living. We believe that we can use reason and deliberation, too, to figure out how to better arrange the affairs of society, to create better social and economic institutions that, in turn, have not only increased our material well-being, but created a society in which diverse individuals are better able to work together, to achieve far more than they could working alone.

See Stephen Broadberry, Bruce Campbell, Alexander Klein, Mark Overton, and Bas van Leeuwen, British Economic Growth, 1270–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 18.A critical aspect of the scientific process entails repeated verification of the results, and clarity about the scientific precision and certainty with which various results have been established. Science itself is thus a social enterprise: we know and believe what we do because of the collective efforts of thousands of individuals, all operating within the discipline provided by the scientific method. 19.Each of these concepts is complex and subtle, and the terms are often abused. Feudal lords might claim to invoke a rule of law as they abused the serfs that worked for them; so too for slave owners in the South, who used the “law” to force the return of escaped slaves. (See Eric Foner, Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015]).


pages: 511 words: 139,108

The Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Arthur Eddington, Boeing 747, butterfly effect, coherent worldview, complexity theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cosmological principle, different worldview, Donald Knuth, Douglas Hofstadter, Eddington experiment, Georg Cantor, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Johannes Kepler, Occam's razor, phenotype, quantum cryptography, Richard Feynman, scientific worldview, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, time dilation, Turing machine

Although this doctrine is itself meaningless, according to its own criterion, it was nevertheless the prevailing theory of scientific knowledge during the first half of the twentieth century! Even today, instrumentalist and positivist ideas still have currency. One reason why they are superficially plausible is that, although prediction is not the purpose of science, it is part of the characteristic method of science. The scientific method involves postulating a new theory to explain some class of phenomena and then performing a crucial experimental test, an experiment for which the old theory predicts {6} one observable outcome and the new theory another. One then rejects the theory whose predictions turn out to be false. Thus the outcome of a crucial experimental test to decide between two theories does depend on the theories' predictions, and not directly on their explanations.

When confronted with evidence of it, they are obliged to regard it as an 'anomaly', an experimental error, a fraud - anything at all that will allow them to hold the paradigm inviolate. Thus Kuhn believes that the scientific values of openness to criticism and tentativeness in accepting theories, and the scientific methods of experimental testing and the abandonment of prevailing theories when they are refuted, are largely myths that it would not be humanly possible to enact when dealing with any significant scientific issue. {321} Kuhn accepts that, for insignificant scientific issues, something like a scientific process (as I outlined in Chapter 3) does happen.

Furthermore, we have seen that the existence of highly adapted replicators depends on the physical feasibility of virtual-reality generation and universality, which in turn can be understood as consequences of a deep principle, the Turing principle, that links physics and the theory of computation and makes no explicit reference to replicators, evolution or biology at all. An analogous gap exists in Popperian epistemology. Its critics wonder why the scientific method works, or what justifies our reliance on the best scientific theories. This leads them to hanker after a principle of induction or something of the sort (though, as {340} crypto-inductivists, they usually realize that such a principle would not explain or justify anything either). For Popperians to reply that there is no such thing as justification, or that it is never rational to rely on theories, is to provide no explanation.


pages: 741 words: 199,502

Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class by Charles Murray

23andMe, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Asperger Syndrome, assortative mating, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, behavioural economics, bioinformatics, Cass Sunstein, correlation coefficient, CRISPR, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark triade / dark tetrad, domesticated silver fox, double helix, Drosophila, emotional labour, epigenetics, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, feminist movement, glass ceiling, Gregor Mendel, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, Kenneth Arrow, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, meritocracy, meta-analysis, nudge theory, out of africa, p-value, phenotype, public intellectual, publication bias, quantitative hedge fund, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, replication crisis, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, school vouchers, Scientific racism, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Skinner box, social intelligence, Social Justice Warrior, statistical model, Steven Pinker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, twin studies, universal basic income, working-age population

“Man, who will learn how to move rivers and mountains, how to build peoples’ palaces on the peaks of Mont Blanc and at the bottom of the Atlantic, will not only be able to add to his own life richness, brilliancy and intensity, but also a dynamic quality of the highest degree.”6 Elsewhere, the pioneers of the new discipline of sociology had less extreme ambitions, but they drew from the same optimism about the power of the scientific method applied to human behavior. “Our main objective,” Émile Durkheim wrote of sociology, “is to extend the scope of scientific rationalism to cover human behavior.” Causes and effects could be spelled out, he continued, and they in turn “can then be transformed into rules of action for the future.”7 The constraints of inborn human nature? “These individual natures are merely the indeterminate material that the social factor molds and transforms.”8 At the beginning of the twentieth century, the application of the scientific method to human malleability was extended to another new discipline, psychology.

I find Mitchell’s skepticism convincing, but this aspect of the research is being conducted using methods that lend themselves to rigorous examination. The more ambitious claims of the enthusiasts are currently unwarranted, but if the enthusiasts are right they will eventually be able to make their case via the scientific method. The second issue is whether environmentally induced changes in methylation are passed on to the next generation. The scientifically interpretable evidence for this is mostly from work with C. elegans (a worm about one millimeter long) and D. melanogaster (the fruit fly), which seems a long way from proving that it happens in humans.

But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?”5 During the nineteenth century, unsentimental realism about human nature lost ground to a strange mix of idealism and rationalism that pursued extravagant goals. Karl Marx outdid all the rest with his grand theoretical application of the scientific method (as Marx saw it) to human malleability, blending history, sociology, economics, and politics into a utopian vision of what could be accomplished given the right economic and institutional structures. The Communists who came to power in Russia didn’t think it was just theory; they thought it would work miracles.


pages: 246 words: 81,625

On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins, Sandra Blakeslee

airport security, Albert Einstein, backpropagation, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Jeff Hawkins, Johannes Kepler, Necker cube, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Ray Kurzweil, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, superintelligent machines, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Turing machine, Turing test

Many vision researchers ignore saccades and the rapidly changing patterns of vision. Working with anesthetized animals, they study how vision occurs when an unconscious animal fixates on a point. In doing so, they're taking away the time dimension. There's nothing wrong with that in principle; eliminating variables is a core element of the scientific method. But they're throwing away a central component of vision, what it actually consists of. Time needs a central place in a neuroscientific account of vision. With hearing, we're used to thinking about sound's temporal aspect. It is intuitively obvious to us that sounds, spoken language, and music change over time.

Stereotyping is an inherent feature of the brain. The way to eliminate the harm caused by stereotypes is to teach our children to recognize false stereotypes, to be empathetic, and to be skeptical. We need to promote these critical-thinking skills in addition to instilling the best values we know. Skepticism, the heart of the scientific method, is the only way we know how to ferret out fact from fiction. * * * By now, I hope I have convinced you that mind is just a label of what the brain does. It isn't a separate thing that manipulates or coexists with the cells in the brain. Neurons are just cells. There is no mystical force that makes individual nerve cells or collections of nerve cells behave in ways that differ from what they would normally do.


pages: 296 words: 86,188

Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong-And the New Research That's Rewriting the Story by Angela Saini

Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, classic study, demographic transition, Drosophila, feminist movement, gender pay gap, Large Hadron Collider, meta-analysis, mouse model, out of africa, place-making, scientific mainstream, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, women in the workforce

If biological differences exist, we can’t help but want to know. More than that, if we want to build a fairer society, we need to be able to understand these gaps and accommodate them. The problem is that answers in science aren’t everything they seem. When we turn to scientists for resolution, we assume they will be neutral. We think the scientific method can’t be biased or loaded against women. But we’re wrong. The puzzle of why there are so few women in the sciences is crucial to understanding why, not because it tells us something about what women are capable of but because it explains why science has failed to rid us of the gender stereotypes and dangerous myths we’ve been laboring under for centuries.

“Darwin created a space where women could say that maybe the Garden of Eden didn’t happen. . .and this was huge. You cannot overestimate how important Adam and Eve were in terms of constraining and shaping people’s ideas about women.” Although not a scientist herself, through Darwin’s work Gamble realized just how devastating the scientific method could be. If humans were descended from lesser creatures, the same as all other life on earth, then it made no sense for women to be confined to the home or subservient to men. These obviously weren’t the rules in the rest of the animal kingdom. “It would be unnatural for women to sit around and be totally dependent on men,” Hamlin tells me.


pages: 369 words: 80,355

Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren't the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room by David Weinberger

airport security, Alfred Russel Wallace, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, An Inconvenient Truth, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, book scanning, Cass Sunstein, commoditize, Computer Lib, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, David Brooks, Debian, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, future of journalism, Future Shock, Galaxy Zoo, Gregor Mendel, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, invention of the telegraph, Jeff Hawkins, jimmy wales, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, linked data, Neil Armstrong, Netflix Prize, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, P = NP, P vs NP, PalmPilot, Pluto: dwarf planet, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Republic of Letters, RFID, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, semantic web, slashdot, social graph, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize

Mary Poovey cites the invention in Italy of double-entry bookkeeping, which in the sixteenth century provided a process by which ledger entries could be proved accurate to anyone who, regardless of status, followed the proper procedure. 11 But most historians look to the seventeenth century, when the philosopher and statesman Francis Bacon, seeking to put knowledge on a more certain basis, invented the scientific method. Like Aristotle, he sought knowledge of universals.12 But he proposed getting to them through careful experiments on particulars. For example, when Bacon wanted to find out how much a liquid expands when it becomes a gas, he filled a one-ounce vial with alcohol, capped it with a bladder, heated the alcohol until the bladder filled, and then measured how much liquid was left.13 From this experiment on particulars, he was able to propose a theory that applied universally to heated liquids.

Thousands of babies grew up listening to cloying New Age renditions of Mozart’s works because a statistically insignificant, nonrepresentative sample of college kids did marginally better at a narrowly defined task under poorly controlled circumstances. That’s how science too often is taken up by our culture. Of course, science itself doesn’t work this way. The scientific method enables us to test hypotheses by isolating the causes of effects through carefully controlled, repeatable experiments. That’s true for much of day-to-day science carried out in labs and workshops around the world. Even in scientific disciplines that are more theoretical or observational than experimental—evolutionary biology, for example—science has been a careful and conservative practice, patiently trying to tie facts together into theories that make sense of them.


pages: 301 words: 85,263

New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future by James Bridle

AI winter, Airbnb, Alfred Russel Wallace, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Boeing 747, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, congestion charging, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Eyjafjallajökull, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, fear of failure, Flash crash, fulfillment center, Google Earth, Greyball, Haber-Bosch Process, Higgs boson, hive mind, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, James Bridle, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Large Hadron Collider, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, Leo Hollis, lone genius, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, meta-analysis, Minecraft, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, oil shock, p-value, pattern recognition, peak oil, recommendation engine, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, social graph, sorting algorithm, South China Sea, speech recognition, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, stem cell, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, the built environment, the scientific method, Uber for X, undersea cable, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks

Scannell, Alex Blanckley, Helen Boldon and Brian Warrington, ‘Diagnosing the decline in pharmaceutical R&D efficiency’, Nature Reviews Drug Discovery 11, 191–200 (March 2012). One of the places in which it has become increasingly evident that the reliance on vast amounts of data alone is harmful to the scientific method is in pharmacological research. Over the past sixty years, despite the huge growth of the pharmacological industry, and the concomitant investment in drug discovery, the rate at which new drugs are made available has actually fallen when compared to the amount of money spent on research – and it has fallen consistently and measurably.

An arms race develops between writer and machine, with the latest plagiarism detectors employing neural networks to winkle out uncommon words and phrases that might point towards manipulation. But neither plagiarism nor outright fraud suffice to account for a larger crisis within science: replicability. Replication is a cornerstone of the scientific method: it requires that any experiment be repeatable by another group of independent researchers. But in reality, very few experiments are replicated – and the more that are, the more fail the test. At the University of Virginia’s Center for Open Science, an initiative called the Reproducibility Project has, since 2011, tried to replicate the findings of five landmark cancer studies: to take the same experimental setup, rerun the experiments, and get the same results.


pages: 288 words: 81,253

Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke

banking crisis, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Cass Sunstein, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, fake news, Filter Bubble, Herman Kahn, hindsight bias, Jean Tirole, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, loss aversion, market design, mutually assured destruction, Nate Silver, p-value, phenotype, prediction markets, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, systematic bias, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, urban planning, Walter Mischel, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

We see that even judges and scientists succumb to these biases. We shouldn’t feel bad, whatever our situation, about admitting that we also need help. Second, groups with diverse viewpoints are the best protection against confirmatory thought. Peer review, the gold standard that epitomizes the open-mindedness and hypothesis testing of the scientific method, “offers much less protection against error when the community of peers is politically homogeneous.” In other words, the opinions of group members aren’t much help if it is a group of clones. Experimental studies cited in the BBS paper found that confirmation bias led reviewers “to work extra hard to find flaws with papers whose conclusions they dislike, and to be more permissive about methodological issues when they endorse the conclusions.”

A betting market in which the traders were the exact same experts and those experts had money on the line predicted correctly 71% of the time. A lot of people were surprised to learn that the expert opinion expressed as a bet was more accurate than expert opinion expressed through peer review, since peer review is considered a rock-solid foundation of the scientific method. Of course, this result shouldn’t be surprising to readers of this book. We know that scientists are dedicated to truthseeking and take peer review seriously. Arguably, there is already an implied betting element in the scientific process, in that researchers and peer reviewers have a reputational stake in the quality of their review.


The Armchair Economist: Economics and Everyday Life by Steven E. Landsburg

Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, business cycle, diversified portfolio, Dutch auction, first-price auction, German hyperinflation, Golden Gate Park, information asymmetry, invisible hand, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, low interest rates, means of production, price discrimination, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, random walk, Ronald Coase, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, statistical model, the scientific method, Unsafe at Any Speed

He proposed retaining the economist to study what makes teams punt. 211 212 THE PITFALLS OF SCIENCE The commissioner summoned the economist, who went home with a large retainer check and a mandate to discover the causes of punting. Many hours later (he billed by the hour) the answer was at hand. Volumes of computer printouts left no doubt: Punting nearly always takes place on the fourth down. But the economist was trained in the scientific method and knew that describing the past is less impressive than predicting the future. So before contacting the commissioner, he put his model to the acid test. He attended several football games and predicted in advance that all punting would take place on fourth down. When his predictions proved accurate, he knew he had made a genuine scientific discovery.

The naive environmentalism of my daughter's preschool is a force-fed potpourri of myth, superstition, and ritual that has 223 224 THE PITFALLS OF RELIGION much in common with the least reputable varieties of religious Fundamentalism. The antidote to bad religion is good science. The antidote to astrology is the scientific method, the antidote to naive creationism is evolutionary biology, and the antidote to naive environmentalism is economics. Economics is the science of competing preferences. Environmentalism goes beyond science when it elevates matters of preference to matters of morality. A proposal to pave a wilderness and put up a parking lot is an occasion for conflict between those who prefer wilderness and those who prefer convenient parking.


pages: 790 words: 150,875

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, Atahualpa, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Dean Kamen, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Easter island, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, guns versus butter model, Hans Lippershey, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, land reform, land tenure, liberal capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, Pearl River Delta, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, retail therapy, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Great Moderation, the market place, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, undersea cable, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, wage slave, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, work culture , World Values Survey

It comes in many variants – medieval English individualism, humanism and the Protestant ethic – and it has been sought everywhere from the wills of English farmers to the account books of Mediterranean merchants and the rules of etiquette of royal courts. In The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, David Landes made the cultural case by arguing that Western Europe led the world in developing autonomous intellectual inquiry, the scientific method of verification and the rationalization of research and its diffusion. Yet even he allowed that something more was required for that mode of operation to flourish: financial intermediaries and good government.26 The key, it becomes ever more apparent, lies with institutions. Institutions are, of course, in some sense the products of culture.

That the struggle between radical Islam and Western civilization can be caricatured as ‘Jihad vs McWorld’ speaks volumes.91 In reality, the core values of Western civilization are directly threatened by the brand of Islam espoused by terrorists like Muktar Said Ibrahim, derived as it is from the teachings of the nineteenth-century Wahhabist Sayyid Jamal al-Din and the Muslim Brotherhood leaders Hassan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb.92 The separation of church and state, the scientific method, the rule of law and the very idea of a free society – including relatively recent Western principles like the equality of the sexes and the legality of homosexual acts – all these things are openly repudiated by the Islamists. Estimates of the Muslim population of West European countries vary widely.

A growing number of Resterners are sleeping, showering, dressing, working, playing, eating, drinking and travelling like Westerners.61 Moreover, as we have seen, Western civilization is more than just one thing; it is a package. It is about political pluralism (multiple states and multiple authorities) as well as capitalism; it is about the freedom of thought as well as the scientific method; it is about the rule of law and property rights as well as democracy. Even today, the West still has more of these institutional advantages than the Rest. The Chinese do not have political competition. The Iranians do not have freedom of conscience. They get to vote in Russia, but the rule of law there is a sham.


pages: 560 words: 158,238

Fifty Degrees Below by Kim Stanley Robinson

airport security, bioinformatics, bread and circuses, Burning Man, carbon credits, carbon tax, clean water, DeepMind, Donner party, full employment, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, iterative process, Kim Stanley Robinson, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, North Sea oil, off-the-grid, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method

Their usual lunchtime special ran parallel to Route 66 east for a while, then back around the curve of the Potomac and west back to NSF. They ran at talking speed, which for this group meant about an eight-minute mile pace. A lot of the talking came from Edgardo, riffing on one thing or another. He liked to make connections; he liked to question things. He didn’t believe in anything. Even the scientific method was to him a kind of ad hoc survival attempt, a not-very–successful concoction of emergency coping mechanisms. Which belief did not, however, keep him from working maniacally on every project thrown his way, nor from partying late almost every night at various Latin venues. He was from Buenos Aires originally, and this, he said, explained everything about him.

Social Science Experiment in Elective Politics (SSEEP) (notes by Edgardo Alfonso, for Diane Chang, the Vanderwal committee, and the National Science Board) The experiment is designed to ask, if the scientific community were to propose a platform of political goals based on scientific principles, how would it be formulated, and what would the platform say? In other words, what goals for improvement in society and government might follow logically from the aggregate of scientific findings and the application of the scientific method to the problem of change? The platform could conceivably take the form of the “Contract with America” adopted by the Republican Party before the 1994 election (a kind of list of Things To Do): “Contract with Humanity” “Contract with the Children” “Contract with the Generations to Come” commitment to inventing a sustainable culture (Permaculture, first iteration —what science is for) Some kind of underlying macro-goal or foundational axiom set might have to be synthesized from the particulars of scientific practice and the composite standard model of physical reality expressed by the various disciplines. 1) One axiom or goal might be some form of the “Greatest good for the greatest number” rubric.

Take a problem, break it down into parts (analyze), quantify whatever parts you could, see if what you learned suggested anything about causes and effects; then see if this suggested anything about long-term plans, and tangible things to do. She did not believe in revolution of any kind, and only trusted the mass application of the scientific method to get any real-world results. “One step at a time,” she would say to her team in bioinformatics, or Nick’s math group at school, or the National Science Board; and she hoped that as long as chaos did not erupt worldwide, one step at a time would eventually get them to some tolerable state.


pages: 543 words: 147,357

Them And Us: Politics, Greed And Inequality - Why We Need A Fair Society by Will Hutton

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Blythe Masters, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, centre right, choice architecture, cloud computing, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, debt deflation, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of DNA, discovery of the americas, discrete time, disinformation, diversification, double helix, Edward Glaeser, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, first-past-the-post, floating exchange rates, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, income inequality, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Dyson, James Watt: steam engine, Japanese asset price bubble, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, language acquisition, Large Hadron Collider, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, long term incentive plan, Louis Pasteur, low cost airline, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meritocracy, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, moral panic, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Neil Kinnock, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, plutocrats, power law, price discrimination, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, railway mania, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, tail risk, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-masted sailing ship, too big to fail, unpaid internship, value at risk, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, work culture , working poor, world market for maybe five computers, zero-sum game, éminence grise

., only 23 true GPTs have ever been invented, and 15 of them have appeared in the last 550 years.10 Moreover, the pace is accelerating. Nine GPTs – the internal combustion engine, electricity, the motor vehicle, the airplane, mass production, the computer, lean production, the internet and biotechnology – have been developed over the last 125 years. The movement to a scientific culture and the adoption of the scientific method since the Enlightenment have allowed systematic formulation of the principles underlying GPTs and the creation of a common knowledge base that grows cumulatively – thereby opening the path for the creation of new GPTs. There is every reason to believe that the number will double again in the next 125 years, as technologies build on each other at an exponential rate.

Before 1829, dissenters were all prohibited from joining Parliament, the military or the civil service. Wedgwood typified the new breed: ‘everything yields to experiment’, he said, as he restlessly integrated art, industry and the latest technological processes. Britain had become an open-access society in every way, celebrating Newton’s mechanics and the scientific method that produced it but also welcoming the influence of thinkers from outside the mainstream.4 The country was locked into a virtuous circle. The threat of ossification The contrast between Britain’s embrace of the new in the first half of the nineteenth century and the resistance elsewhere is striking.

Gardner argues that there are five distinct sets of mental capabilities that are necessary for future progress. The first is what he dubs the ‘disciplined mind’ – the mind that can work with subject matter in any discipline to uncover laws, truths or insights via a systematic, disciplined process, be it the scientific method or a historian quarrying away in the archives to make empathetic sense of the past and the present. Gardner then makes the case for the ‘creative’, the ‘synthesising’, the ‘respectful’ and the ‘ethical’ mind. Synthesising minds are needed to marshal disparate information from the multiplicity of new sources, while creative minds challenge received wisdom and authority to make new breakthroughs.


Animal Spirits by Jackson Lears

1960s counterculture, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, behavioural economics, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, clockwork universe, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Doomsday Clock, double entry bookkeeping, epigenetics, escalation ladder, feminist movement, financial innovation, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, George Santayana, heat death of the universe, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Ida Tarbell, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Norman Mailer, plutocrats, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scientific racism, short selling, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, source of truth, South Sea Bubble, Stanislav Petrov, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, the market place, the scientific method, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog, zero-sum game

A Science that has tried and failed is as satisfactory as a Science that succeeds. Truth simply consists in the perpetual quest after truth.” As Lovejoy recognized, this perspective was consistent with the conception of truth-as-process that James had dubbed “pragmatic.” It was also far more congruent with the trial-and-error nature of the scientific method than nineteenth-century scientists’ claims to certainty had been. Still, there was a certain vagueness around the edges of the élan vital (as there was around all celebrations of raw energy) that left it susceptible to appropriation for vile purposes, including those of militarists and fascists.

Roszak’s sweeping condemnations of “scientists,” “science,” and “the scientific world view” left him vulnerable to charges of anti-intellectualism. He neglected to make clear that his real focus was on scientism—the belief that a reified “science” had answered (or was about to answer) all the questions we could possibly pose to the cosmos. This outlook, which is completely at odds with the scientific method, has always been more prominent among journalistic popularizers than among scientists themselves. Yet despite Roszak’s imprecise aim at “science,” he recognized that elevation of quantity over quality—like the technocratic worldview it enabled—depended on a dualistic Cartesian ontology. Though Roszak never referred to Descartes, he focused on “the myth of objective consciousness” as the intellectual foundation of technocracy.

Like previous mainstream economists, Shiller and Akerlof turned Keynesianism into mere technique. In fact, Keynes’s ideas remained profoundly at odds with contemporary policy assumptions. Keynes would undoubtedly take issue with the consensus faith in quantitative expertise, which has been fed by popularizing journalists. Ignoring the experimental cast of mind at the heart of the scientific method, they have made a reified “science” the repository of absolute truth. Behind this enterprise lies the reductionist assumption that science has answered (or is about to answer) all ultimate questions with quantifiable precision. The determination to calculate the incalculable has accelerated, promoting “happiness studies” and other forms of survey research that purport to plumb the depths of subjective experience on the dubious basis of self-reporting.


pages: 795 words: 215,529

Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman by James Gleick

Albert Einstein, American ideology, Arthur Eddington, Brownian motion, Charles Babbage, disinformation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, gravity well, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, pattern recognition, Pepto Bismol, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sand Hill Road, Schrödinger's Cat, sexual politics, sparse data, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, uranium enrichment

They do not appreciate that the problem is not to demonstrate whether it’s possible or not but whether it’s going on or not.” How could one evaluate miracle cures or astrological forecasts or telekinetic victories at the roulette wheel? By subjecting them to the scientific method. Look for people who recovered from leukemia without having prayed. Place sheets of glass between the psychic and the roulette table. “If it’s not a miracle,” he said, “the scientific method will destroy it.” It was essential to understand coincidence and probability. It was noteworthy that flying-saucer lore involved a considerably greater variety of saucer than of creature: “orange balls of light, blue spheres which bounce on the floor, gray fogs which disappear, gossamer-like streams which evaporate into the air, thin, round flat things out of which objects come with funny shapes that are something like a human being.”

Instead, professors and working physicists found Feynman’s three volumes reshaping their own conception of their subject. They were more than just authoritative. A physicist, citing one of many celebrated passages, would dryly pay homage to “Book II, Chapter 41, Verse 6.” Authoritative, too, were Feynman’s views of quantum mechanics, of the scientific method, of the relations between science and religion, of the role of beauty and uncertainty in the creation of knowledge. His comments on such subjects were mostly expressed offhand in technical contexts, but also in two slim models of science writing, again distilled from lectures: The Character of Physical Law and QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter.

A year after that, the study of streptomycin as an antitubercular agent had become the most extensive research project ever devoted to a drug and a disease. Researchers were treating more than one thousand patients. In 1947 streptomycin was released to the public. Streptomycin’s discovery, like penicillin’s a few years earlier, had been delayed by medicine’s slow embrace of the scientific method. Physicians had just begun to comprehend the power of controlled experiments repeated thousands of times. The use of statistics to uncover any but the grossest phenomena remained alien. The doctor who first isolated the culture he named Streptomyces griseus, by cultivating some organisms swabbed from the throat of a chicken, had seen the same microbes in a soil sample in 1915 and had recognized even then that they had a tendency to kill disease-causing bacteria.


pages: 420 words: 98,309

Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts by Carol Tavris, Elliot Aronson

Ayatollah Khomeini, classic study, climate anxiety, cognitive dissonance, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, Donald Trump, false memory syndrome, fear of failure, Lao Tzu, longitudinal study, medical malpractice, medical residency, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, placebo effect, psychological pricing, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, social intelligence, sugar pill, telemarketer, the scientific method, trade route, transcontinental railway, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

For example, cognitive and behavioral methods are the psychological treatments of choice for panic attacks, depression, eating disorders, insomnia, chronic anger, and other emotional disorders. These methods are often as effective or more effective than medication.5 In contrast, most psychiatrists, who have medical degrees, learn about medicine and medication, but they rarely learn much about the scientific method or even about basic research in psychology. Throughout the twentieth century, they were generally practitioners of Freudian psychoanalysis or one of its offshoots; you needed an MD to be admitted to a psychoanalytic training institute. As the popularity of psychoanalysis declined and the biomedical model of disorder gained the upper hand, most psychiatrists began treating patients with medication rather than any form of talk therapy.

An understanding of how to think scientifically may not aid therapists in the subjective process of helping a client who is searching for answers to existential questions. But it matters profoundly when therapists claim expertise and certainty in domains in which unverified clinical opinion can ruin lives. The scientific method consists of the use of procedures designed to show not that our predictions and hypotheses are right, but that they might be wrong. Scientific reasoning is useful to anyone in any job because it makes us face the possibility, even the dire reality, that we were mistaken. It forces us to confront our self-justifications and put them on public display for others to puncture.


pages: 336 words: 92,056

The Battery: How Portable Power Sparked a Technological Revolution by Henry Schlesinger

Albert Einstein, animal electricity, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, British Empire, Copley Medal, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, index card, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Livingstone, I presume, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, pneumatic tube, popular electronics, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RFID, Robert Metcalfe, Stephen Hawking, Thales of Miletus, the scientific method, Thomas Davenport, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Yogi Berra

Unlike the dubious work of alchemists or innovations by tradesmen, which were largely conducted in secret, Gilbert’s brand of science was freely shared and open to challenges. A better theory backed up by a credible experiment could displace even the most fundamental of Gilbert’s conclusions. The scientific method would even have a profound effect on alchemy. By the time De Magnete was published, the secretive endeavor, which uncomfortably merged the technical and the mystical, had already moved beyond its traditional wasted efforts of transmutation or eternal life toward legitimate medicine. Gilbert and the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century served to push it even further away from magic and mysticism toward experimentation and respectability.

Given the participants, it was an odd debate. Galvani, the anatomist, had ventured into physics, while Volta, the physicist, was crossing over into anatomy. Cultured Europe, in which science was very much salonfähig, quickly began to line up on both sides of the issue. Volta, for his part, was a strict adherent to the scientific method. Using a methodology very much like Franklin’s disassembling of a Leyden jar, he discovered that electrical fluid generated in the frog experiment was a product of the sum of its parts rather than a single piece. In a series of experiments, he systematically substituted various components of Galvani’s original experiment and soon found the secret resided not in the frog, but in the two dissimilar metals.


pages: 369 words: 90,630

Mindwise: Why We Misunderstand What Others Think, Believe, Feel, and Want by Nicholas Epley

affirmative action, airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autism spectrum disorder, behavioural economics, Cass Sunstein, cognitive load, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, drone strike, friendly fire, invisible hand, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, payday loans, Peter Singer: altruism, pirate software, Richard Thaler, school choice, social intelligence, the scientific method, theory of mind

Only at the rare times when it is stretched beyond its limits, or is proven to be profoundly mistaken, does its existence come back into view. ON MY MIND My goal is to bring what I think is your brain’s greatest ability out of the shadows and into the light of scientific inspection. Like thousands of other psychologists at research universities around the world, I use the basic principles of the scientific method to understand why you think, act, and feel as you do. More specifically, I conduct experiments that test your sixth sense to learn exactly how, and how well, you reason about the thoughts, motives, attitudes, beliefs, and emotions of others. This ability is one of your brain’s greatest because it allows you to achieve one of the most important goals in any human life: connecting, deeply and honestly, with other human beings.

The biggest gender differences are biological: men have penises and women have vaginas, and, yes, research confirms that most men throw a baseball faster and farther than most women.21 The gender differences that most strongly capture our imagination and define our genders, however, are psychological: women are communal, emotional, relational, and think mainly about others, whereas men are independent, logical, spatial, and think mainly about sex. Scientists also love to talk about psychological gender differences, in part because the scientific method—just like our senses—uses methods that detect differences between groups rather than similarities. Consider the largest single study of gender preferences ever conducted in psychology, a survey of 10,047 men and women (ages twenty to twenty-five) from 37 cultures. These men and women were asked to rate the importance of thirteen attributes in a romantic partner (from 0, meaning it’s unimportant, to 3, meaning it’s indispensable).


pages: 335 words: 95,280

The Greatest Story Ever Told--So Far by Lawrence M. Krauss

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, complexity theory, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, Ernest Rutherford, Higgs boson, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, Isaac Newton, Large Hadron Collider, Magellanic Cloud, Murray Gell-Mann, Plato's cave, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, the scientific method, time dilation

Everything about our evolutionary history has primed our minds to be comfortable with concepts that helped us survive, such as the natural teleological tendency children have to assume objects exist to serve a goal, and the broader tendency to anthropomorphize, to assign agency to lifeless objects, because clearly it is better to mistake an inert object for a threat than a threat for an inert object. Evolution didn’t prepare our minds to appreciate long or short timescales or short or huge distances that we cannot experience directly. So it is no wonder that some of the remarkable discoveries of the scientific method, such as evolution and quantum mechanics, are nonintuitive at best, and can draw most of us well outside our myopic comfort zone. This is also what makes the greatest story ever told so worth telling. The best stories challenge us. They cause us to see ourselves differently, to realign our picture of ourselves and our place in the cosmos.

He suggests that we can only do so by exploring the realities that underlie the world of our direct experience, rather than by exploring the illusions of a reality that we might want to exist. Only through rational examination of what is real, and not by faith alone, is rational action—or good—possible. Today, Plato’s vision of “pure thought” has been replaced by the scientific method, which, based on both reason and experiment, allows us to discover the underlying realities of the world. Rational action in public and private life now requires a basis in both reason and empirical investigation, and it often requires a departure from the solipsistic world of our direct experience.


pages: 356 words: 95,647

Sun in a Bottle: The Strange History of Fusion and the Science of Wishful Thinking by Charles Seife

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Brownian motion, correlation does not imply causation, Dmitri Mendeleev, Dr. Strangelove, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, Gary Taubes, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, John von Neumann, Mikhail Gorbachev, Norman Macrae, Project Plowshare, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, the scientific method, Yom Kippur War

The true power of science comes from its ability to withstand the wishful thinking of the humans who craft its stories. Individual scientists err. They deceive themselves—and they can deceive others. They might even lie or cheat in an attempt to win fame or glory or immortality. But the whole point of the scientific method is to try to insulate the scientific story from the whims and frailties of the scientists who write it. The mechanisms of science are, essentially, protection against wishful thinking. This protection takes many forms, but the strongest come from the scientific community itself. Published scientific research is peer reviewed and vetted by rivals to ensure that its authors have made no obvious mistakes.

And if there’s a hint of incompetence or fraud, the community will howl for the blood of the malefactors. It can be brutal, but this is the way science protects itself from the dishonesty, the stupidity, or the human failures of an individual scientist. This is what makes science seem so inhuman. The scientific method has no sympathy for wishful thinking. This can be hard on even the most brilliant scientists. As they practice their craft, they are forced to renounce some of their beliefs, no matter how deeply held they might be. If they err—as they almost certainly will—they must admit that they have deceived themselves.


pages: 1,737 words: 491,616

Rationality: From AI to Zombies by Eliezer Yudkowsky

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, anti-pattern, anti-work, antiwork, Arthur Eddington, artificial general intelligence, availability heuristic, backpropagation, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Build a better mousetrap, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, cosmological constant, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dematerialisation, different worldview, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Douglas Hofstadter, Drosophila, Eddington experiment, effective altruism, experimental subject, Extropian, friendly AI, fundamental attribution error, Great Leap Forward, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker News, hindsight bias, index card, index fund, Isaac Newton, John Conway, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Pasteur, mental accounting, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, money market fund, Monty Hall problem, Nash equilibrium, Necker cube, Nick Bostrom, NP-complete, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), P = NP, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peak-end rule, Peter Thiel, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, planetary scale, prediction markets, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific mainstream, scientific worldview, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, strong AI, sunk-cost fallacy, technological singularity, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the map is not the territory, the scientific method, Turing complete, Turing machine, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Once I broke ritual by that single misstep, the power did not linger, but vanished instantly; the heap of paperclips and the pile of dollar bills no longer went empty at the same time.” “You actually tried this?” asks Mark. “Yes,” I say, “I actually performed the experiment, to verify that the outcome matched my theoretical prediction. I have a sentimental fondness for the scientific method, even when it seems absurd. Besides, what if I’d been wrong?” “If it had worked,” says Mark, “you would have been guilty of counterfeiting! Imagine if everyone did that; the economy would collapse! Everyone would have billions of dollars of currency, yet there would be nothing for money to buy!”

The Great Idea would unravel the mysteries of the universe, supersede the authority of the corrupt and error-ridden Establishment, confer nigh-magical powers upon its wielders, feed the hungry, heal the sick, make the whole world a better place, etc., etc., etc. The man was Francis Bacon, his Great Idea was the scientific method, and he was the only crackpot in all history to claim that level of benefit to humanity and turn out to be completely right. (Bacon didn’t singlehandedly invent science, of course, but he did contribute, and may have been the first to realize the power.) That’s the problem with deciding that you’ll never admire anything that much: Some ideas really are that good.

Bayes’s Theorem shows that falsification is very strong evidence compared to confirmation, but falsification is still probabilistic in nature; it is not governed by fundamentally different rules from confirmation, as Popper argued. So we find that many phenomena in the cognitive sciences, plus the statistical methods used by scientists, plus the scientific method itself, are all turning out to be special cases of Bayes’s Theorem. Hence the Bayesian revolution. * * * Having introduced Bayes’s Theorem explicitly, we can explicitly discuss its components. We’ll start with P(A|X). If you ever find yourself getting confused about what’s A and what’s X in Bayes’s Theorem, start with P(A|X) on the left side of the equation; that’s the simplest part to interpret.


pages: 100 words: 28,911

A Short Guide to a Long Life by David B. Agus

Danny Hillis, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Larry Ellison, lifelogging, Marc Benioff, meta-analysis, Murray Gell-Mann, personalized medicine, placebo effect, risk tolerance, TED Talk, the scientific method

And even when I suggest something that comes with a price, such as paying for a DNA screening test, there’s often an inexpensive, if not totally free, alternative (see Rule 19), which can be even more informative and useful. When I went on the Dr. Oz Show in the fall of 2012, I was billed as the most controversial doctor in America. But I think I’m the absolute opposite. I won’t endorse anything that’s not backed by well-controlled clinical trials—studies that live up to the rigors of the scientific method. In that regard, I’m one of the most conservative of doctors in America. People tend to label certain things as aggressive or, conversely, mainstream. Many individuals think taking aspirin and statins on a daily basis is aggressive but taking vitamins is mainstream. But the data tell a totally different story, painting a picture in which aspirin and statins can significantly reduce your risk of death (what scientists call “all cause mortality”) while vitamins and supplements may raise your risk for a variety of illnesses, including cancer.


pages: 108 words: 28,348

Code Simplicity by Max Kanat-Alexander

don't repeat yourself, premature optimization, the scientific method

It has to be put into categories, the various pieces have to be correctly related to each other in terms of importance, etc. A science must contain general truths or basic laws. A science must tell you how to do something in the physical universe. It must be somehow applicable in work or in life. Usually, a science is discovered and proven through the scientific method, which involves observation of the physical universe, making a theory about how the universe works, performing experiments to verify your theory, and showing that the same experiment works everywhere to demonstrate that the theory is a general truth and not just a coincidence or something that worked just for you.


pages: 385 words: 98,015

Einstein's Unfinished Revolution: The Search for What Lies Beyond the Quantum by Lee Smolin

adjacent possible, Albert Einstein, Brownian motion, Claude Shannon: information theory, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, Ernest Rutherford, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, Schrödinger's Cat, Stephen Hawking, Stuart Kauffman, the scientific method, Turing machine

When we speak of the picture of nature in the exact science of our age, we do not mean a picture of nature so much as a picture of our relationships with nature. . . . Science no longer confronts nature as an objective observer, but sees itself as an actor in this interplay between man and nature. The scientific method of analyzing, explaining and classifying has become conscious of its limitations, which arise out of the fact that by its intervention science alters and refashions the object of investigation. In other words, method and object can no longer be separated. . . . [T]he different intuitive pictures which we use to describe atomic systems, although fully adequate for given experiments, are nevertheless mutually exclusive.

But if we don’t, I have no doubt our descendants will, so long as we keep the great adventure of science alive. EPILOGUE/REVOLUTIONS Note to Self The truth is out there. —THE X-FILES Never, never, never, never, never give up. —DAVID GROSS Einstein told us that we scientists are opportunists who are willing to break the rules and bend the scientific method to our purpose of discovering how nature works. Each scientist is like an entrepreneur, who has a certain amount of capital to invest; for a theoretical physicist that capital consists mainly of time and attention. The most important decisions we make are what problems we work on and which approaches we choose.


pages: 417 words: 103,458

The Intelligence Trap: Revolutionise Your Thinking and Make Wiser Decisions by David Robson

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Atul Gawande, autism spectrum disorder, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, classic study, cognitive bias, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, deep learning, deliberate practice, dematerialisation, Donald Trump, Dunning–Kruger effect, fake news, Flynn Effect, framing effect, fundamental attribution error, illegal immigration, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, lone genius, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, post-truth, price anchoring, reality distortion field, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, the scientific method, theory of mind, traveling salesman, ultimatum game, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

He was so sure of the genetic nature of intelligence that he neglected to hunt for talented children in poorer neighbourhoods. And he must have known that meddling in his subjects’ lives would skew the results, but he often offered financial support and professional recommendations to his Termites, boosting their chances of success. He was neglecting the most basic (tacit) knowledge of the scientific method, which even the most inexperienced undergraduate should take for granted. This is not to mention his troubling political leanings. Terman’s interest in social engineering led him to join the Human Betterment Foundation – a group that called for the compulsory sterilisation of those showing undesirable qualities.58 Moreover, when reading Terman’s early papers, it is shocking how easily he dismissed the intellectual potential of African Americans and Hispanics, based on a mere handful of case-studies.

31. 7 For an accessible description of this argument, see Stanovich, K.E. (2009), ‘Rational and Irrational Thought: The Thinking That IQ Tests Miss’, Scientific American Mind, 20(6), 34?9. 8 There is good evidence, for instance, that children naturally reject information if it contradicts ‘common sense’ theories of the world, and they need to learn the scientific method from the people they trust. So a child growing up in an environment that rejects science will naturally adopt those views, regardless of their intelligence. Bloom, P. and Weisberg, D.S. (2007), ‘Childhood Origins of Adult Resistance to Science’, Science, 316(5827), 996–7. 9 ‘Knowledge projection from an island of false beliefs might explain the phenomenon of otherwise intelligent people who get caught in a domain-specific web of falsity that, because of projection tendencies, they cannot escape.


pages: 370 words: 97,138

Beyond: Our Future in Space by Chris Impey

3D printing, Admiral Zheng, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, AltaVista, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, Biosphere 2, Buckminster Fuller, built by the lowest bidder, butterfly effect, California gold rush, carbon-based life, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, cosmic abundance, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Dennis Tito, discovery of DNA, Doomsday Clock, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, Hans Moravec, Hyperloop, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Late Heavy Bombardment, life extension, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mars Rover, Mars Society, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, Oculus Rift, operation paperclip, out of africa, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, phenotype, private spaceflight, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Scaled Composites, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snow Crash, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, supervolcano, technological singularity, telepresence, telerobotics, the medium is the message, the scientific method, theory of mind, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, wikimedia commons, world market for maybe five computers, X Prize, Yogi Berra

The baby knew it was unlikely for the experimenter to draw mostly ducks, so the experimenter’s behavior indicated a preference for ducks. Babies aren’t doing experiments or crunching statistics in the self-conscious way that adults do, but they’re unconsciously processing information in a way that parallels the scientific method. The next level of development involves play. When children say, “Let’s pretend,” they conjure up alternative worlds and populate them with imaginary friends. As we all know, these imaginary worlds can be very elaborate. Such behavior is uniquely human. Jane Goodall only spotted a few examples of pretend play in many hours of observing the Gombe chimpanzees in Tanzania, while it would be trivial to note this behavior in any four-year-old.

It seems chaotic, but suddenly the tendrils form spirals and complex geometric shapes. Then, just as suddenly, the patterns disappear. I stare, transfixed. 12 Journey to the Stars _______________________ Home Away from Home “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future,” according to Danish physicist Niels Bohr.1 Prediction is a core part of the scientific method. At a grainy level, scientists predict the outcome of an experiment or a measurement. At a big-picture level, scientists learn about our world by extrapolating laws of nature or predicting how they will operate in unfamiliar situations. It’s easy to cherry-pick predictions that make the prognosticator look foolish in hindsight.


pages: 416 words: 100,130

New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World--And How to Make It Work for You by Jeremy Heimans, Henry Timms

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, battle of ideas, benefit corporation, Benjamin Mako Hill, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, British Empire, Chris Wanstrath, Columbine, Corn Laws, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, death from overwork, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, future of work, game design, gig economy, hiring and firing, holacracy, hustle culture, IKEA effect, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, job satisfaction, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Jony Ive, Kevin Roose, Kibera, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Occupy movement, post-truth, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Snapchat, social web, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, TED Talk, the scientific method, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

They came from a world with clear boundaries between “us” and “them,” where only the lab-coated and credentialed were equipped to solve the mysteries of the cosmos. As one leading scientist explained, the resistance to open innovation “is really intrinsic, the history of the scientific method goes against it…In our training, trying to solve problems in the scientific method was: I take in all this information, I synthesize it, I do analysis and I come to some conclusion and so to reach out to other people to solve it, it’s like cheating!” This group believed deeply in the value of expertise. Their own identities grew out of a tradition that venerated individual moments of genius.


Data and the City by Rob Kitchin,Tracey P. Lauriault,Gavin McArdle

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, algorithmic management, bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cloud computing, complexity theory, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, create, read, update, delete, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, dematerialisation, digital divide, digital map, digital rights, distributed ledger, Evgeny Morozov, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, floating exchange rates, folksonomy, functional programming, global value chain, Google Earth, Hacker News, hive mind, information security, Internet of things, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, linked data, loose coupling, machine readable, new economy, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, nowcasting, open economy, openstreetmap, OSI model, packet switching, pattern recognition, performance metric, place-making, power law, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, RFID, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, semantic web, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, smart contracts, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, software studies, statistical model, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technological solutionism, text mining, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the market place, the medium is the message, the scientific method, Toyota Production System, urban planning, urban sprawl, web application

A new science of cities should therefore contribute to our understanding of cities in addressing these kinds of questions as well. References Allwinkle, S. and Cruickshank, P. (2011) ‘Creating smart-er cities: an overview’, Journal of Urban Technology 18(2): 1–16. Anderson, C. (2008) ‘The end of theory: The data deluge makes the scientific method obsolete’, Wired magazine online, 23 June, available at: www.wired.com/2008/06/ pb-theory/. Auge, M. (1995) Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. London: Verso. Batty, M. (2013a) Urban Informatics and Big Data. A Report to the ESRC Expert Group. London: CASA, UCL, available from: www.spatialcomplexity.info/files/2015/07/ Urban-Informatics-and-Big-Data.pdf [accessed 24 November 2016].

These kinds of integration are as important as the search for pattern in such data and as the big data revolution proceeds it is increasingly clear that the pronouncements on the end of theory, made so vociferously by commentators such as Anderson (2008), are not being borne out in any sense. The need to approach big data with clear theory has never been more important. References Anderson, C. (2008) ‘The end of theory: the data deluge makes the scientific method obsolete’, Wired Magazine 16-07, 23 June, available from: http://archive.wired.com/ science/discoveries/magazine/16-07/pb_theory [accessed 24 November 2016]. Batty, M. (2013) The New Science of Cities. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Batty, M. (2014) ‘Can it happen again? Planning support, Lee’s requiem and the rise of the smart cities movement’, Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 41(3): 388–391.


pages: 420 words: 100,811

We Are Data: Algorithms and the Making of Our Digital Selves by John Cheney-Lippold

algorithmic bias, bioinformatics, business logic, Cass Sunstein, centre right, computer vision, critical race theory, dark matter, data science, digital capitalism, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Hans Moravec, Ian Bogost, informal economy, iterative process, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, lifelogging, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, Mercator projection, meta-analysis, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, price discrimination, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software studies, statistical model, Steven Levy, technological singularity, technoutopianism, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Toyota Production System, Turing machine, uber lyft, web application, WikiLeaks, Zimmermann PGP

Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990); and Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1993). 118. David Bamman, Jacob Eisenstein, and Tyler Schnoebelen, “Gender in Twitter: Styles, Stances, and Social Networks,” arXiv:1210.4567, 2012, 2. 119. Chris Anderson, “The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete,” Wired, June 23, 2008, www.wired.com. 120. Gartner, “Gartner Says Worldwide Enterprise IT Spending to Reach $2.7 Trillion in 2012,” October 2011, http://gartner.com. 121. David Ribes and Steven J. Jackson, “Data Bite Man: The Work of Sustaining Long-Term Study,” in Gitelman, “Raw Data” Is an Oxymoron, 147–166; Kate Crawford, “The Hidden Biases of Big Data,” Harvard Business Review Blog, April 1, 2013, http://blogs.hbr.org; Rob Kitchin, “Big Data and Human Geography: Opportunities, Challenges and Risks,” Dialogues in Human Geography 3, no. 3 (2013): 262–267. 122.

Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (New York: Schocken, 1969), 222. 89. Ibid., 223. 90. Zeynep Tufekci, “Engineering the Public: Big Data, Surveillance and Computational Politics,” First Monday 19, no. 7 (2014), http://firstmonday.org. 91. Chris Anderson, “The End of Theory: Will the Data Deluge Make the Scientific Method Obsolete?,” Wired, June 23, 2008, http://archive.wired.com. 92. Kai Eriksson, “Foucault, Deleuze, and the Ontology of Networks,” European Legacy 10, no. 6 (2005): 599–600; Foucault, History of Sexuality, Volume 1, 92–93. Chapter 3. Subjectivity 1. Babycastles, “JULIAN ASSANGE—When Google Met WikiLeaks Book Release Party,” Facebook, 2014, www.facebook.com. 2.


pages: 419 words: 102,488

Chaos Engineering: System Resiliency in Practice by Casey Rosenthal, Nora Jones

Amazon Web Services, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, blockchain, business continuity plan, business intelligence, business logic, business process, cloud computing, cognitive load, complexity theory, continuous integration, cyber-physical system, database schema, DevOps, fail fast, fault tolerance, hindsight bias, human-factors engineering, information security, Kanban, Kubernetes, leftpad, linear programming, loose coupling, microservices, MITM: man-in-the-middle, no silver bullet, node package manager, operational security, OSI model, pull request, ransomware, risk tolerance, scientific management, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, software as a service, statistical model, systems thinking, the scientific method, value engineering, WebSocket

But in this case, even more direct appeal can be made to the basis of healthcare as a system. When empirical experimentation was chosen as the basis of Chaos Engineering, it was a direct appeal to Karl Popper’s concept of falsifiability, which provides the foundation for Western notions of science and the scientific method. The pinnacle of Popperian notions in practice is the clinical trial. In this sense, the phenomenal success of the Western healthcare system is built on Chaos Engineering. Modern medicine depends on double-blind experiments with human lives on the line. They just call it by a different name: the clinical trial.

., Site Reliability Engineering (Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly, 2016), Chapter 14. 8 The Wikipedia definition is as follows: “Fuzzing or fuzz testing is an automated software testing technique that involves providing invalid, unexpected, or random data as inputs to a computer program,” https://oreil.ly/Erveu. 9 Two tools that have been open sourced by Google are libprotobuf-mutator and ClusterFuzz. 10 It is no coincidence that the Principles of Chaos reflect the scientific method—the universe being the original large-scale, distributed system. 11 There is a phenomenon at Google known as the “DiRT curse” where on the occasions that a particularly major test is canceled or postponed there will shortly be a real incident uncannily similar to the originally planned test.


pages: 418 words: 102,597

Being You: A New Science of Consciousness by Anil Seth

AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, backpropagation, carbon-based life, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Drosophila, en.wikipedia.org, Filter Bubble, GPT-3, GPT-4, John Markoff, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, mirror neurons, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, Plato's cave, precautionary principle, Ray Kurzweil, self-driving car, speech recognition, stem cell, systems thinking, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, TikTok, Turing test

Since brains are physical systems with finite resources, and since some brains seem incapable of understanding some things, it seems inescapable that there must be some things which are the case, but which no human could ever understand. However, it is unjustifiably pessimistic to pre-emptively include consciousness within this uncharted domain of species-specific ignorance. One of the more beautiful things about the scientific method is that it is cumulative and incremental. Today, many of us can understand things that would have seemed entirely incomprehensible even in principle to our ancestors, maybe even to scientists and philosophers working just a few decades ago. Over time, mystery after mystery has yielded to the systematic application of reason and experiment.

If your lawn is wet two mornings in a row, your best guess about the cause on the second day should be informed by your best guess on the first day, and so on as each new day comes along. Bayesian inference has been applied to great benefit in all sorts of contexts, from medical diagnosis to searching for missing nuclear submarines, with new applications emerging all the time. Even the scientific method itself can be understood as a Bayesian process, in which scientific hypotheses are updated by new evidence from experiments. Conceiving of science in this way is distinct from both the ‘paradigm shifts’ of Thomas Kuhn, in which entire scientific edifices are overturned as inconsistent evidence accumulates, and the ‘falsificationist’ views of Karl Popper, where hypotheses are raised and tested one by one, like balloons released into the sky and then shot down.


pages: 309 words: 96,168

Masters of Scale: Surprising Truths From the World's Most Successful Entrepreneurs by Reid Hoffman, June Cohen, Deron Triff

"Susan Fowler" uber, 23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Anne Wojcicki, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, call centre, chief data officer, clean water, collaborative consumption, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, desegregation, do well by doing good, Elon Musk, financial independence, fulfillment center, gender pay gap, global macro, growth hacking, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, knowledge economy, late fees, Lean Startup, lone genius, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Network effects, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, polynesian navigation, race to the bottom, remote working, RFID, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, two and twenty, work culture , Y Combinator, zero day, Zipcar

This is what Eric dubbed the “Minimum Viable Product,” or MVP: the most bare-bones, least-polished version of a product that can be used to test a hypothesis. This catchy terminology was new at the time, but as Eric readily acknowledges, his test-and-learn theory is derived from the scientific method, which developed over centuries. “We’re not breaking any really new ground here,” he says, “but just applying those lessons to business.” It’s worth noting that Eric’s approach is not just about learning—it’s also about how you respond to what you’ve learned, achieving “perfection through iteration.” As with the scientific method, it involves assessing the results of your experiment and asking: Did it bear out my hypothesis? Or do I need to make adjustments?


pages: 329 words: 101,233

We Are Electric: Inside the 200-Year Hunt for Our Body's Bioelectric Code, and What the Future Holds by Sally Adee

air gap, airport security, anesthesia awareness, animal electricity, biofilm, colonial rule, computer age, COVID-19, CRISPR, discovery of DNA, double helix, Elon Musk, epigenetics, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, hype cycle, impulse control, informal economy, Internet Archive, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, lockdown, mass immigration, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, multilevel marketing, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, stealth mode startup, stem cell, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, traumatic brain injury

The best available metaphor was plumbing: Rather than being comprised of a bunch of separate cells, scientists still saw a series of tubes. Except instead of animal spirits, it was now electricity that coursed through them. Thanks to better tools—like sensitive galvanometers and Volta’s battery—and Humboldt, du Bois-Reymond, and Helmholtz’s commitment to the rigors of the scientific method, the millennia-old mystery of animal spirits had finally been solved. Animal spirits, the things that carried the brain’s impulse and intent to the limbs to carry out, and carried back the sensations of the world outside, were electric. Animal spirits were animal electricity. But instead of calling it animal electricity, the new term was “nervous conduction.”

The consequent advances were so swift, and so numerous, that science historians Marco Bresadola and Marco Piccolino call them “comparable to that of quantum mechanics in Max Planck’s day.”1 CHAPTER 3 The electrome and the bioelectric code: How to understand our body’s electrical language By the end of the nineteenth century, animal spirits had been rescued from millennia of airy philosophical conjecture and placed onto the firm ground of the scientific method. Alexander von Humboldt, Emil du Bois-Reymond, and Hermann von Helmholtz had vindicated the work for which Galvani had given his life: what are the animal spirits in our nerves, these things that animate our every sense and motion? They are electric. Yet even they could not have anticipated what their foundational tools and insights would set in motion over the next 150 years.


pages: 104 words: 30,990

The Centrist Manifesto by Charles Wheelan

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, carbon tax, centre right, clean water, creative destruction, David Brooks, delayed gratification, demand response, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, invisible hand, obamacare, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Solyndra, stem cell, the scientific method, transcontinental railway, Walter Mischel

This lack of action is particularly disturbing because there are ample other reasons besides global warming to wean us from our excessive dependence on fossil fuels. In fact, the climate change “debate” is a sad example of the triumph of a self-interested, faith-based argument over common sense and the scientific method. Our “human capital”—the reservoir of skills that we need to prosper in a modern economy—is stagnant. The U.S. high school dropout rate is about the same as it was thirty years ago, despite the fact that dropping out of high school is essentially an economic death warrant in the twenty-first-century economy.


Thinking with Data by Max Shron

business intelligence, Carmen Reinhart, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, data science, Growth in a Time of Debt, iterative process, Kenneth Rogoff, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, statistical model, The Design of Experiments, the scientific method

With the skeptical ideal in mind, it becomes easier to make a general argument, but it is also easier to make an argument to a specific audience. After making an argument for an ideal audience, it is easy to remove some parts and emphasize others to meet the needs of one or more particular audiences. Simplifying or expanding on certain things for an audience is fine, but lying is not. Something that good data work inherits from the scientific method is that it is bad form to cheat by preying on gullibility or ignorance. It is bad form, and in the long run it will cause the ruin of a business (or maybe a civilization). An argument moves from statements that the audience already believes to statements they do not yet believe. At the beginning, they already agree with some statements about the world.


pages: 107 words: 33,799

The Meaning of It All by Richard P. Feynman

means of production, Murray Gell-Mann, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, the scientific method

They would then have to compare the success of the cure of these people with the average cure of people for whom such prayers were not made, and so forth. It’s an honest, straightforward way to do it, and there is nothing dishonest and nothing sacriligious about it, because if it’s a miracle, it will hold up. And if it’s not a miracle, the scientific method will destroy it. The people who study medicine and try to cure people are interested in every method that they can find. And they have developed clinical techniques in which (all these problems are very difficult) they are trying all kinds of medicines too, and the woman got better. She also had chicken pox just before she got better.


pages: 397 words: 109,631

Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking by Richard E. Nisbett

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, big-box store, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cognitive dissonance, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, cosmological constant, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, do well by doing good, Edward Jenner, endowment effect, experimental subject, feminist movement, fixed income, fundamental attribution error, Garrett Hardin, glass ceiling, Henri Poincaré, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, libertarian paternalism, longitudinal study, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Neil Armstrong, quantitative easing, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, Shai Danziger, Socratic dialogue, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, William of Occam, Yitang Zhang, Zipcar

What’s needed is what’s provided in this book—namely the ability to code events and objects in such a way that rough-and-ready versions of statistical principles can be applied to them. The book also presents the most important concepts of microeconomics and decision theory, the basic principles of the scientific method as they apply to solving everyday problems, the basic concepts of formal logic, the much less familiar principles of dialectical reasoning, and some of the most important concepts developed by philosophers who study how scientists as well as ordinary folks think (or should think). 4. The concepts in the book can be triangulated to understand a given problem from many perspectives.

In contrast to deductive logic, inductive reasoning is a “bottom-up” type of reasoning. Observations are collected that suggest or support some conclusion. One type of inductive reasoning consists of observing facts and reaching a general conclusion about facts of their particular kind. This book is full of different types of inductive reasoning. The scientific method nearly always involves—in fact often is completely dependent on—inductive reasoning of one kind or another. All of the types of inductive reasoning in this book are inductively valid, but their conclusions are not deductively valid, merely probable. On the basis of observation and calculation we induce that the mean of the population of some events is X plus or minus Y standard deviations.


pages: 379 words: 109,612

Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?: The Net's Impact on Our Minds and Future by John Brockman

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Asperger Syndrome, availability heuristic, Benoit Mandelbrot, biofilm, Black Swan, bread and circuses, British Empire, conceptual framework, corporate governance, Danny Hillis, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Emanuel Derman, epigenetics, Evgeny Morozov, financial engineering, Flynn Effect, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Google Earth, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, index card, information retrieval, Internet Archive, invention of writing, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, lone genius, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Neal Stephenson, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, pneumatic tube, Ponzi scheme, power law, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Schrödinger's Cat, search costs, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart grid, social distancing, social graph, social software, social web, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, telepresence, the medium is the message, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, trade route, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize, Yochai Benkler

The beneficiaries of the system in which making things public was a privileged activity—academics, politicians, reporters, doctors—will complain about the way the new abundance of public thought upends the old order, but those complaints are like keening at a wake: The change they are protesting is already in the past. The real action is elsewhere. The Internet’s primary effect on how we think will reveal itself only when it affects the cultural milieu of thought, not just the behavior of individual users. The members of the Invisible College did not live to see the full flowering of the scientific method, and we will not live to see what use humanity makes of a medium for sharing that is cheap, instant, and global (both in the sense of “comes from everyone” and in the sense of “goes everywhere”). We are, however, the people who are setting the earliest patterns for this medium. Our fate won’t matter much, but the norms we set will.

When I reflect on how I go about my intellectual work these days, I see that the Internet has changed it dramatically, but what has changed is the execution process (and hence, on some occasions, the conclusions I reach or the way I present them), not the underlying thinking process. I would hope for humanity’s future that the same is true for all my fellow highly trained specialists. The scientific method for reaching conclusions has served us well for many generations, leading to a length and quality of life for most of us that was beyond the imagination of our ancestors. If that way of thinking were to be replaced by a blind “wisdom of the crowd” approach, which the Internet offers, then we are likely in for real trouble.


pages: 370 words: 107,983

Rage Inside the Machine: The Prejudice of Algorithms, and How to Stop the Internet Making Bigots of Us All by Robert Elliott Smith

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, affirmative action, AI winter, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, animal electricity, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate personhood, correlation coefficient, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, desegregation, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, Geoffrey Hinton, Gerolamo Cardano, gig economy, Gödel, Escher, Bach, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, John Harrison: Longitude, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Linda problem, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, new economy, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, p-value, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, Pierre-Simon Laplace, post-truth, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, stochastic process, Stuart Kauffman, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, twin studies, Vilfredo Pareto, Von Neumann architecture, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, Yochai Benkler

He determined to travel to Tunisia, meet with the most learned scholars of the Muslim world, and persuade them to establish a Parliament of Faiths, where the relative merits of Christianity and Islam could be rationally debated, to what Llull saw as an obvious end. Though Francis Bacon wouldn’t formalize the scientific method until 300 years later, Llull’s idea of a rational argument over spirituality is an important scientific precursor. It is an idea whose appearance may have been particularly fomented by the monotheistic, Abrahamic tradition Ramon was steeped in. In earlier animist and polytheistic religions, many of the awful and inexplicable things that happened to people were laid at the door of capricious gods or spirits.

In it, she critiques not only Darwin, but Herbert Spencer as well, highlighting that balance and cooperation were key features of evolution rather than just struggle and savage rivalry. In particular, she criticized Darwin for basing his theory on the ‘time-honored assumption that the male is the normal type of his species’. Blackwell believed both men employed a tainted version of the scientific method, one that embraced a solely masculine viewpoint, adding that while Spencer scientifically ‘subtracts from the female’, Darwin scientifically ‘adds to the male’. Blackwell’s radical theories were brought to light over a century later when feminist scientists, such as anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, wrote in her 1999 book Mother Nature: For a handful of nineteeth-century women intellectuals, however, evolutionary theory was just too important to ignore.


pages: 371 words: 108,317

The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future by Kevin Kelly

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, bank run, barriers to entry, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, bitcoin, blockchain, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, Computer Lib, connected car, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Filter Bubble, Freestyle chess, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lifelogging, linked data, Lyft, M-Pesa, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, means of production, megacity, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, off-the-grid, old-boy network, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, placebo effect, planetary scale, postindustrial economy, Project Xanadu, recommendation engine, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, robo advisor, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Snapchat, social graph, social web, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The future is already here, the long tail, the scientific method, transport as a service, two-sided market, Uber for X, uber lyft, value engineering, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WeWork, Whole Earth Review, Yochai Benkler, yottabyte, zero-sum game

Constant flux means more than simply “things will be different.” It means processes—the engines of flux—are now more important than products. Our greatest invention in the past 200 years was not a particular gadget or tool but the invention of the scientific process itself. Once we invented the scientific method, we could immediately create thousands of other amazing things we could have never discovered any other way. This methodical process of constant change and improvement was a million times better than inventing any particular product, because the process generated a million new products over the centuries since we invented it.

Dealing with alien intelligences will require similar skills, and a further broadening of ourselves. An embedded AI will change how we do science. Really intelligent instruments will speed and alter our measurements; really huge sets of constant real-time data will speed and alter our model making; really smart documents will speed and alter our acceptance of when we “know” something. The scientific method is a way of knowing, but it has been based on how humans know. Once we add a new kind of intelligence into this method, science will have to know, and progress, according to the criteria of new minds. At that point everything changes. AI could just as well stand for “alien intelligence.”


pages: 433 words: 106,048

The End of Illness by David B. Agus

confounding variable, Coronary heart disease and physical activity of work, Danny Hillis, discovery of penicillin, double helix, epigenetics, germ theory of disease, Google Earth, Gregor Mendel, impulse control, information retrieval, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, Marc Benioff, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, microbiome, Murray Gell-Mann, pattern recognition, Pepto Bismol, personalized medicine, randomized controlled trial, risk tolerance, Salesforce, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, TED Talk, the scientific method

The Rochester community is heavily populated with German and Norwegian Americans who tend to marry and procreate within their community, thus maintaining a steady gene pool. Hence, their ancestry’s genetics will be vastly different from that of a homogenous community elsewhere. The meaning of studies performed will be different depending on the group studied, even when the rigors of the scientific method are employed to generate a “randomized” group of participants. So the next time you read an eye-popping headline about a health-related study revealing something “new” (especially those that tend to be alarmist), look behind that headline to see where the study was done and who participated in it.

But despite its role in many of the body’s vital functions, we must be careful about making broad statements about vitamin D and its link (“associations”) to various illnesses and disease. Despite thousands of studies, there’s not a lot of strong research showing consistent benefits from vitamin D supplementation; and here, semantics again comes into play. “Studies” should mean large, controlled, double-blind, randomized trials that honor the scientific method. That doesn’t always happen, especially with regard to vitamin D. Performing a true study on vitamin D’s potential benefit, which should theoretically result in reliable conclusions, is nearly impossible since vitamin D cannot be controlled in any given person. First, we have the stumbling block of dealing with a vitamin that can be obtained naturally from sunlight and certain foods such as wild salmon and fortified milk and cereals.


pages: 407 words: 104,622

The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution by Gregory Zuckerman

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, automated trading system, backtesting, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blockchain, book value, Brownian motion, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, buy low sell high, Cambridge Analytica, Carl Icahn, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, computerized trading, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, Emanuel Derman, endowment effect, financial engineering, Flash crash, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, illegal immigration, index card, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Loma Prieta earthquake, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, Monty Hall problem, More Guns, Less Crime, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, obamacare, off-the-grid, p-value, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Sharpe ratio, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, stochastic process, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, Turing machine, Two Sigma

“Okay, go back to what you were doing,” Simons said. A bit later, as gold shot even higher, he phoned again: “It went up more, Elwyn!” Berlekamp was baffled. It was Simons who had pushed to develop a computerized trading system free of human involvement, and it was Simons who wanted to rely on the scientific method, testing overlooked anomalies rather than using crude charts or gut instinct. Berlekamp, Laufer, and the rest of the team had worked diligently to remove humans from the trading loop as much as possible. Now Simons was saying he had a good feeling about gold prices and wanted to tweak the system?

In June 2019, Renaissance managed a combined $65 billion, making it one of the largest hedge-fund firms in the world, and sometimes represented as much as 5 percent of daily stock-market trading volume, not including high-frequency traders. The firm’s success is a useful reminder of the predictability of human behavior. Renaissance studies the past because it is reasonably confident investors will make similar decisions in the future. At the same time, staffers embrace the scientific method to combat cognitive and emotional biases, suggesting there’s value to this philosophical approach when tackling challenging problems of all kinds. They propose hypotheses and then test, measure, and adjust their theories, trying to let data, not intuition and instinct, guide them. “The approach is scientific,” Simons says.


pages: 335 words: 111,405

B Is for Bauhaus, Y Is for YouTube: Designing the Modern World From a to Z by Deyan Sudjic

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, clean water, company town, dematerialisation, deskilling, Easter island, edge city, Elon Musk, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, Guggenheim Bilbao, illegal immigration, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, Kitchen Debate, light touch regulation, market design, megastructure, moral panic, New Urbanism, place-making, QWERTY keyboard, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, the scientific method, University of East Anglia, urban renewal, urban sprawl, young professional

Clearly it was a law that left a mark on Sullivan’s most famous employee, Frank Lloyd Wright, and its traces are visible in the architect Louis Kahn’s mystical injunction to architects to ask of a brick what it wants to be, a perception that shaped his scheme for Bangladesh’s Parliament building and the Kimbell Art Museum in Texas. Using the metaphor of the machine, and the analogy of the scientific method, the modernists purported to eliminate the sentimental and the irrational from their work. They tried to make design as objective a process as possible. They created a language for design characterized by simplified forms and smooth surfaces that seemed to suggest mechanical production. The rhetorical message carried by design became as important as its substance.

Putting modernity down to Walter Gropius’s Bauhaus manifesto from 1919, with its expressionist woodcut cover and its William Morris-influenced ideas about the unity of all the arts, design and architecture, or even to Adolf Loos’s writings in the Vienna newspapers in the years after 1900, is to miss the impact of the industrialization of the previous 200 years, of the enlightenment and the invention of the scientific method. Modernism was used in a derogatory sense as early as 1737, when Jonathan Swift branded those who abused contemporary language as ‘modernists’. The critic and architectural historian Joseph Rykwert takes an imaginative leap, claiming, convincingly, that ‘modern’, as it relates to design, is a concept that begins at least 250 years ago, with the separation of architecture from what were once called the other arts.


pages: 406 words: 108,266

Journey to the Edge of Reason: The Life of Kurt Gödel by Stephen Budiansky

Abraham Wald, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, business cycle, Douglas Hofstadter, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, four colour theorem, Georg Cantor, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, John von Neumann, laissez-faire capitalism, P = NP, P vs NP, Paul Erdős, rent control, scientific worldview, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen, Turing machine, urban planning

Discussion circles dedicated to every imaginable intellectual topic had been the rage in Vienna since before the First World War, many of them devoted to various brands of philosophical investigation. There were circles on Kant, on Kierkegaard, on Tolstoy, on phenomenology, on the philosophy of religion. But the new group was distinctive for its strongly analytical cast. “All members of the Circle had a background of scientific research,” said Karl Menger, “took the scientific method seriously, and in fact expected to obtain a consistent Weltbild—picture of the world—through what in the Circle was called die wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung,” the scientific worldview. The group was distinctive, too, for being one of the few places in the still very hierarchical world of Austrian higher education in which members of three generations, men and women, Austrians and foreign visitors, met and debated on equal terms.4 Café Josephinum, which Gödel lived above in 1927–28 By the time Gödel joined the circle, Schlick had begun leading the discussions, which took place in what Menger called “a rather dingy room” next to Schlick’s office on the ground floor of the Mathematics and Physics Institute.

Gabriel conveniently absented himself during the trial, heading off to a “religious retreat” at a monastery in Innsbruck to avoid testifying. An utterly incompetent philosopher given to sententious and nebulous bloviations about “integral logic” and “synthesis of the whole,” Gabriel rejected the scientific method altogether as corrupting and destructive. In the ultimate irony, the chair he was appointed to was the very one once held by Schlick, now rededicated to the study of Catholic philosophy.67 Almost no attempt was made to bring back those who had been fired or fled. The University of Vienna judiciously decreed in 1946 that because Menger had resigned his position in 1938, he could not “in a strict sense” count as having been dismissed by the Nazi regime.68 As Gödel wrote his mother, That the Austrians today often do not want to give their colleagues abroad what is due them is probably true, and in part is motivated by material reasons.


pages: 799 words: 187,221

Leonardo Da Vinci by Walter Isaacson

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Bonfire of the Vanities, Commentariolus, crowdsourcing, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, game design, iterative process, lone genius, New Journalism, public intellectual, reality distortion field, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, urban planning, wikimedia commons

They will say that because I have no book learning I cannot properly express what I desire to describe—but they do not know that my subjects require experience rather than the words of others.17 Thus was Leonardo spared from being trained to accept dusty Scholasticism or the medieval dogmas that had accumulated in the centuries since the decline of classical science and original thinking. His lack of reverence for authority and his willingness to challenge received wisdom would lead him to craft an empirical approach for understanding nature that foreshadowed the scientific method developed more than a century later by Bacon and Galileo. His method was rooted in experiment, curiosity, and the ability to marvel at phenomena that the rest of us rarely pause to ponder after we’ve outgrown our wonder years. To that was added an intense desire and ability to observe the wonders of nature.

Leonardo broke with this tradition by basing his science primarily on observations, then discerning patterns, and then testing their validity through more observations and experiments. Dozens of times in his notebook he wrote some variation of the phrase “this can be proved by experiment” and then proceeded to describe a real-world demonstration of his thinking. Foreshadowing what would become the scientific method, he even prescribed how experiments must be repeated and varied to assure their validity: “Before you make a general rule of this case, test it two or three times and observe whether the tests produce the same effects.”7 He was aided by his ingenuity, which enabled him to devise all sorts of contraptions and clever methods for exploring a phenomenon.

“Galileo, born 112 years after Leonardo, is usually credited with being the first to develop this kind of rigorous empirical approach and is often hailed as the father of modern science,” the historian Fritjof Capra wrote. “There can be no doubt that this honor would have been bestowed on Leonardo da Vinci had he published his scientific writings during his lifetime, or had his Notebooks been widely studied soon after his death.”12 That goes a step too far, I think. Leonardo did not invent the scientific method, nor did Aristotle or Alhazen or Galileo or any Bacon. But his uncanny abilities to engage in the dialogue between experience and theory made him a prime example of how acute observations, fanatic curiosity, experimental testing, a willingness to question dogma, and the ability to discern patterns across disciplines can lead to great leaps in human understanding.


pages: 194 words: 36,223

Smart and Gets Things Done: Joel Spolsky's Concise Guide to Finding the Best Technical Talent by Joel Spolsky

AOL-Time Warner, Build a better mousetrap, David Heinemeier Hansson, functional programming, knowledge worker, linear programming, no silver bullet, nuclear winter, off-by-one error, Ruby on Rails, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, sorting algorithm, Superbowl ad, the scientific method, type inference, unpaid internship

I wound up saying Hire even though he was a crappy candidate. You know what? Everybody else who interviewed him said No Hire. So: don’t listen to recruiters; don’t ask around about the person before you interview them; and never, ever talk to the other interviewers about the candidate until you’ve both made your decisions independently. That’s the scientific method. The introduction phase of the interview is intended to put the candidate at ease. I ask them if they had a nice flight. I spend about thirty seconds telling the person who I am and how the interview will work. I always reassure candidates that we are interested in how they go about solving problems, not the actual answer.


pages: 434 words: 117,327

Can It Happen Here?: Authoritarianism in America by Cass R. Sunstein

active measures, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, anti-communist, anti-globalists, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, cognitive load, David Brooks, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Garrett Hardin, ghettoisation, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Isaac Newton, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Long Term Capital Management, microaggression, Nate Silver, Network effects, New Journalism, night-watchman state, nudge theory, obamacare, Paris climate accords, post-truth, Potemkin village, random walk, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Steve Bannon, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, Tyler Cowen, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey

It is not an exaggeration to say that without considering counterfactuals (or, as they are sometimes called, potential outcomes), statements about causality, and hence scientifically valid explanations, are impossible (Morgan and Winship 2014). It is for this reason that experiments are so important to the scientific method, because in an experiment you can systematically vary X (the “treatment”) and then directly observe the causal effect on Y. In much of social science, however, true experiments are impossible: the US can’t invade half of Iraq and not the other half to see which approach works out better; the Federal Reserve can’t set the interest rate at one level for a year and then rerun history with a different rate to measure the causal effect on inflation; and companies can’t hire two CEOs who get to run different instances of the same company to see who is more successful.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the scientific world was undergoing transformative changes, in no small part because new instruments and methods were allowing scientists to observe and quantify phenomena that had previously been ephemeral. As is the case today with “big data” transforming once-sleepy areas of social science, public interest in the sciences was extremely high—scientists like Humphry Davy, a celebrated chemist, inventor of the Davy safety lamp, and fierce advocate of the scientific method, occupied almost celebrity status—but so was public skepticism. In effect, science was claiming for itself areas of human knowledge—like the size of the universe and the nature of the elements—that had for hundreds of years been the province of religion and poetry. The traditional arbiters of truth found their status increasingly challenged by a new breed of experts who brought with them methods—and a level of self-assurance in their answers—that the old guard naturally found deeply threatening.


pages: 407 words: 116,726

Infinite Powers: How Calculus Reveals the Secrets of the Universe by Steven Strogatz

Albert Einstein, Asperger Syndrome, Astronomia nova, Bernie Sanders, clockwork universe, complexity theory, cosmological principle, Dava Sobel, deep learning, DeepMind, double helix, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, four colour theorem, fudge factor, Henri Poincaré, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, Khan Academy, Laplace demon, lone genius, music of the spheres, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precision agriculture, retrograde motion, Richard Feynman, Socratic dialogue, Steve Jobs, the rule of 72, the scientific method

He wrote it in Italian rather than Latin so that it could be understood by anyone and arranged for it to be smuggled out to Holland, where it was published in 1638. Its radical insights helped launch the scientific revolution and brought humanity to the cusp of discovering the secret of the universe: that the great book of nature is written in calculus. Falling, Rolling, and the Law of Odd Numbers Galileo was the first practitioner of the scientific method. Rather than quoting authorities or philosophizing from an armchair, he interrogated nature through meticulous observations, ingenious experiments, and elegant mathematical models. His approach led him to many remarkable discoveries. One of the simplest and most surprising is this: The odd numbers 1, 3, 5, 7, and so forth are hiding in how things fall.

See derivatives Raytheon Company, 263–64 reductionist thinking, 280 refraction, of light, 114–16, 114 religion and spirituality AlphaInfinity, 292–93, 294 Aristotle and, 60–61 calculus as God’s language, vii–viii, ix, xix, 295–97 cosmology and, 63–64 differential equations, 72 God. see God “God’s book,” 294 Newton’s influence on, 239 See also Church, the Renaissance, xix, 50, 59, 92 retrograde motion, 61–62, 61, 62 Riddle of the Wall, 8–9, 8, 21–25 Riemann, Bernhard, 290 rigid bodies, 278 rule of 72, 137 rule of logs, 132–33 Russell, Bertrand, 16 S Sanders, Bernie, 130–31 satellites, 76, 299–300 Saturn, 278 Schrödinger, Erwin, 22 science ideal conditions, 69–71 physics. see xPhysics planetary motion, 78–81 the scientific method, 66 scientific notation, 128–31 scientific revolution, 50, 63, 66, 87, 92, 124, 227, 272 second derivatives, 258 sectors, 83–84 self-regeneration property, 157–59 Shepard, Alan, 238 Shrek (movie), 50, 51, 53, 53 sine law of refraction, 115–117, 209 sine waves Chladni patterns, 259–60 day length example, 156–59 derivatives and, 256–59 heat flow, 250–52 overview of, 108–12, 109 string theory, 252–56 x-rays and, 267 slope changing rate of, 149–54 equation for, 147, 147, 207, 208 optimization problems, 104–5 problems concerning, 144–46 of a ramp, 142 Smith, Barnabas, 187 smooth curves, 153 Snell, Willebrord, 115 Snell’s law, 115–117, 209 Somayaji, Nilakantha, 193 soup example, 243–44 space-time, 248, 287–88, 299–300 speed, xx, 68, 141–42, 175 Spencer, Percy, 264, 328n262 spheres.


Chasing the Moon: The People, the Politics, and the Promise That Launched America Into the Space Age by Robert Stone, Alan Andres

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apollo Guidance Computer, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, Easter island, feminist movement, Gene Kranz, General Motors Futurama, invention of the telephone, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, military-industrial complex, more computing power than Apollo, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, operation paperclip, out of africa, overview effect, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, the scientific method, traveling salesman, Works Progress Administration

As he read the news and talked with acquaintances, Ley was alarmed as things he had long opposed were gradually accepted as part of everyday life: a cult of loyalty and blind patriotism, militarism, anti-globalism, superstition, and pseudoscience. While Germany touted its reputation for excellence in the sciences, Ley observed how politics had begun to encroach on the scientific method, and positions formerly held by Jewish scientists were filled by less qualified opportunists. His friend Fritz Lang had already fled Germany, and Ley decided he had no other choice but to do the same. He would pretend to leave for a brief vacation in England but knew it likely he would not return home for years.

Its curvy and cornerless exterior was a single concrete wall broken by a repetitive honeycomb pattern; inside, sunlight filtering through hundreds of stained-glass panels cast the towering interior in an eerie cobalt blue. Visitors described the environment as futuristic or otherworldly. But more often it was described as “cathedral-like.” The Hall of Science at the 1964 New York World’s Fair celebrated knowledge of the natural world, the scientific method, and their applications as the nation moved into a highly technological future. It was a secular cathedral dedicated to disciplines many in government, business, and academia believed would define the nation during the decades to come. Unlike the many corporate pavilions, which promoted Coca-Cola, General Motors, Ford, IBM, and other firms, the Hall of Science was one of the few structures to remain after the fair closed in 1965.


pages: 385 words: 112,842

Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door -- Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy by Christopher Mims

air freight, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, big-box store, blue-collar work, Boeing 747, book scanning, business logic, business process, call centre, cloud computing, company town, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, data science, Dava Sobel, deep learning, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital twin, Donald Trump, easy for humans, difficult for computers, electronic logging device, Elon Musk, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, gentrification, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, guest worker program, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hive mind, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, intermodal, inventory management, Jacquard loom, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, Kiva Systems, level 1 cache, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, lone genius, Lyft, machine readable, Malacca Straits, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, Nomadland, Ocado, operation paperclip, Panamax, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, polynesian navigation, post-Panamax, random stow, ride hailing / ride sharing, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Rodney Brooks, rubber-tired gantry crane, scientific management, self-driving car, sensor fusion, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, six sigma, skunkworks, social distancing, South China Sea, special economic zone, spinning jenny, standardized shipping container, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Toyota Production System, traveling salesman, Turing test, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, workplace surveillance

The more complicated the products of a factory, the more that management fell to the workers themselves, since no one else knew better how to do their jobs. When Taylor entered the machine shop, a transition was underway in which managers of variable backgrounds were being replaced by engineers granted the responsibilities of management. Engineering itself was just becoming an accredited profession, and as the scientific method was applied to the products of engineering, so too were engineers primed to apply it to the management of the humans who worked with machines. In an age in which the use of interchangeable parts was not yet universal and the assembly line was just getting started—that is, the age before Ford’s system of mass production had taken over the world—it was often the case that every complicated machine was different from every other and had to be constructed by hand.

But her talent for making what were then some of the most time-consuming tasks of everyday life more tractable demonstrated, more than anything else up to that point in time, the broad applicability of scientific management. Frederick Taylor codified and popularized the fruits of the efficiency movement, but it was Lillian Gilbreth who taught the world that it was possible to use careful observation and the scientific method to speed up just about anything. The irony of Gilbreth’s efforts to save housewives time was that as women working in the home became more capable, the standards of “good housekeeping” rose to match their enhanced abilities. Instead of saving America’s homemakers time, she unintentionally burdened them, and eventually all of us, with greater demands and more complex tasks.


pages: 859 words: 204,092

When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Rise of the Middle Kingdom by Martin Jacques

Admiral Zheng, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, classic study, credit crunch, Dava Sobel, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discovery of the americas, Doha Development Round, energy security, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, flying shuttle, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income per capita, invention of gunpowder, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, land tenure, lateral thinking, Malacca Straits, Martin Wolf, Meghnad Desai, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, one-China policy, open economy, Pearl River Delta, pension reform, price stability, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, urban planning, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, zero-sum game

Chinese medicine, rather like the world’s cuisines, is a product of thousands of years of trial and error, of the everyday experience and resourcefulness of hundreds of millions of people and their interaction with their plant environment; Western medicine is a rigorous product of the scientific method and the invention and refining of chemicals. With the exception of those fundamentalists of the scientific method who believe that they enjoy a monopoly of true knowledge, there is a widespread and growing acceptance in the West that medicinal palliatives and cures derived from civilizational experience are a valid and important part of medicine, even if we do not understand, at least as yet, how the great majority of them actually work.

Even the Renaissance and the Reformation, two great efflorescences of European life, were, as their names suggest, couched in terms of the past, despite the fact that they contained much that was forward-looking and novel.1 Scholars of Renaissance Europe believed that the learning of classical antiquity was being restored even while they were busy transforming the very manner in which people understood history.2 From the sixteenth century, this retrospective way of thinking gradually began to subside, not just in Europe but also in China, India, Japan and the Islamic world, though the process has been best chronicled in Europe. The growth of scientific knowledge, the expanding influence of the scientific method, the spread of secularism, and the burgeoning importance of the market and commerce slowly eroded the idea that the present and the future were little more than replays of the past. From the late eighteenth century, a fundamentally different outlook began to take root with the arrival of modernity.


pages: 124 words: 40,697

The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking, Leonard Mlodinow

airport security, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Buckminster Fuller, conceptual framework, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, fudge factor, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, luminiferous ether, Mercator projection, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, Thales of Miletus, the scientific method, Turing machine

The Ionian idea that the universe is not human-centered was a milestone in our understanding of the cosmos, but it was an idea that would be dropped and not picked up again, or commonly accepted, until Galileo, almost twenty centuries later. As insightful as some of their speculations about nature were, most of the ideas of the ancient Greeks would not pass muster as valid science in modern times. For one, because the Greeks had not invented the scientific method, their theories were not developed with the goal of experimental verification. So if one scholar claimed an atom moved in a straight line until it collided with a second atom and another scholar claimed it moved in a straight line until it bumped into a cyclops, there was no objective way to settle the argument.


pages: 138 words: 40,525

This Is Not a Drill: An Extinction Rebellion Handbook by Extinction Rebellion

3D printing, autonomous vehicles, banks create money, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean water, Colonization of Mars, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Attenborough, David Graeber, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, digital capitalism, Donald Trump, driverless car, drug harm reduction, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Extinction Rebellion, Fairphone, feminist movement, full employment, Gail Bradbrook, gig economy, global pandemic, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, ice-free Arctic, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, mass immigration, negative emissions, Peter Thiel, place-making, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, retail therapy, rewilding, Sam Altman, smart grid, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, the scientific method, union organizing, urban sprawl, wealth creators

In our top-ten list of planetary threats, our statement included charts of global data on the oceans, forests, freshwater resources, vertebrate species and atmospheric carbon and temperature. We concluded that, with one exception, conditions have worsened since 1992. As retired NASA scientist James Hansen writes in Storms of My Grandchildren, scientists tend to be reticent in communicating the implications of their findings, a result perhaps of their adherence to the scientific method. ‘Caution has its merits,’ he wrote, ‘but we may live to rue our reticence if it serves to lock in future disasters.’ We scientists have been frustrated and even in despair over the many years of inaction, but we will continue to speak out, telling the truth about what we all need to do to protect life on planet Earth.


pages: 130 words: 43,665

Powerful: Teams, Leaders and the Culture of Freedom and Responsibility by Patty McCord

call centre, data science, future of work, job satisfaction, late fees, Silicon Valley, Skype, subscription business, the scientific method, women in the workforce

We set a standard at Netflix that people should develop their opinions by probing into facts and by listening with an open mind to fact-based arguments they didn’t agree with. This flowed naturally from the fact that most of the early employees were mathematicians and engineers. They lived and breathed the scientific method, which is all about discovering facts and then adjusting one’s understanding of the problem and the way to solve it. As the company grew, we consciously cultivated that obsession with being fact driven and scientific—all around the company, not just in engineering. You don’t need a company founded on engineering in order to widely instill this ethic.


pages: 351 words: 123,876

Beautiful Testing: Leading Professionals Reveal How They Improve Software (Theory in Practice) by Adam Goucher, Tim Riley

Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Black Swan, business logic, call centre, continuous integration, Debian, Donald Knuth, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Grace Hopper, index card, Isaac Newton, natural language processing, off-by-one error, p-value, performance metric, revision control, six sigma, software as a service, software patent, SQL injection, the scientific method, Therac-25, Valgrind, web application

Although we can find examples of this principle being applied in structured programming, object-oriented design (OOD), and design patterns, beauty and simplicity aren’t yet common considerations in bug management or QA test design. In this chapter we discuss how to manage bugs and measure test case effectiveness. We hope you will find this approach to be more beautiful, simple, and true than the more common haphazard QA approaches, which often stray from the scientific method and rely a bit too much on luck. 67 Bug Management The following sections explain bug management. The First Bug Found The Smithsonian National Museum of American History has part of an engineering notebook on display. The notebook’s terse handwritten notes bring to light some arcane details of the operation of Harvard University’s Mark II electromechanical computer.

Tagged defect sets (tag clouds) 76 CHAPTER SIX Tagged Defect Sets (Tag Clouds): Why? Defect reports often contain multiple hypotheses describing theoretical root causes. But when a defect is closed, the validated root cause should be highlighted. If the developer and QA engineers have followed the scientific method, a closed defect should reference the following: • The code base the defect resides in • The hypothesized root cause • A description of the fix and/or a link to the source code patch • A test case proving that the root cause of the defect has indeed been fixed It is also useful to include test cases that disprove or eliminate alternative hypothesized root causes.


pages: 414 words: 121,243

What's Left?: How Liberals Lost Their Way by Nick Cohen

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, centre right, critical race theory, DeepMind, disinformation, Etonian, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Farzad Bazoft, feminist movement, government statistician, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, kremlinology, liberal world order, light touch regulation, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, no-fly zone, plutocrats, post-industrial society, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, sensible shoes, the scientific method, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Yom Kippur War

Each separate cultural group was playing its own ‘language game’, to use the phrase the postmodernists took from Wittgenstein, and only players in the game, whether feminists or Holocaust deniers, could determine whether what was being said was right or wrong. As epistemic relativism infected leftish intellectual life, all the old universal criteria, including human rights, the search for truth and the scientific method, became suspect instruments of elite oppression and Western cultural imperialism. Joseph de Maistre, an eighteenth-century reactionary philosopher, who hated the Enlightenment and its revolutions, dismissed the rights of man by saying: ‘There is no such thing in the world as man. In my life I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians … But as for man, I declare I’ve never encountered him.’

Each wave of ultra-rightists asserted that the armies of the democracies will be no match for warriors ready to kill and be killed on the orders of a charismatic leader. Nationalist, fascist and Islamist alike believed that a ‘rootless, arrogant, greedy, decadent, frivolous cosmopolitanism’ drove the trading cities of the democracies. They all condemned Western thought for upholding the cold and specialized reasoning of the scientific method rather than the holistic mysteries of tribe and church. They all believed that the citizens of the democracies were bourgeois cowards; too selfishly fearful for their personal safety to risk a confrontation. The messianic worship of pure blood and the idolization of blood sacrifices are at the root of fascism, and it is an enormous mistake to ennoble the fascist critique of ‘corrupt’ and ‘hypocritical’ democracies by pretending it is just an extension of the ordinary arguments and confrontations of democratic debate.


pages: 420 words: 124,202

The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention by William Rosen

Albert Einstein, All science is either physics or stamp collecting, barriers to entry, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, computer age, Copley Medal, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, delayed gratification, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Flynn Effect, fudge factor, full employment, Higgs boson, independent contractor, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, iterative process, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, Joseph Schumpeter, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, knowledge economy, language acquisition, Lewis Mumford, moral hazard, Network effects, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Singer: altruism, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Simon Kuznets, spinning jenny, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, zero-sum game, éminence grise

Coke’s motivation was not, needless to say, a longing to see steam engines decorating the English countryside, but rather a desire to see it filled with English craftsmen. A high level of craftsmanship alone, however, wasn’t going to result in anything like Newcomen’s engine, much less Rocket; artisans can be—frequently are—ingenious without being innovative. Craftsmanship needed to be married to a new way of thinking, one not yet known as the “scientific” method. Luckily for history, a culture of observation, experimentation, and innovation was being cultivated in England at exactly the same moment that Coke was advocating for her artisans. Luckily for historians, its patron saint was not only Coke’s contemporary, but his professional, political, and even romantic rival.

Afterward—particularly after he wrote Novum Organum, in 1622, in which he famously stated his belief that the compass, the printing press, and gunpowder had changed history more than any empire or religion—truth was something extracted from nature using the tools of observation and experiment. He didn’t, as is sometimes suggested, invent the scientific method; he had too feeble a handle on hypotheses, and especially mathematics, to do so. But what he did understand about the scientific enterprise was profoundly important for the wave of inventions that would inundate the world a century after his death. He knew that to be self-sustaining, both science and invention needed to be social enterprises, depending utterly on the free flow of information among investigators.


pages: 320 words: 87,853

The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information by Frank Pasquale

Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, asset-backed security, Atul Gawande, bank run, barriers to entry, basic income, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, bonus culture, Brian Krebs, business cycle, business logic, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Chelsea Manning, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, computerized markets, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Debian, digital rights, don't be evil, drone strike, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, Flash crash, folksonomy, full employment, Gabriella Coleman, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Earth, Hernando de Soto, High speed trading, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Ian Bogost, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, information security, interest rate swap, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Bogle, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, kremlinology, late fees, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, mobile money, moral hazard, new economy, Nicholas Carr, offshore financial centre, PageRank, pattern recognition, Philip Mirowski, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, risk-adjusted returns, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, search engine result page, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social intelligence, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steven Levy, technological solutionism, the scientific method, too big to fail, transaction costs, two-sided market, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

One attorney at the Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Project (now the New Economy Project) called subprime lending a systematic “equity stripping” targeted at minorities— even if they were longtime homeowners.124 Subtle but persistent racism, arising out of implicit bias or other factors, may have influenced past terms of credit, and it’s much harder to keep up on a loan at 15 percent interest than one at 5 percent.125 Late payments will be more likely, and then will be fed into present credit scoring models as neutral, objective, nonracial indicia of reliability and creditworthiness.126 Far from liberating individuals to be judged on their character rather than their color, credit scores in scenarios like these launder past practices of discrimination into a black-boxed score, immune from scrutiny.127 Continuing unease about black box scoring reflects long-standing anxiety about misapplications of natural science methods to the social realm.128 A civil engineer might use data from a thousand bridges to estimate which one might next collapse; now fi nancial engineers scrutinize millions of transactions to predict consumer defaults. But unlike the engineer, whose studies do nothing to the bridges she examines, a credit scoring system increases the chance of a consumer defaulting once it labels him a risk and prices a loan accordingly. Moreover, the “science” of secret scoring does not adopt a key safeguard of the scientific method: publicly testable generalizations and observations.129 As long as the analytics are secret, they will remain an opaque and troubling form of social sorting. Bias can embed itself in other self-reinforcing cycles based on ostensibly “objective” data. Police in the past may have watched certain 42 THE BLACK BOX SOCIETY neighborhoods more closely than others.

mod=googlenews _wsj; Christopher Ingraham, “Wal- Mart Has a Lower Acceptance Rate than Harvard,” Washington Post, Mar. 28, 2014, at http://www.washingtonpost .com /blogs / wonkblog /wp /2014 /03 /28 /wal -mart -has -a -lower -acceptance -rate -than -harvard /. 98. Barbara Ehrenreich, “Time Theft,” New Internationalist Magazine, November 2, 2002, http://www.newint.org/features/2002/11/01/women /. 99. O’Connell, “Test for Dwindling Retail Jobs Spawns a Culture of Cheating.” 100. Chris Anderson, “The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete,” Wired, June 23, 2008, http://www.wired.com /science/discoveries/magazine/16-07/pb_theory. 101. Ibid. 236 NOTES TO PAGES 37–40 102. Charles Tilly, Why?: What Happens When Persons Give Reasons (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). 103. Omer Tene and Jules Polonetsky, “A Theory of Creepy: Technology, Privacy and Shifting Social Norms,” Yale Journal of Law and Technology 16 (2014): 59–102. 104.


pages: 533 words: 125,495

Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters by Steven Pinker

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, backpropagation, basic income, behavioural economics, belling the cat, Black Lives Matter, butterfly effect, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, classic study, clean water, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Attenborough, deep learning, defund the police, delayed gratification, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Easter island, effective altruism, en.wikipedia.org, Erdős number, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, fake news, feminist movement, framing effect, George Akerlof, George Floyd, germ theory of disease, high batting average, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, index card, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, libertarian paternalism, Linda problem, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, microaggression, Monty Hall problem, Nash equilibrium, New Journalism, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, Peter Singer: altruism, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, post-truth, power law, QAnon, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, Richard Thaler, scientific worldview, selection bias, social discount rate, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, sunk-cost fallacy, TED Talk, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, twin studies, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, Walter Mischel, yellow journalism, zero-sum game

Or they think immigrants commit a lot of crime because they read in the news about an immigrant who robbed a store, but don’t think about the larger number of stores robbed by native-born citizens. Confirmation bias is a common diagnosis for human folly and a target for enhancing rationality. Francis Bacon (1561–1626), often credited with developing the scientific method, wrote of a man who was taken to a church and shown a painting of sailors who had escaped a shipwreck thanks to their holy vows. “Aye,” he remarked, “but where are they painted that were drowned after their vows?”27 He observed, “Such is the way of all superstitions, whether in astrology, dreams, omens, divine judgments, or the like; wherein men, having a delight in such vanities, mark the events where they are fulfilled, but where they fail, although this happened much oftener, neglect and pass them by.”28 Echoing a famous argument by the philosopher Karl Popper, most scientists today insist that the dividing line between science and pseudoscience is whether advocates of a hypothesis deliberately search for evidence that could falsify it and accept the hypothesis only if it survives.29 How can humans make it through the day with an inability to apply the most elementary rule of logic?

But most experimenters think that they’ve already racked up some evidence for the effect, so they can get away with fewer participants, not appreciating that this strategy is a one-way path to the Journal of Irreproducible Results.12 A failure to appreciate how regression to the mean applies to striking discoveries led to a muddled 2010 New Yorker article called “The Truth Wears Off,” which posited a mystical “decline effect,” supposedly casting doubt on the scientific method.13 The Winner’s Curse applies to any unusually successful human venture, and our failure to compensate for singular moments of good fortune may be one of the reasons that life so often brings disappointment. What Is Causation? Before we lay out the bridge from correlation to causation, let’s spy on the opposite shore, causation itself.


pages: 148 words: 45,249

Losing Earth: A Recent History by Nathaniel Rich

An Inconvenient Truth, carbon tax, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, energy security, green new deal, ice-free Arctic, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Watt: steam engine, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, oil shale / tar sands, planetary scale, Ronald Reagan, spinning jenny, the scientific method

If we vote correctly, eat vegan, and commute by bicycle, are we excused the occasional airplane ticket, the laptop, the elevators, year-round strawberries, trash collection, refrigerators, Wi-Fi, modern health care, and every other civilized activity that we take for granted? What is the appropriate calculus? How do we begin to make sense of our own complicity, however reluctant, in this nightmare? I know that I’m complicit; my hands drip crude. Hell is murky. In the United States of America, where a growing percentage of the public regards the scientific method as vaguely sacrilegious, if not blasphemous, spiritual leaders have been divided on the significance of climate change. But the most eloquent attempt to articulate a moral vision of the issue has come from Pope Francis, in his second encyclical, Laudato si’, “On Care for Our Common Home.” He borrows one of his central insights from Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, the “Green Patriarch,” the spiritual leader of Orthodox Christians.


pages: 436 words: 141,321

Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness by Frederic Laloux, Ken Wilber

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, augmented reality, blue-collar work, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, different worldview, driverless car, Easter island, failed state, fulfillment center, future of work, hiring and firing, holacracy, index card, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kenneth Rogoff, meta-analysis, ocean acidification, pattern recognition, post-industrial society, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, radical decentralization, randomized controlled trial, selection bias, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, systems thinking, the market place, the scientific method, Tony Hsieh, warehouse automation, zero-sum game

“Social Darwinism”—the notion of the survival of the fittest applied to all aspects of human existence as well—began to insidiously invade all the humanities, ethics, and politics of humans, including the two major new economic systems, capitalism and socialism. Scientific materialism—the idea that all phenomena in the universe (including consciousness, culture, and creativity) could be reduced to material atoms and their interactions, which could be known only by the scientific method—and the generally liberal politics that accompanied such beliefs, set the stage for the next three centuries. Until the 1960s, when not only the reign of scientific materialism was challenged (as being itself largely a cultural construction, not some deified access to universal truths), but also all of the remaining indignities of the Mythic-religious era (some of which were addressed by Modernism, and some of which were exacerbated by it)—indignities such as, overall, the oppression of women and other minorities, the toxic despoliation of nature and the environment, the lack of evenly applied civil rights, the general reign of materialism itself—all were aggressively attacked, and attempted to be remedied, by Postmodernism.

Richard Buckminster Fuller Aristotle, the great Greek philosopher and scientist, proclaimed in a treatise written in 350 BC that women have fewer teeth than men.1 Today we know this is nonsense. But for almost 2,000 years, it was accepted wisdom in the Western World. Then one day, someone had the most revolutionary of ideas: let’s count! The scientific method—formulating a hypothesis and then testing it—is so deeply ingrained in our thinking that we find it hard to conceive that intelligent people would blindly trust authority and not put assumptions to the test. We could be forgiven for thinking that, perhaps, people simply weren’t that smart back then!


Year 501 by Noam Chomsky

air traffic controllers' union, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, Bolshevik threat, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Caribbean Basin Initiative, classic study, colonial rule, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, declining real wages, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, European colonialism, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Howard Zinn, invisible hand, land reform, land tenure, long peace, mass incarceration, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, price stability, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Simon Kuznets, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, union organizing, War on Poverty, working poor

Irrational Disdain As the US proceeded to “assume, out of self-interest, responsibility for the welfare of the world capitalist system” after World War II, it also extended the “experiments in pragmatism” that it had been conducting in its narrower domains to “accelerate the process of national growth and save much waste” (Gerald Haines, Ulysses Weatherby). One striking feature of the “scientific methods of development” designed for our wards is what Hans Schmidt calls the “irrational disdain for the agricultural experience of local peasants.” This was the source of “a series of disastrous failures” as US experts attempted to apply “the latest developments in scientific agriculture” to their Haitian testing area—as always, sincerely believing that they were doing good while (by the sheerest accident) benefiting US corporations.

They are assigned to the category of crafts, not art. The fact that the artistic traditions extending over thousands of years are “women’s work,” may contribute to these dubious interpretations, Allen suggests.4 The “suspicious” will not fail to observe that, however ruinous to Liberia, the “scientific methods of development” offer many benefits to the western corporate sector, perhaps well beyond the usual beneficiaries, agribusiness and petrochemicals. As the variety of crops is reduced, and disease and blight become an increasing threat, genetic engineering may have to come to the rescue with artificially designed crops, offering the rising biotech industries alluring prospects for growth and profit Following standard doctrine, US experts advised Liberia to convert farmland to plantation cash crops (which, incidentally, also happens to benefit US corporations).


pages: 420 words: 130,714

Science in the Soul: Selected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist by Richard Dawkins

agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Boeing 747, book value, Boris Johnson, David Attenborough, Donald Trump, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, Google Earth, Gregor Mendel, John Harrison: Longitude, Kickstarter, lone genius, Mahatma Gandhi, mental accounting, Necker cube, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, out of africa, p-value, phenotype, place-making, placebo effect, precautionary principle, public intellectual, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, the long tail, the scientific method, twin studies, value engineering

Here we see a patient, careful teasing out of the ‘why’ of faith and practice, showing the power of Darwinian natural selection as an explanatory tool, even – perhaps especially; certainly fittingly – when applied to belief systems that deny its efficacy. And one sentence sings out to me from this piece to epitomize the scientific method as practised by Dawkins, the demanding rigour of his approach to investigation: ‘I am much more wedded to the general idea that the question should be properly put than I am to any particular answer.’ From a carefully refined question to a brisk and definitive answer: the next piece (also originally a lecture) disposes of the contention that ‘belief’ in science is itself a form of religion by reasserting the foundations of evidence, honesty and verifiability on which scientific investigation is based.

It’s always been a puzzle to me, and indeed something of an irritation, to read this or that interview or profile and find the writer saying something along the lines that ‘Richard Dawkins is of course a very clever man but has no sense of humour’ or ‘the trouble with atheists is, they have no sense of humour’. This is so blatantly wrong that it seems justifiable – and in harmony with the scientific method – to offer a little evidence. Exhibits A–G here, chosen to reflect Richard Dawkins’ own heroes of comic writing as well as his own considerable talent in its practice, range from pitch-perfect pastiche to prodigal inventiveness to the pithiest of ironies. All have in common the wit and linguistic agility that run through so much of the material in this book; here that seam of gold hits the surface.


pages: 461 words: 128,421

The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street by Justin Fox

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Abraham Wald, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big Tech, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, card file, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, collateralized debt obligation, compensation consultant, complexity theory, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, democratizing finance, Dennis Tito, discovery of the americas, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Glaeser, Edward Thorp, endowment effect, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, floating exchange rates, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Henri Poincaré, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, impulse control, index arbitrage, index card, index fund, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Bogle, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, libertarian paternalism, linear programming, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, market design, Michael Milken, Myron Scholes, New Journalism, Nikolai Kondratiev, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, power law, prediction markets, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, pushing on a string, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, stocks for the long run, tech worker, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, transaction costs, tulip mania, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, value at risk, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, volatility smile, Yogi Berra

But as his commodity trading indicated, Cootner never believed market movements were entirely random. “My model is perfectly compatible with much of what I interpret Wall Street chart reading to be all about,” he told a financial journalist in the mid-1960s. “Like the Indian folk doctors who discovered tranquilizers, the Wall Street witch doctors, without benefit of the scientific method, have produced something with their magic, even if they can’t tell you what it is or how it works.”16 As a scientist, Cootner figured he could beat the witch doctors. At one speech in the 1960s, a Wall Streeter introduced him with the standard anti-economist crack, “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?”

It was an awkward coexistence, and it was probably inevitable that one day a mathematically inclined graduate student in economics would apply the elegant formulas he was learning in micro class to the inelegant problems of the business cycle. It was also perhaps inevitable that this would happen at Carnegie Tech’s Graduate School of Industrial Administration, that pioneer in imposing the scientific method on matters of money and human behavior. Economics maverick Herbert Simon was the instigator, in a backward sort of way. He had argued, decades before Kahneman and Tversky, that because people don’t have unlimited time and brain-power to devote to decision making they take shortcuts and follow rules of thumb.


pages: 544 words: 134,483

The Human Cosmos: A Secret History of the Stars by Jo Marchant

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Arthur Eddington, British Empire, complexity theory, Dava Sobel, Drosophila, Easter island, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, founder crops, game design, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Nicholas Carr, out of africa, overview effect, Plato's cave, polynesian navigation, scientific mainstream, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, Skype, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, technological singularity, TED Talk, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, trade route

At the very birth of our species, it was the circling heavens that allowed people to first glean order from chaos, to derive a model of existence as an ever-repeating cycle in which light alternates with darkness, life alternates with death. We’ve since built on those foundations. Observing the Sun, Moon and stars informed practical abilities such as navigation, timekeeping and ultimately the scientific methods that have led to today’s sophisticated technology. Meanwhile, the patterns people saw in the sky—magical beasts, divine suns, or universal forces—fed spiritual beliefs and political structures, and ideas about the nature and meaning of reality. What happens, then, when we lose that view, when we experience Lagash’s eclipse in reverse?

It was divided into five “quarters,” representing a primordial star as well as four surrounding stars associated with north, south, east, and west. [Reference: Clare Oxby, “A review of African ethno-astronomy,” La Ricerca Folklorica 40 (1999), 55-64.] * Bacon’s work in the seventeenth century was instrumental in the development of the scientific method. * This tradition emerged from a series of lectures, endowed by the physicist Robert Boyle, to consider the relationship between Christianity and the new science. The first series, given in 1692 by the theologian Richard Bentley, was called “A Confutation of Atheism from the Origin and Frame of the World.”


pages: 909 words: 130,170

Work: A History of How We Spend Our Time by James Suzman

agricultural Revolution, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, basic income, biodiversity loss, carbon footprint, clean water, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, cyber-physical system, David Graeber, death from overwork, deepfake, do-ocracy, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, fake news, financial deregulation, Ford Model T, founder crops, Frederick Winslow Taylor, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kibera, Kickstarter, late capitalism, lateral thinking, market bubble, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, Parkinson's law, Peter Singer: altruism, post-industrial society, post-work, public intellectual, Rubik’s Cube, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific management, sharing economy, social intelligence, spinning jenny, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, urban planning, work culture , zoonotic diseases

He was born in the revolutionary summer of 1792, the same year that France’s Citizens’ Assembly abolished the monarchy and dragged King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette from the Palace of Versailles to await their appointment with the guillotine. But Coriolis was a revolutionary of a different sort. He was one of the vanguard of men and women who had turned their back on theological dogma and instead embraced reason, the explanatory power of mathematics and the rigour of the scientific method to make sense of the world, and who as a result ushered in the industrial age after unlocking the transformative energy of fossil fuels. Coriolis is now best remembered for formulating the ‘Coriolis Effect’, without which meteorologists would have no sensible way of modelling the swirling forms of weather systems or the vagaries of ocean currents.

The evidence is now so overwhelming that debate within the scientific community on the scale of human impact on our planet has shifted to asking whether the current geological era merits being redubbed the Anthropocene – the human era. In John Maynard Keynes’s economic utopia, there was no anthropogenic climate change. Nor was there ocean acidification or large-scale biodiversity loss. But if there were, it would almost certainly be under better control than it is now. His utopia was, after all, a place where the scientific method was respected, scientists were admired, and laypeople paid serious heed to their warnings. But more importantly, it was a place where meeting the energy-expensive ‘relative needs’ that animate our urge to consume had diminished to the point that people were no longer inclined to periodically upgrade and replace everything they owned simply to keep the wheels of commerce turning.


pages: 502 words: 132,062

Ways of Being: Beyond Human Intelligence by James Bridle

Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Anthropocene, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, experimental subject, factory automation, fake news, friendly AI, gig economy, global pandemic, Gödel, Escher, Bach, impulse control, James Bridle, James Webb Space Telescope, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, language acquisition, life extension, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, microbiome, music of the spheres, negative emissions, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, RAND corporation, random walk, recommendation engine, self-driving car, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, speech recognition, statistical model, surveillance capitalism, techno-determinism, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the long tail, the scientific method, The Soul of a New Machine, theory of mind, traveling salesman, trolley problem, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, UNCLOS, undersea cable, urban planning, Von Neumann architecture, wikimedia commons, zero-sum game

Tugging on the strings would have brought the food into the animals’ enclosure, but the gibbons had ignored them. In the 1967 experiment, the researchers hung the strings from the roof of the enclosure: immediately the gibbons grasped them, tugged, and got their snacks. In one swift motion, the gibbons suddenly became ‘intelligent’ – according, that is, to the narrow definition of the scientific method.7 Illustration from Benjamin B. Beck, ‘A Study of Problem Solving by Gibbons’, 1967. The 1967 experiment was designed to account for the fact that gibbons are brachiators. In their natural forest habitat, they spend almost all their time in the trees, and move around by swinging from branch to branch.

It makes it hard for us to trust even our own experiences, whether that is the ecstatic experience of spirit encounters in the grip of psychedelics, or the uncanny sensation of communion in the eyes of other species. This is part of the genius of Gagliano’s experiments: the rigorous application of the scientific method, the careful weighting and testing of her Mimosa plants, and the reproducibility of her method means we don’t have to put all our trust in our subjective experience. What is required of us is to be open to changing our minds. Mimosa speaks, and the world changes. We are forced to account for a different reality than the one we knew.


pages: 413 words: 134,755

Where Bigfoot Walks: Crossing the Dark Divide by Robert Michael Pyle

back-to-the-land, clean water, D. B. Cooper, dark pattern, Donald Trump, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the High Line, the scientific method, trade route

.” −− So while it is not true, as often asserted, that science has willfully ignored the phenomenon, far and away the greatest number of Bigfoot buffs have been nonacademics, if not antiacademics. It is common at Sasquatch gatherings to hear vicious derogations of the academy for “repressing” information or for blindly ignoring the obvious and thereby pulling the rug out from under the worthy ranks of the dedicated amateurs. These charges, however naive and lacking in empathy for the scientific method, are not without basis. Many tenured or tenure-hopeful scientists have pooh-poohed the topic without any critical attention to its substance. Grover Krantz and the BC Twenty can thus be seen as courageously bucking the tide, sometimes to their detriment. The amateurs (true lovers of the search) have no such tethers on their enthusiasm.

“What a good poem inevitably hears, sees, and speaks,” wrote poet Jane Hirshfield, “is that point where perceived and perceiver join, where inner and outer worlds meet.” Then my walk in the nude was a poem, and a good one. I didn’t hear Bigfoot or see it; I was Bigfoot. The pumice and the moonlight met in me, and through me Bigfoot gave voice. An open mind neither rejects nor limits itself to the scientific method but considers it among the other tools for palping the universe. It doubts everything and accepts everyone. It is completely skeptical and wholly receptive, seldom wishy-washy but often unsettled. The open mind is not afraid to be made up, then, like a bed, to be thrashed, stripped, and made fresh all over again.


Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Kimmerer

back-to-the-land, clean water, commoditize, double helix, food desert, invisible hand, music of the spheres, oil shale / tar sands, p-value, Pepto Bismol, Potemkin village, rewilding, scientific worldview, the built environment, the scientific method

I took her out to our restored sweetgrass meadows and it was love at first sniff. It didn’t take her long to recognize Sweetgrass after that. It was as if the plant wanted her to find it. Together we designed experiments to compare the effects of the two harvesting methods the basket makers had explained. Laurie’s education so far was full of the scientific method, but I wanted her to live out a slightly different style of research. To me, an experiment is a kind of conversation with plants: I have a question for them, but since we don’t speak the same language, I can’t ask them directly and they won’t answer verbally. But plants can be eloquent in their physical responses and behaviors.

They’ve been so conditioned to be skeptical of even the hardest of hard data that bending their minds toward theories that are verified without the expected graphs or equations is tough. Couple that with the unblinking assumption that science has cornered the market on truth and there’s not much room for discussion. Undeterred, we carried on. The basket makers had given us the prerequisites of the scientific method: observation, pattern, and a testable hypothesis. That sounded like science to me. So we began by setting up experimental plots in the meadows to ask the plants the question “Do these two different harvest methods contribute to decline?” And then we tried to detect their answer. We chose dense sweetgrass stands where the population had been restored rather than compromising native stands where pickers were active.


pages: 170 words: 49,193

The People vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy (And How We Save It) by Jamie Bartlett

Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, computer vision, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Hans Moravec, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, information retrieval, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Gilmore, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mittelstand, move fast and break things, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans, Peter Thiel, post-truth, prediction markets, QR code, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, smart contracts, smart meter, Snapchat, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the long tail, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, too big to fail, ultimatum game, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Y Combinator, you are the product

Go is now firmly in the category of ‘games that humans will never win against machines again’. Most people in Silicon Valley agree that machine learning is the next big thing, although some are more optimistic than others. Tesla and SpaceX boss Elon Musk recently said that AI is like ‘summoning the demon’, while others have compared its significance to the ‘scientific method, on steroids’, the invention of penicillin and even electricity. Andrew Ng, former chief scientist at Baidu, reckons that there isn’t a single industry that won’t shortly be ‘transformed’. AIs are starting to outperform humans in a small-but-quietly-growing number of narrow tasks. Over the last year alone inroads have been made into things such as driving, bricklaying, fruit-picking, burger-flipping, banking, trading and automated stock-taking.


pages: 197 words: 49,296

The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis by Christiana Figueres, Tom Rivett-Carnac

3D printing, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Extinction Rebellion, F. W. de Klerk, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gail Bradbrook, General Motors Futurama, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high-speed rail, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Benioff, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mustafa Suleyman, Nelson Mandela, new economy, ocean acidification, plant based meat, post-truth, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, the scientific method, trade route, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, Yogi Berra

A recent analysis by MIT shows that on Twitter lies spread on average six times faster than truth, and that truth never reaches the same level of penetration.22 Social media is an engine for the production and dissemination of lies. This fact has serious consequences for our society and in particular for our ability to come together to deal with complicated long-term threats like the climate crisis. In this “post-truth era,” the undermining of science now has currency. The fabric of the scientific method is fraying. Objectivity is under attack. Some political leaders have chosen to part company with objective reality. The rise of social media has afforded these leaders ample opportunity to obscure facts. This move toward subjectivity creates a breeding ground for oppression and tyranny. We all have an urgent responsibility to recognize and defend such an attack on truth because if it persists, our small window of opportunity to turn back the tide on the climate crisis will be lost forever.


Masters of Mankind by Noam Chomsky

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, Berlin Wall, failed state, God and Mammon, high-speed rail, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), land bank, land reform, Martin Wolf, means of production, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, nuremberg principles, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, profit maximization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, scientific management, Silicon Valley, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, union organizing, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system

We must search for truth but anticipate error, and always retain a tolerance for other perceptions and conclusions. We must not “ever despair of an adequate scientific method mitigating ideological conflicts in history, but must, on the other hand, recognize the limits of its power” (“Ideology and the Scientific Method,” 1953; Nature and Destiny, II, 220ff.). The same holds of “the struggle for justice,” which is “as profound a revelation of the possibilities and limits of historical existence as the quest for truth.” Here too, the Christian faith teaches us that “History moves towards the realization of the Kingdom [of God] but yet the judgment of God is upon every new realization,” upon “the evil, which taints all (human) achievements” (Nature and Destiny, II, 244, 286).


pages: 209 words: 53,175

The Psychology of Money: Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness by Morgan Housel

airport security, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Madoff, book value, business cycle, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, Donald Trump, financial engineering, financial independence, Hans Rosling, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, new economy, Paul Graham, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, side hustle, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, stocks for the long run, tech worker, the scientific method, traffic fines, Vanguard fund, WeWork, working-age population

Elders in his Yemeni village proposed a folk remedy: shove the tip of a burning stick through his son’s chest to drain the sickness from his body. After the procedure, Hajaji told The New York Times: “When you have no money, and your son is sick, you’ll believe anything.”⁶⁴ Medicine predates useful medicine by thousands of years. Before the scientific method and the discovery of germs there was blood-letting, starvation therapy, cutting holes in your body to let the evils out, and other treatments that did nothing but hasten your demise. It seems crazy. But if you desperately need a solution and a good one isn’t known or readily available to you, the path of least resistance is toward Hajaji’s reasoning: willing to believe anything.


pages: 161 words: 52,058

The Art of Corporate Success: The Story of Schlumberger by Ken Auletta

Albert Einstein, Bretton Woods, data science, George Gilder, job satisfaction, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Ronald Reagan, the scientific method, union organizing

The other was that the budding “New Left,” theoretically in favor of “workers’ control” and the free flow of information it implies, ardently championed a one-man control that, however charmingly eccentric, was ultimately tyrannical and mystifying. The dichotomy between rhetoric and reality, it could be said, has a protracted history in French political thought. Descartes, the 17th-century French philosopher, divorced his commitment to the scientific method from his commitment to Roman Catholicism, proclaiming his dualism with these memorable words: “I think, therefore I am.” Down through the years French politics—left or right—has developed a well-deserved reputation for hyperbole. Like many people on the French left, Riboud sees himself as having a kind of moral mission, and thus has a propensity for symbolic battles.


pages: 487 words: 151,810

The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement by David Brooks

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, assortative mating, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, business process, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, classic study, clean water, cognitive load, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, fake it until you make it, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial independence, Flynn Effect, George Akerlof, Henri Poincaré, hiring and firing, impulse control, invisible hand, Jeff Hawkins, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, language acquisition, longitudinal study, loss aversion, medical residency, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, Monroe Doctrine, Paul Samuelson, power law, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, school vouchers, six sigma, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Walter Mischel, young professional

The metaphor, “the world is a machine,” began to replace the metaphor, “the world is a living organism.” Society was often seen as a clock with millions of moving pieces, and God was the Divine Clock-maker, the author of an exquisitely rational universe. Great figures like Francis Bacon and René Descartes helped create a different way of thinking—the scientific method. Descartes aimed to begin human understanding anew. He would start from scratch and work logically and consciously through every proposition to see, step by step, what was true and certain. He would rebuild human understanding on a logical foundation. In this scientific age, the mind could not, Bacon urged, be “left to take its own course, but guided at every step.”

He must proceed consciously and methodically, beginning with the simplest element of the problem and then proceeding step by step toward the complex. He must develop a scientific language that will avoid the vagueness and confusion of ordinary language. The aim of the whole method is to arrive at certain lawlike generalizations about human behavior—to arrive at certainty and truth. The scientific method brought rigor to where there had once been guesswork and intuition. In the realm of physics, chemistry, biology, and the other natural sciences, the results were awesome to behold. Inevitably, rationalist techniques were applied to the science of organizing society, so that progress in the social realm could be as impressive as progress in the scientific one.


pages: 490 words: 150,172

The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance by Henry Petroski

business climate, Charles Babbage, Douglas Hofstadter, Ford Model T, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Khartoum Gordon, Lewis Mumford, Menlo Park, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen

There are now a few pencils among the books and literary material in the Thoreau alcove in the library, but their method of manufacture seems to be more mysterious than that of any of Henry David Thoreau’s literary works. While it may be excusable that Thoreau’s pencil engineering is seldom emphasized relative to his other achievements, there is no excuse for ignoring engineering in our culture generally. Yet it is rare to find generalizations about engineering qua engineering that are the equivalent of the scientific method or to find universal insights about engineering that have the ring of Archimedes’ “Eureka!” Great engineers have seldom left articulate generalizations or insights in ink; they have usually only sketched them in pencil, to be fleshed out in state-of-the-art structures and machines. Yet even as the state of the art is constantly evolving and developing, there are deep underlying similarities in what the first engineers or those described by Vitruvius did and what today’s engineers still do.

Conté could make a quantum leap in thinking about how to fashion a pencil lead out of graphite dust and clay because he was already familiar with the way those materials combined to produce excellent crucibles, broken fragments of which incidentally might act as marking stones, or so Conté might have noted in his tinkering in the laboratory. The laboratory is really the modern workshop. And modern engineering results when the scientific method is united with experience with the tools and products of craftsmen. While it would emerge more slowly in Britain and America, modern engineering, in spirit if not in name, would come to play a more and more active role in turning the craft tradition into modern technology, with its base of research and development.


pages: 852 words: 157,181

The Origins of the British by Stephen Oppenheimer

active measures, agricultural Revolution, British Empire, Eratosthenes, gravity well, Gregor Mendel, it's over 9,000, mass immigration, Neolithic agricultural revolution, out of africa, phenotype, Recombinant DNA, the scientific method, trade route

Undetected borrowing distorts both kinds of language tree (comparative and lexico-statistical) and is probably the main underlying reason for structural differences between them. So, what to do? There are basic differences between the disciplines of archaeology and linguistics on the one hand, and sciences such as geology and biology on the other. In their attitude to the scientific method, some linguists seem to misunderstand the meaning of, or are unable to accept, uncertainty. They interpret the scientific method as implying authority, rigour and certainty, while scientists accept that, in many situations, comparisons have to be made using measurements that have some degree of error and theories of classification with a degree of uncertainty.


pages: 444 words: 151,136

Endless Money: The Moral Hazards of Socialism by William Baker, Addison Wiggin

Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, asset allocation, backtesting, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , book value, Branko Milanovic, bread and circuses, break the buck, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, carbon tax, commoditize, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, debt deflation, Elliott wave, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, fiat currency, fixed income, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, German hyperinflation, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, lost cosmonauts, low interest rates, McMansion, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, naked short selling, negative equity, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, price stability, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent control, rent stabilization, reserve currency, risk free rate, riskless arbitrage, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, seigniorage, short selling, Silicon Valley, six sigma, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steve Jobs, stocks for the long run, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, time value of money, too big to fail, Two Sigma, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, Yogi Berra, young professional

To reverse the damage from reckless lending, we have showered money on risky banks, stunting competitive gains that would have been realized by smaller prudent institutions. The academic and investment community has intellectually bought into theories of interest rate manipulation based upon signals gleaned from the quicksand of near-term economic statistics. Although proven by the scientific methods of economics, somehow the chain of desired short-term outcomes generated through this central planning has a side effect of producing long waves of debt accumulation. While we were still in the long wave of debt accumulation relative to national income that stretched from the early 1950s to 2008, it was impossible for anyone to refute the case for such a system.

In fact, it’s impossible, for if it did, all humans would be machines that never strayed far from a straight line, and there would neither have been business cycles nor hyperinflation and great depressions. Interestingly, the logic that flows from this is that under a monetary system anchored firmly by gold, man’s weaknesses are counteracted. Oddly, the scientific method so honored by economists is the enabler of outrageous and risky behavior. Entranced by mathematics and caught in the headlights of the coming credit implosion, Bernanke believed that papering over a debt problem with more loans and guarantees Spitting into the Wind 119 would be effective.


pages: 467 words: 154,960

Trend Following: How Great Traders Make Millions in Up or Down Markets by Michael W. Covel

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Atul Gawande, backtesting, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California energy crisis, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, commodity trading advisor, computerized trading, correlation coefficient, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, Elliott wave, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Everything should be made as simple as possible, fiat currency, fixed income, Future Shock, game design, global macro, hindsight bias, housing crisis, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Bogle, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, linear programming, Long Term Capital Management, managed futures, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, market microstructure, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, mental accounting, money market fund, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, new economy, Nick Leeson, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, South Sea Bubble, Stephen Hawking, survivorship bias, systematic trading, Teledyne, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, value at risk, Vanguard fund, William of Occam, zero-sum game

At the same time, however, Hite was adamant that the real key to using computers successfully was the thinking that went into the computer code. When someone asked why even go the computer route if people power is so important. Hite responded: “[B]ecause it works—it’s countable and replicable. I’m a great fan of the scientific method. And the other things are not scientific. If I give you the algorithms, you should be able to get the same results I did. That to me means a great deal.”35 Whales only get harpooned when they come to the surface, and turtles can only move forward when they stick their neck out, but investors face risk no matter what they do.

In the real world, there are traders who do beat the market by a wide margin, and many of them are trend followers. After word 289 What accounts for the patience, discipline, and commitment to long-term success as a trend follower? It might ultimately be about making a profit, but it is also an understanding and keen appreciation for the scientific method. Just as scientists start with a hypothesis, trend followers start with a certain view of the world. Their divergent view sees the world in trends. Facing the reality of any market environment head on is the philosophical foundation of trend following. Yet, if the approach is that simple (and profitable), then why does trend following continue to be ignored or confused by so-called bright and market-wise people?


pages: 513 words: 152,381

The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity by Toby Ord

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, availability heuristic, biodiversity loss, Columbian Exchange, computer vision, cosmological constant, CRISPR, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, defense in depth, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, Drosophila, effective altruism, Elon Musk, Ernest Rutherford, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, Hans Moravec, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Large Hadron Collider, launch on warning, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, OpenAI, p-value, Peter Singer: altruism, planetary scale, power law, public intellectual, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, seminal paper, social discount rate, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supervolcano, survivorship bias, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, uranium enrichment, William MacAskill

The next great transition was the Scientific Revolution.16 Early forms of science had been practiced since ancient times, and the seeds of empiricism can be found in the work of medieval scholars in the Islamic world and Europe.17 But it was only about 400 years ago that humanity developed the scientific method and saw scientific progress take off.18 This helped replace a reliance on received authorities with careful observation of the natural world, seeking simple and testable explanations for what we saw. The ability to test and discard bad explanations helped us break free from dogma, and allowed for the first time the systematic creation of knowledge about the workings of nature.

The Roman Empire reached a similar size shortly after, with most people in the world living in one of these two civilizations. 15 Like agriculture, each was independently developed in multiple places across the world. 16 Other scholars sometimes include this revolution under the name of the Enlightenment, or bundle it together with the Industrial Revolution. 17 Important scholars include Ibn al-Haytham (c. 965–1040 CE), whose use of experimental methods in optics was a major influence on Robert Grosseteste and Roger Bacon in the thirteenth century. And the roots of the idea of unlimited incremental improvements in our understanding can be seen in Seneca’s Natural Questions, written in 65 CE (Seneca, 1972) (see p. 49). 18 Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum (1620) is the canonical exposition of the scientific method, and is a convenient dating for the Scientific Revolution. There is substantial debate over why earlier advances outside Europe did not lead to the sustained knowledge-creation we have seen since the seventeenth century. See, for example, Sivin (1982). 19 Because only a tiny proportion of organisms became fossil fuels, the energy within the entire global supply of fossil fuels is not millions of years’ worth of solar energy.


pages: 1,132 words: 156,379

The Ape That Understood the Universe: How the Mind and Culture Evolve by Steve Stewart-Williams

Albert Einstein, battle of ideas, carbon-based life, David Attenborough, European colonialism, feminist movement, financial independence, Garrett Hardin, gender pay gap, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, moral panic, out of africa, Paul Graham, Peter Pan Syndrome, phenotype, post-industrial society, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, twin studies

Scientists propose competing theories about the nature of the universe (variation), and then cull those theories that don’t match what they see in the world and in the lab (selection). Thus, Aristotelian physics was replaced by Newtonian physics, which in turn was replaced by Einsteinian relativity. At each step, the earlier theory was displaced from the population of scientific ideas when a new, upstart theory matched our observations more closely. In effect, the scientific method establishes a struggle for existence among theories, which results ultimately in the survival of the fittest theories: those that best explain the facts. The end result is that our theories evolve – step by slow step – toward greater and greater accuracy. One minute, we’re talking about God creating the world and all life in six days; the next, we’re talking about the Big Bangand evolution by natural selection, and trying to figure out how to reconcile relativity theory with quantum mechanics.

Over the last several centuries, we’ve slowly pieced together cultural mechanisms that reliably favor truth over catchiness. These include critical thinking, careful observation, peer review, open discussion, independent replication, and the rejection of authority, tradition, and revelation as reliable sources of knowledge. Taken together, these habits and tactics constitute the scientific method. In a sense, science is a system of selectively breeding accurate memes. In the “wild,” there’s no guarantee that accurate memes will do better than inaccurate ones. But in the carefully controlled memetic ecosystem of science, we can and do breed memes for closer and closer correspondence to truth.


pages: 226 words: 59,080

Economics Rules: The Rights and Wrongs of the Dismal Science by Dani Rodrik

airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, bank run, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bretton Woods, business cycle, butterfly effect, capital controls, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collective bargaining, congestion pricing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, distributed generation, Donald Davies, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial deregulation, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, fudge factor, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Growth in a Time of Debt, income inequality, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, liquidity trap, loss aversion, low skilled workers, market design, market fundamentalism, minimum wage unemployment, oil shock, open economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, price elasticity of demand, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, public intellectual, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, risk/return, Robert Shiller, school vouchers, South Sea Bubble, spectrum auction, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, trade route, ultimatum game, University of East Anglia, unorthodox policies, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, white flight

But the paradox is only an illusion. What is a paradox for one class of models is often readily comprehensible within another class of models. Scientific Progress, One Model at a Time Ask an economist what makes economics a science, and the reply is likely to be, “It’s a science because we work with the scientific method: we build hypotheses and then test them. When a theory fails the test, we discard it and either replace it or come up with an improved version. Ultimately, economics advances by developing theories that better explain the world.” This is a nice story, but it bears little relationship to what economists do in practice and how the field really makes progress.# For one thing, much of economists’ work departs significantly from the hypothetico-deductive mold according to which hypotheses are first formulated and then confronted with real-world evidence.


Trend Commandments: Trading for Exceptional Returns by Michael W. Covel

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, business cycle, buy and hold, commodity trading advisor, correlation coefficient, delayed gratification, disinformation, diversified portfolio, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, family office, full employment, global macro, Jim Simons, Lao Tzu, Long Term Capital Management, managed futures, market bubble, market microstructure, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Nick Leeson, oil shock, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Sharpe ratio, systematic trading, the scientific method, three-martini lunch, transaction costs, tulip mania, upwardly mobile, Y2K, zero-sum game

If so, you need to figure it out, and fast. For example, trader Jim Simons (arguably a closeted trend trader—he does not identify as one), worth about $8.5 billion, has said that the advantage scientists brought to the trading table was not their computing or math skills, but their ability to think scientifically. That means the scientific method is in play: 1. Define the question/theory. 2. Gather information and resources (observe). 3. Form hypothesis. 4. Perform experiment and collect data. 5. Analyze data. 6. Interpret data and draw conclusions that serve as a starting point for new hypothesis. 7. Publish results. 8. Retest (frequently done by other scientists).


pages: 204 words: 58,565

Keeping Up With the Quants: Your Guide to Understanding and Using Analytics by Thomas H. Davenport, Jinho Kim

behavioural economics, Black-Scholes formula, business intelligence, business process, call centre, computer age, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, data science, en.wikipedia.org, feminist movement, Florence Nightingale: pie chart, forensic accounting, global supply chain, Gregor Mendel, Hans Rosling, hypertext link, invention of the telescope, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, longitudinal study, margin call, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Myron Scholes, Netflix Prize, p-value, performance metric, publish or perish, quantitative hedge fund, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Shiller, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, six sigma, Skype, statistical model, supply-chain management, TED Talk, text mining, the scientific method, Thomas Davenport

What kind of data are we likely to want to look for? How have variables been defined before? What types of analyses are we likely to perform? How could we tell the story in an interesting way that is likely to get results, and different from past stories? One of the key attributes of quantitative analysis (and of the scientific method more broadly) is that it draws on previous research and findings. For example, searching thorough the problem-related knowledge appearing in books, reports, and articles is very important in getting to the bottom of the problem. It may help to identify relevant variables and any association among the identified variables.


The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World by Iain McGilchrist

Albert Einstein, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, classic study, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, computer age, Donald Trump, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, epigenetics, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, Georg Cantor, hedonic treadmill, Henri Poincaré, language acquisition, Lao Tzu, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, music of the spheres, Necker cube, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, randomized controlled trial, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Schrödinger's Cat, social intelligence, social web, source of truth, stem cell, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury

Such a development seems to me as striking as the developments in mathematics and physics since the 1880s to which it is in some important respects a parallel. It’s hardly surprising that scientific method for a long time led to a vision of the universe – the Newtonian universe – which reflected the principles of the scientific method. But when it began to compel conclusions incompatible with the model assumed by its method, a ‘paradoxical’ universe, that was a more revealing finding. In the late nineteenth-century Georg Cantor struggled with the idea that there was a necessary uncertainty and incompleteness to the realm of mathematics.

Scientism, the illicit extension of the methods and categories of science beyond their legitimate domain, is one such form, and the conception of the unity of the sciences and the methodological homogeneity of the natural sciences and of humanistic studies one such myth. It is the task of philosophy to defend us against such illusions of reason.80 Wittgenstein was sceptical of the scientific method for two main reasons: its tendency to ‘reduce’, and the deceptive clarity of its models. He referred to the ‘preoccupation with the method of science … reducing the explanation of natural phenomena to the smallest possible number of primitive natural laws’.81 Though ‘irresistibly tempted to ask and answer questions in the way science does … it can never be our job to reduce anything to anything.’

Objectivity requires interpretation of what one finds, depends on imagination for its achievement.124 Detachment has a deeply ambiguous nature. The cool, detached stance of the scientific or bureaucratic mind ultimately may lead where we do not wish to follow. And the relationship implied by the left-hemisphere attention brought to bear through the scientific method, with its implied materialism, is not no relationship – merely a disengaged relationship, implying, incorrectly, that the observer does not have an impact on the observed (and is not altered by what he or she observes). The betweenness is not absent, just denied, and therefore of a particular – particularly ‘cold’ – kind.


pages: 206 words: 60,587

Side Hustle: From Idea to Income in 27 Days by Chris Guillebeau

Airbnb, buy low sell high, content marketing, inventory management, Lyft, passive income, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, sharing economy, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, subscription business, TaskRabbit, the scientific method, Uber for X, uber lyft

Anything better than that is even more validation of your winning idea, and even more money in the bank. FOLLOW THESE PRICING POINTERS TO THE BANK Pricing is both an art and a science. On Day 20, you’ll learn about A/B testing, where you can offer multiple prices and see how it affects conversion rates. That’s the scientific method—for a more creative one, consider these guidelines. 1. Whenever possible, design your hustle with recurring revenue in mind. Why sell something once when you can sell it over and over? Recurring revenue isn’t possible in every hustle, but it’s a worthwhile point of consideration when comparing different ideas.


Healing_Back_Pain__The_Mind.pdf by Unknown

placebo effect, sugar pill, the scientific method

Anything which is outside mainstream medicine may be accepted as holistic, but more accurately described, the predominant idea is that one must treat the “whole person,” a wise concept that is generally neglected by contemporary medicine. But that should not give license to identify anything as holistic that defies medical convention. Perhaps holistic should be defined as that which includes consideration of both the emotional and structural aspects of health and illness. In accepting this definition one does not reject the scientific method. On the contrary, it becomes increasingly important to require proof and replication of results when one adds the very difficult emotional dimension to the medical equation. Therefore, this is not holistic medicine as it is popularly conceived. I hope it is an example of good medicine—accurate diagnosis and effective treatment, and good science—conclusions based on observation, verified by experience.


pages: 240 words: 60,660

Models. Behaving. Badly.: Why Confusing Illusion With Reality Can Lead to Disaster, on Wall Street and in Life by Emanuel Derman

Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, Augustin-Louis Cauchy, Black-Scholes formula, British Empire, Brownian motion, capital asset pricing model, Cepheid variable, creative destruction, crony capitalism, currency risk, diversified portfolio, Douglas Hofstadter, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, Financial Modelers Manifesto, fixed income, Ford Model T, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, I will remember that I didn’t make the world, and it doesn’t satisfy my equations, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, law of one price, low interest rates, Mikhail Gorbachev, Myron Scholes, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Richard Feynman, riskless arbitrage, savings glut, Schrödinger's Cat, Sharpe ratio, stochastic volatility, the scientific method, washing machines reduced drudgery, yield curve

There are few genuine theories in the realm of Thought, and none that is quantitatively accurate. There we rely mostly on metaphors and models. Financial value, situated more centrally within Thought than Extension, is therefore less inclined to yield to mathematics or science; there are no isolated social systems on which to carry out the repeated experiments the scientific method requires, and so it is hard to study the regularities that might reveal the putative laws that govern them. Given the success of mathematics in dealing with Extension, it has become tempting to treat Thought as though it were a kind of Extension too. Most models in the social sciences give in to what I like to call pragmamorphism,1 by which I mean the naive tendency to attribute the properties of things to human beings.


pages: 215 words: 61,435

Why Liberalism Failed by Patrick J. Deneen

classic study, David Brooks, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, income inequality, intentional community, Lewis Mumford, mortgage debt, Nicholas Carr, plutocrats, price mechanism, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, Steven Levy, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

The individual is to be liberated from all the partial and limiting affiliations that preceded the liberal state, if not by force then by constantly lowering the barriers to exit. The state claims to govern all groupings within the society: it is the final arbiter of legitimate and illegitimate groupings, and from its point of view, streamlining the relationship between the individual and the liberal state. In a reversal of the scientific method, what is advanced as a philosophical set of arguments is then instantiated in reality. The individual as a disembedded, self-interested economic actor didn’t exist in any actual state of nature but rather was the creation of an elaborate intervention by the incipient state in early modernity, at the beginnings of the liberal order.


pages: 217 words: 63,287

The Participation Revolution: How to Ride the Waves of Change in a Terrifyingly Turbulent World by Neil Gibb

Abraham Maslow, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Albert Einstein, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, gentrification, gig economy, iterative process, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kodak vs Instagram, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Minecraft, mirror neurons, Network effects, new economy, performance metric, ride hailing / ride sharing, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, trade route, urban renewal, WeWork

Into action A call to action Manifesto An open-source tool kit “Tomorrow belongs to those who can hear it coming” David Bowie I. Introduction When things fall apart “You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf” Jon Kabat-Zinn Galileo Galilei was a clever lad. He is often referred to as the founding father of modern physics, of modern astronomy, of the scientific method, and of science itself. Einstein was one of his many fans. Galileo was a geek, an engineer, a 16th-century hipster, and he could code. He was a pivotal figure in the great social and economic transformation that we now call the Renaissance. He was the inventor of one of the breakthrough technologies that enabled the discovery of the New World.


How to Be Black by Baratunde Thurston

affirmative action, carbon footprint, Columbine, dark matter, desegregation, drone strike, gentrification, high-speed rail, housing crisis, phenotype, plutocrats, Rosa Parks, shareholder value, supply-chain management, the scientific method, transatlantic slave trade, W. E. B. Du Bois

Because my older sister had attended private or at least specialized schooling (Catholic school, magnet school, and an arts public school) my mother felt that I, too, should have the benefits of a non-public education. Thus began my tour of Washington-area private schools. The first was Georgetown Day School. All I remember from my visit is making some really shitty pottery in an art class. I’m sure they did other things at that school, like math and English and the scientific method, but I just remember that shitty piece of pottery. The second school I visited was called Green Acres, and it had three strikes against it. Strike One: the name. “Green Acres”??? That sounds like a rehab center for matrimonially challenged politicians. That name was just a bit too soft for a black kid from the city.


pages: 551 words: 174,280

The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World by David Deutsch

agricultural Revolution, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, Bonfire of the Vanities, Charles Babbage, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cosmological principle, dark matter, David Attenborough, discovery of DNA, Douglas Hofstadter, Easter island, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, first-past-the-post, Georg Cantor, global pandemic, Gödel, Escher, Bach, illegal immigration, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Jacquard loom, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, mirror neurons, Nick Bostrom, pattern recognition, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precautionary principle, Richard Feynman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, Stephen Hawking, supervolcano, technological singularity, Thales of Miletus, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Review, William of Occam, zero-sum game

The physicist Galileo Galilei was perhaps the first to understand the importance of experimental tests (which he called cimenti, meaning ‘trials by ordeal’) as distinct from other forms of experiment and observation, which can more easily be mistaken for ‘reading from the Book of Nature’. Testability is now generally accepted as the defining characteristic of the scientific method. Popper called it the ‘criterion of demarcation’ between science and non-science. Nevertheless, testability cannot have been the decisive factor in the scientific revolution either. Contrary to what is often said, testable predictions had always been quite common. Every traditional rule of thumb for making a flint blade or a camp fire is testable.

Long before that, it was only genes that were encoding rules of thumb, and the knowledge in them, too, was about emergent phenomena. Thus emergence is another beginning of infinity: all knowledge-creation depends on, and physically consists of, emergent phenomena. Emergence is also responsible for the fact that discoveries can be made in successive steps, thus providing scope for the scientific method. The partial success of each theory in a sequence of improving theories is tantamount to the existence of a ‘layer’ of phenomena that each theory explains successfully – though, as it then turns out, partly mistakenly. Successive scientific explanations are occasionally dissimilar in the way they explain their predictions, even in the domain where the predictions themselves are similar or identical.


pages: 592 words: 161,798

The Future of War by Lawrence Freedman

Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, Boeing 747, British Empire, colonial rule, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global village, Google Glasses, Herman Kahn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), John Markoff, long peace, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, nuclear taboo, open economy, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuxnet, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, systematic bias, the scientific method, uranium enrichment, urban sprawl, Valery Gerasimov, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, WikiLeaks, zero day

From this theory may come new and unthought-of solutions to end wars and to guide international relations.14 In a book published in 2012 the political scientist John Vasquez cited Guetzkow as an inspiration in a collection of essays that sought to assess how far researchers had got with the application of ‘the scientific method to identify those factors that promote the outbreak of interstate war and those factors that promote peace’. Even after sixty years there was still some way to go, Vasquez conceded, but there was now some core knowledge for theories of peace and war to explain.15 In the introduction he explained how the scholarly movement to apply the scientific method was ‘one of the best hopes of humanity for solving the intellectual puzzle of war.’ This was because it replaced ‘the solitary efforts of past great thinkers,’ and here he mentioned Thucydides and Freud, with a ‘large number of researchers committed to using the best method of inquiry humanity has invented.’16 Better than mere ‘speculation or intellectual argument’ was to develop hypotheses that could be tested by a rigorous examination of evidence.


pages: 522 words: 162,310

Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History by Kurt Andersen

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, animal electricity, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, Burning Man, California gold rush, Celebration, Florida, centre right, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, corporate governance, cotton gin, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, disinformation, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Donner party, Downton Abbey, Easter island, Edward Snowden, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, failed state, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, God and Mammon, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herman Kahn, high net worth, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, large denomination, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, McMansion, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, placebo effect, post-truth, pre–internet, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart meter, Snapchat, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, sugar pill, Ted Kaczynski, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y2K, young professional

But it seems clear to me the deeper, broader, and more enduring influence of American Protestantism was the permission it gave to dream up new supernatural or otherwise untrue understandings of reality and believe them with passionate certainty. Science was being invented at the time. Like science, Protestantism was powered by skepticism of the established religious paradigms, which were to be revised or rejected—but unlike science, the old paradigms were to be replaced by new fixed truths. The scientific method is unceasingly skeptical, each truth understood as a partial, provisional best-we-can-do-for-the-moment understanding of reality. In their travesty of science, Protestant true believers scrutinized the natural world to deduce the underlying godly or satanic causes of every strange effect, from comets to hurricanes to Indian attacks to unusual illnesses and deaths.

He didn’t just want science to take seriously “experiences of ecstasy, mystical union, other ‘dimensions,’ rapture, beauty, space-and-time transcendence.” He was explicitly dedicated to going there. A “perfectly scientific theory may be based on data that have no physical existence,” he insisted. The rules of the scientific method must be revised. To work as a psychologist in the new age, Tart argued, a researcher should be in the altered state of consciousness he’s studying, high or delusional or filled with the Holy Spirit “at the time of data collection” and during “data reduction and theorizing.” Tart’s new paradigm for research, he admitted, poses problems of “consensual validation,” given that “only observers in the same [altered state] are able to communicate adequately with each other.”


pages: 578 words: 168,350

Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies by Geoffrey West

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, British Empire, butterfly effect, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, clean water, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, complexity theory, computer age, conceptual framework, continuous integration, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, creative destruction, dark matter, Deng Xiaoping, double helix, driverless car, Dunbar number, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Ernest Rutherford, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Frank Gehry, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, housing crisis, Index librorum prohibitorum, invention of agriculture, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, laissez-faire capitalism, Large Hadron Collider, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, life extension, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Benioff, Marchetti’s constant, Masdar, megacity, Murano, Venice glass, Murray Gell-Mann, New Urbanism, Oklahoma City bombing, Peter Thiel, power law, profit motive, publish or perish, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, Salesforce, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Suez canal 1869, systematic bias, systems thinking, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, time dilation, too big to fail, transaction costs, urban planning, urban renewal, Vernor Vinge, Vilfredo Pareto, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, wikimedia commons, working poor

Similarly, relativity together with quantum mechanics spawned atomic and nuclear bombs, which changed the entire dynamic of international politics and continue to hang over all of us as a constant, though often suppressed and sometimes unacknowledged, threat to our very existence. To varying degrees, all theories and models are incomplete. They need to be continually tested and challenged by increasingly accurate experiments and observational data over wider and wider domains and the theory modified or extended accordingly. This is an essential ingredient in the scientific method. Indeed, understanding the boundaries of their applicability, the limits to their predictive power, and the ongoing search for exceptions, violations, and failures has provoked even deeper questions and challenges, stimulating the continued progress of science and the unfolding of new ideas, techniques, and concepts.

The variables we choose to focus on and measure in order to obtain data are not arbitrary—they are guided by previous success and failure within the context of an evolving conceptual framework. Doing science is much more than a fishing expedition. With the advent of big data this classic view is being challenged. In a highly provocative article published in Wired magazine in 2008 titled “The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete,” its then editor, Chris Anderson, wrote: The new availability of huge amounts of data, along with the statistical tools to crunch these numbers, offers a whole new way of understanding the world. Correlation supersedes causation, and science can advance even without coherent models, unified theories, or really any mechanistic explanation at all . . . faced with massive data, this approach to science—hypothesize, model, test—is becoming obsolete. . . .


pages: 467 words: 503

The omnivore's dilemma: a natural history of four meals by Michael Pollan

additive manufacturing, back-to-the-land, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Community Supported Agriculture, double entry bookkeeping, food desert, Gary Taubes, Haber-Bosch Process, index card, informal economy, invention of agriculture, means of production, military-industrial complex, new economy, off-the-grid, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, transaction costs, Upton Sinclair, Whole Earth Catalog

For a book that devotes so many of its pages to the proper making of compost, An Agricultural Testament turns out to be an important work of philosophy as well as of agricultural science. Indeed, Howard's drawing Î 4 6 *THE O M N I V O R E ' S DILEMMA of lines of connection between so many seemingly discrete realms— from soil fertility to "the national health"; from the supreme importance of animal urine to the limitations of the scientific method—is his signal contribution, his method as well as his message. Even though Howard never uses the term organic, it is possible to tease out all the many meanings of the word—as a program for not just agricultural but social renovation—from his writings. To measure the current définition of organic against his genuinely holistic conception is to appreciate just how much it has shrunk.

But providing a buffet of nutrients to plants is not the only thing humus does: It also serves as the glue that binds the minute mineral particles in soil together into airy crumbs and holds water in suspension so that rainfall remains available to plant roots instead of instantly seeping away. To reduce such a vast biological complexity to NPK represented the scientific method at its reductionist worst. Complex qualities are reduced to simple quantities; biology gives way to chemistry. As Howard was not the first to point out, that method can only deal with one or two variables at a time. The problem is that once science has reduced a complex phenomenon to a couple of variables, however important they may be, the natural tendency is to overlook everything else, to as- • 14 7 148* THE O M N I VO R E ' S D I L E M M A sume that what you can measure is all there is, or at least all that really matters.


pages: 552 words: 168,518

MacroWikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World by Don Tapscott, Anthony D. Williams

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, airport security, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, bioinformatics, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, business climate, business process, buy and hold, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, cloud computing, collaborative editing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, demographic transition, digital capitalism, digital divide, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, failed state, fault tolerance, financial innovation, Galaxy Zoo, game design, global village, Google Earth, Hans Rosling, hive mind, Home mortgage interest deduction, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, medical bankruptcy, megacity, military-industrial complex, mortgage tax deduction, Netflix Prize, new economy, Nicholas Carr, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, oil shock, old-boy network, online collectivism, open borders, open economy, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, scientific mainstream, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, social web, software patent, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, systems thinking, text mining, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, transfer pricing, University of East Anglia, urban sprawl, value at risk, WikiLeaks, X Prize, Yochai Benkler, young professional, Zipcar

Quoted in Damian Carrington, Suzanne Goldenberg, Juliette Jowit, Jonathan Watts, Alok Jha, James Randerson, David Smith, David Adam, and Tom Hennigan, “Global deal on climate change in 2010 ‘all but impossible,’” The Guardian (February 2, 2010). 17. http://www.ibm.com/ceostudy Chapter 2 1. Gutenberg was not the first to invent printing. Asian cultures had previously developed printing but it was not as sophisticated or flexible as Gutenberg’s wonder. 2. The ideas of Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton, which defined the scientific method, set the tone for much of what would follow in the century. Bacon and Newton believed that true science called for axiomatic proof to be fused with physical observation in a coherent system of verifiable predictions. For scientific theories and predictions to be verifiable, science needed to be open. 3.

On top of all that, broad participation in projects like Galaxy Zoo helps boost the public’s general understanding of science, a nice side effect at a time when some degree of scientific literacy is required just to understand, let alone solve, some of our biggest public policy issues. 3. The ideas of Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton, which defined the scientific method, set the tone for much of what would follow in the century. Bacon and Newton believed that true science called for axiomatic proof to be fused with physical observation in a coherent system of verifiable predictions. For scientific theories and predictions to be verifiable, science needed to be open. 4.


pages: 622 words: 169,014

Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction by Alec Nevala-Lee

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, basic income, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Doomsday Clock, Elon Musk, experimental subject, Ford paid five dollars a day, heat death of the universe, lone genius, Neil Armstrong, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, planetary scale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Strategic Defense Initiative, the map is not the territory, the scientific method, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair

Cybernetics was less an integral part of the theory than a form of branding, and he would ultimately remove nearly all of it. Campbell’s hand was visible in the book in other ways. He was responsible for several key sections, including a long footnote in which he used a computer analogy to explain how the analytic mind could be free of error, and he wrote an appendix on the scientific method, signing it “John W. Campbell, Jr., Nuclear Physicist,” and thanking the engineers of Bell Labs. Campbell also composed the appendix “Advice to the Pre-Clear,” of which Hubbard said years later, “You can tear that out. . . . I didn’t write it in the first place. Written by John W. ‘Astounding’ Campbell, Jr., who the older he gets the more astonishing he is.”

Mailer complained that NASA had turned the greatest achievement in human history into a “monumentally boring” spectacle. Like Campbell, he was intrigued by the possibility of communication that didn’t involve the electromagnetic spectrum, and he said that the astronauts should have conducted experiments in telepathy on the moon. Asimov’s response was diplomatic. “When you apply the scientific method to the supernatural, then it automatically becomes natural.” Mailer replied by expounding on his theory of the “thanatosphere,” a layer of the atmosphere populated by the souls of the dead. In another talk, he noted that the public was starting to view space travel with indifference, rather than as a form of adventure—which may have been his most insightful remark.


pages: 218 words: 65,422

Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think About Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth by A. O. Scott

barriers to entry, citizen journalism, conceptual framework, death of newspapers, disinformation, Evgeny Morozov, hive mind, Jacob Silverman, Joan Didion, Marshall McLuhan, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, sexual politics, sharing economy, social web, subscription business, TED Talk, the scientific method

We find it so easy to be wrong, and to recover from the shame of error, because we have trouble crediting the real difficulty of being right. The desire for a shortcut—whether in the form of an unshakable worldview or a set of nifty algorithms—feeds the suspicion that every assertion is a scam, and is therefore vulnerable to simple debunking. The essential modesty and rigor of the scientific method is widely and cheaply travestied and willfully misunderstood. The work of scientists consists to some degree of trying, over and over, to prove themselves wrong. A hypothesis is only valid if it has been exposed to repeated attempts at falsification, and once it has it wears the deceptively humble name of theory.


pages: 257 words: 67,152

The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels by Alex Epstein

addicted to oil, An Inconvenient Truth, carbon footprint, clean water, glass ceiling, hindcast, hydraulic fracturing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), LNG terminal, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, profit motive, public intellectual, Saturday Night Live, the scientific method

Speaking from personal experience, it is incredibly difficult to get a straight answer about what is and isn’t known in the field, because so much of it is catastrophic speculation by people who seem more focused on a political goal than on clear, honest, big-picture communication. In 1996, Stanford climate scientist Stephen Schneider wrote an influential paper about the ethics of exaggerating the evidence for catastrophic climate change. On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but—which means that we must include all the doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands, and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climate change.


pages: 228 words: 68,880

Revolting!: How the Establishment Are Undermining Democracy and What They're Afraid Of by Mick Hume

anti-communist, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, central bank independence, colonial rule, David Brooks, disinformation, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Jeremy Corbyn, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, non-tariff barriers, Occupy movement, open borders, plutocrats, post-truth, public intellectual, Slavoj Žižek, the scientific method, We are the 99%, World Values Survey

Is screening for prostate cancer a help or a hindrance to men’s health? It depends which expert you listen to. Even on an issue such as climate change where, we are often informed, ‘the science is settled’, there are well-informed sceptics who disagree with the consensus and point out that the scientific method means everything should always be open to question. And what about the many occasions when the experts change their minds, and yesterday’s heretical fringe nonsense becomes today’s accepted wisdom, or vice versa? These flip-flops appear particularly common among the supposed experts on issues of public health, where the advice on what to eat and drink or how to care for our children seems to change as often as a baby’s nappy.


Foundation by Isaac Asimov

new economy, the scientific method, trade route

It seems an uncommonly woundabout and hopelessly wigmawolish method of getting anywheahs. Look heah, now, I’ve got the wuhks of all the old mastahs—the gweat ahchaeologists of the past. I wigh them against each othah—balance the disagweements—analyze the conflicting statements—decide which is pwobably cowwect—and come to a conclusion. That is the scientific method. At least”—patronizingly—“as I see it. How insuffewably cwude it would be to go to Ahctuwus, oah to Sol, foah instance, and blundah about, when the old mastahs have covahed the gwound so much moah effectually than we could possibly hope to do.” Hardin murmured politely, “I see.” “Come, milord,” said Pirenne, “I think we had better be returning.”


pages: 243 words: 66,908

Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Meadows. Donella, Diana Wright

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, clean water, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, game design, Garrett Hardin, Gunnar Myrdal, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, peak oil, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Stanford prison experiment, systems thinking, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, Tragedy of the Commons, Whole Earth Review

That way you will be emotionally able to see the evidence that rules out an assumption that may become entangled with your own identity. Getting models out into the light of day, making them as rigorous as possible, testing them against the evidence, and being willing to scuttle them if they are no longer supported is nothing more than practicing the scientific method—something that is done too seldom even in science, and is done hardly at all in social science or management or government or everyday life. Honor, Respect, and Distribute Information You’ve seen how information holds systems together and how delayed, biased, scattered, or missing information can make feedback loops malfunction.


pages: 216 words: 69,480

Sweetness and Light: The Mysterious History of the Honeybee by Hattie Ellis

back-to-the-land, Gregor Mendel, haute couture, New Urbanism, the scientific method, urban decay

It got to the point that the blind naturalist had total trust in Burnens: “I hesitated no longer to give him my entire confidence, feeling sure to see well when seeing through his eyes,” he wrote. Réaumur’s glass observation hives. By this stage, the relationship had evolved from master and servant to that of colleagues. Testing their theories with repeated experiments—the basis of the scientific method—the two men advanced together. Huber described their work in his book New Observations on Bees, printed in 1792. These two volumes are easy to understand today, even for the layperson, because the prose is the sum of two people talking to each other. Huber and Burnens made many discoveries, but the mystery that absorbed them most was the mating of the queen.


pages: 236 words: 66,081

Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age by Clay Shirky

Andrew Keen, behavioural economics, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, citizen journalism, commons-based peer production, corporate social responsibility, Dean Kamen, experimental economics, experimental subject, fundamental attribution error, Great Leap Forward, invention of movable type, invention of the telegraph, Kevin Kelly, lolcat, means of production, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, seminal paper, social contagion, social software, Steve Ballmer, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, Tragedy of the Commons, ultimatum game, work culture , Yochai Benkler

It was a college because their relations were collegial—they operated with a sense of mutual interest in, and respect for, one another’s work. In their conversations, they would outline their research according to agreed-upon norms of clarity and transparency. Robert Boyle, one of the group’s members and sometimes called the father of modern chemistry, helped establish many of the norms underpinning the scientific method, especially how experiments were to be conducted. (The motto of the group was Nullis in Verba—“Believe nothing from mere words.”) When one of their number announced the result of an experiment, the others wanted to know not just what that result was but how the experiment had been conducted, so that the claims could be tested elsewhere.


pages: 232 words: 67,934

The Immortalization Commission: Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death by John Gray

Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, anti-communist, death from overwork, dematerialisation, disinformation, George Santayana, laissez-faire capitalism, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Nikolai Kondratiev, public intellectual, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, scientific worldview, the scientific method

And it appeared to us that there was an important body of evidence – tending prima facie to establish the independence of soul or spirit – which modern science had simply left on one side with ignorant contempt; and that in so leaving it she had been untrue to her professed method, and had arrived prematurely at her negative conclusions. Sidgwick distinguished between science as a fixed body of knowledge and science as a method of inquiry. As pictured by materialism the universe had no human meaning; but the solution was not to reject science. It was to apply the scientific method, which could show materialism to be false. Like so many others, then and later, Sidgwick looked to science for salvation from science. If science had brought about the disenchantment of the world, only science could re-enchant it. The result of scientific inquiry seemed to be that humankind was alone.


pages: 277 words: 72,603

Built: The Hidden Stories Behind Our Structures by Roma Agrawal

3D printing, air gap, Anthropocene, British Empire, clean water, Crossrail, David Attenborough, Dmitri Mendeleev, Elisha Otis, Guggenheim Bilbao, Isaac Newton, John Snow's cholera map, Leo Hollis, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the scientific method

Engineers started to use these literally groundbreaking innovations to install foundations for bridges around the middle of the nineteenth century, and Washington Roebling was fascinated. He even considered using explosives in the confined space – a technique that, for obvious reasons, hadn’t been tried before. Emily began to assist her husband’s research, studying caissons alongside him, and using the scientific methods she had learned at the Georgetown Visitation Convent to understand bridge engineering. Little did she realise at the time, that the dangers of working in the highly pressured environment of a caisson would eventually lead to a catastrophic change in their lives, one from which Emily and her husband would both emerge very different people


pages: 254 words: 69,276

The Metric Society: On the Quantification of the Social by Steffen Mau

Airbnb, cognitive bias, cognitive load, collaborative consumption, connected car, crowdsourcing, digital capitalism, double entry bookkeeping, future of work, gamification, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, lifelogging, Mark Zuckerberg, meritocracy, mittelstand, moral hazard, personalized medicine, positional goods, principal–agent problem, profit motive, QR code, reserve currency, school choice, selection bias, sharing economy, smart cities, subprime mortgage crisis, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, Uber for X, vertical integration, web of trust, Wolfgang Streeck

As such, they have an in-built tendency to colonize more and more areas, as long as a suitable data supply is available. The algorithmic analysis and evaluation of information constitutes a specific epistemic logic with its own stamp of authority: ‘That we are now turning to algorithms to identify what we need to know is as momentous as having relied on credentialed experts, the scientific method, common sense, or the word of God’ (Gillespie 2014: 168). Although algorithms often possess a veneer of objectivity due to their role as impersonal processors of quantitative data, these calculative practices are in fact anything but neutral methods of social datafication. Algorithms are inextricably linked to social forms of value ascription, producing and representing what is to be regarded as relevant or valuable (Lupton 2014).


pages: 249 words: 66,383

House of Debt: How They (And You) Caused the Great Recession, and How We Can Prevent It From Happening Again by Atif Mian, Amir Sufi

Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, break the buck, business cycle, Carmen Reinhart, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, debt deflation, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, financial innovation, full employment, high net worth, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Martin Wolf, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, paradox of thrift, quantitative easing, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, school choice, seminal paper, shareholder value, subprime mortgage crisis, the payments system, the scientific method, tulip mania, young professional, zero-sum game

During the Great Recession, disagreement on causes overshadowed the facts that policy makers desperately needed to clean up the mess. We must distinguish whether there is something more to the link between household debt and severe recessions or if the alternatives above are true. The best way to test this is the scientific method: let’s take a close look at the data and see which theory is valid. That is the purpose of this book. To pin down exactly how household debt affects the economy, we zero in on the United States during the Great Recession. We have a major advantage over economists who lived through prior recessions thanks to the recent explosion in data availability and computing power.


The Intelligent Asset Allocator: How to Build Your Portfolio to Maximize Returns and Minimize Risk by William J. Bernstein

asset allocation, backtesting, book value, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, commoditize, computer age, correlation coefficient, currency risk, diversification, diversified portfolio, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, fixed income, index arbitrage, index fund, intangible asset, John Bogle, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, p-value, passive investing, prediction markets, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, South Sea Bubble, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, the rule of 72, the scientific method, time value of money, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, Wayback Machine, Yogi Berra, zero-coupon bond

Then again, there is actually a third type of investor—the investment professional, who indeed knows that he or she doesn’t know, but whose livelihood depends upon appearing to know. It seems intuitively obvious that stock selection should be a skill like any other. With enough intelligence, training, experience, and effort, one should be able to beat the market. However, the primary strength of Western culture is its reliance on the scientific method. The short version of which is that any rational belief should be falsifiable—that is to say, testable. Consider baseball hitters. You say that there is such a thing as “hitting skill”? A trivial thing to ask, of course, but still easy to test. The batting analogy is useful because it forces us to think about the statistical nature of skill.


pages: 208 words: 67,288

The Magic of Reality: How We Know What's Really True by Richard Dawkins

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Buckminster Fuller, double helix, Ernest Rutherford, false memory syndrome, Fellow of the Royal Society, gravity well, Gregor Mendel, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, phenotype, Richard Feynman, the scientific method

And if the predictions come out right, we hope it means that the model probably represents the truth, or at least a part of the truth. Sometimes the predictions don’t come out right, and so scientists go back and adjust the model, or think up a new one, and then go on to test that. Either way, this process of proposing a model and then testing it – what we call the ‘scientific method’ – has a much better chance of getting at the way things really are than even the most imaginative and beautiful myth invented to explain what people didn’t – and often, at the time, couldn’t – understand. An early model of the atom was the so called ‘currant bun’ model proposed by the great English physicist J.


pages: 229 words: 68,426

Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing by Adam Greenfield

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, augmented reality, business process, Charles Babbage, defense in depth, demand response, demographic transition, facts on the ground, game design, Howard Rheingold, Internet of things, James Dyson, knowledge worker, late capitalism, machine readable, Marshall McLuhan, new economy, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, pattern recognition, profit motive, QR code, recommendation engine, RFID, seminal paper, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, the built environment, the scientific method, value engineering

Thesis 72 Even acknowledging their contingency, some explicit set of principles would be highly useful to developers and users both. Almost all of the available literature on ubiquitous computing is academic. That is, it emerges from the methods and viewpoints of applied science as it is practiced in the collective institution of higher education. As part of their immersion in the scientific method, academics are trained to be descriptive. A proper academic paper in the sciences is neither proscriptive nor prescriptive; it expresses no opinion about what should or should not happen. Much of the discourse around ubiquitous computing has to date been of the descriptive variety: This is a system we contemplate engineering; this is how far we were able to get with it; this is where our assumptions broke down.


pages: 239 words: 70,206

Data-Ism: The Revolution Transforming Decision Making, Consumer Behavior, and Almost Everything Else by Steve Lohr

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, bioinformatics, business cycle, business intelligence, call centre, Carl Icahn, classic study, cloud computing, computer age, conceptual framework, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Danny Hillis, data is the new oil, data science, David Brooks, driverless car, East Village, Edward Snowden, Emanuel Derman, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Future Shock, Google Glasses, Ida Tarbell, impulse control, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of writing, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, lifelogging, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, meta-analysis, money market fund, natural language processing, obamacare, pattern recognition, payday loans, personalized medicine, planned obsolescence, precision agriculture, pre–internet, Productivity paradox, RAND corporation, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Salesforce, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, six sigma, skunkworks, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, The Design of Experiments, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tony Fadell, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, yottabyte

So the feedback mechanism for information, he recalls, consisted of market surveys, customer support calls, and e-mail complaints. The smart-machine loop, Fadell explains, is dramatically more powerful, informed by immediate data on the product’s performance and users’ preferences. “It’s just like the scientific method, done in real time,” he says. Fadell talks of conducting A/B experiments, as Google and Facebook do, to test what customers like and don’t like. The only difference is that Nest is doing so with a product that bridges the physical and Internet realms. Not far from the Nest building, in his office at the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, Randy Komisar picked up on that same theme.


pages: 233 words: 67,596

Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning by Thomas H. Davenport, Jeanne G. Harris

always be closing, Apollo 13, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, business intelligence, business logic, business process, call centre, commoditize, data acquisition, digital map, en.wikipedia.org, fulfillment center, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, if you build it, they will come, intangible asset, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, knapsack problem, late fees, linear programming, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Netflix Prize, new economy, performance metric, personalized medicine, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, recommendation engine, RFID, search inside the book, shareholder value, six sigma, statistical model, supply-chain management, text mining, The future is already here, the long tail, the scientific method, traveling salesman, yield management

A little blip in quality isn’t significant enough to adopt.16 Google’s methods for analytical operations are as rigorous as any firm’s, and the nature of the business makes a large amount of data available for analysis. Research and Development Analytics Research and development (R&D) has been perhaps the most analytical function within companies. It was the primary bastion of the scientific method within companies, featuring hypothesis testing, control groups, and statistical analysis. Of course, some of this highly analytical work still goes on within R&D functions, although much of the basic research in R&D has been supplanted by applied research (which can still use analytical methods) and the creation of extensions of existing products.


They Have a Word for It A Lighthearted Lexicon of Untranslatable Words & Phrases-Sarabande Books (2000) by Howard Rheingold

Ayatollah Khomeini, clockwork universe, Easter island, fudge factor, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, junk bonds, Kula ring, Lao Tzu, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, systems thinking, The Home Computer Revolution, the map is not the territory, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons

In this pragmatic age, where practical assistance is usually more convincing than spiritual advancement, this word can easily be adapted to secular ends. Considering the fact that Niels Bohr's discovery of the atomic structure, Kekule's discovery of the shape of the benzene molecule, and Rene Life Is But a Dream 177 Descartes's discovery of the scientific method itself were all attributed by their discoverers to knowledge transmitted in dreams, there is ample reason to believe that systematic referral of aesthetic, scientific, interpersonal, and other secular problems to the unconscious sources of wisdom who speak through dreams might have very practical results.


pages: 224 words: 71,060

A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream by Yuval Levin

affirmative action, Airbnb, assortative mating, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, conceptual framework, David Brooks, demand response, Donald Trump, fake news, hiring and firing, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, meritocracy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steven Pinker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, WeWork

That response took a form similar to (and plainly modeled on) scientific integrity, proposing an institutionalized commitment to a process of verification that aimed to distinguish fact from fiction. This, in turn, allowed for the development of a journalistic code of ethics, layers of something like peer review in the editorial process, and procedures for punishing, shaming, or ostracizing violators. As with the scientific method, this procedure made it possible for professionals within journalism to take pride in their humility—that is, to see as a strength the fact that they would only assert what they could reasonably prove. That ethic required both serious professional discipline and institutions capable of prioritizing professional standards over personal glory or political victory.


pages: 249 words: 66,546

Protecting Pollinators by Jodi Helmer

Anthropocene, big-box store, clean water, Columbine, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Kickstarter, Maui Hawaii, meta-analysis, the scientific method, urban sprawl, zero-sum game

A bat named after Batman actor Christian Bale? A beetle named for John Lennon? A butterfly called Giacomo Puccini in honor of the composer of Madame Butterfly? Participation Pays Off Getting nonexperts involved in research combines science with education, allowing people to experience the scientific method firsthand. Citizen science has also been hailed for democratizing science, encouraging scientific literacy, and engaging the next generation of scientists. Although citizen scientists volunteer their time, the goal is not to acquire data on the cheap. Instead, scientists leverage diverse groups to access data across great spans of space and time; nonscientists provide novel perspectives on research and help scientists translate their findings into policies and action.


Bulletproof Problem Solving by Charles Conn, Robert McLean

active transport: walking or cycling, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, asset allocation, availability heuristic, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Big Tech, Black Swan, blockchain, book value, business logic, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, deep learning, Donald Trump, driverless car, drop ship, Elon Musk, endowment effect, fail fast, fake news, future of work, Garrett Hardin, Hyperloop, Innovator's Dilemma, inventory management, iterative process, loss aversion, megaproject, meta-analysis, Nate Silver, nudge unit, Occam's razor, pattern recognition, pets.com, prediction markets, principal–agent problem, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, SimCity, smart contracts, stem cell, sunk-cost fallacy, the rule of 72, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, time value of money, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, Vilfredo Pareto, walkable city, WikiLeaks

Professor Stephen Roberts, a machine‐learning expert at Oxford, emphasizes the need to rigorously frame a question or hypothesis before embarking on complex analysis. He advises students not to commence machine‐learning analysis until such time as they have developed a clear idea of the structure of the model and testable hypotheses, the essence of the scientific method.1 In this chapter, we explain where and how to apply advanced analytical approaches, as well as some of their limitations. Even if you don't personally employ the analytic big guns, you are likely to be presented with analysis that comes from these approaches. Sequence Your Thinking The process we recommend for deciding when to use the big guns is a sequential one.


pages: 209 words: 68,587

Stephen Hawking by Leonard Mlodinow

Albert Michelson, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, dark matter, Dmitri Mendeleev, do what you love, Ernest Rutherford, Eyjafjallajökull, Isaac Newton, Murray Gell-Mann, Nelson Mandela, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method

“What used to be called ‘natural philosophy’ is dead, but not philosophy.” Natural philosophy was a precursor of the sciences, a branch of philosophy in which scholars attempted to understand nature through pure reason rather than reason plus experiment. It was rendered archaic by the development of the scientific method. Stephen knew all this, but I continued making my case. “I agree that today we can understand the universe better through science than philosophy,” I said. “But there is also the philosophy of life. There’s ethics. There’s logic. There’s the philosophy of individual disciplines such as mathematics and physics.


pages: 199 words: 64,272

Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing by Jacob Goldstein

Alan Greenspan, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, back-to-the-land, bank run, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, break the buck, card file, central bank independence, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, Edmond Halley, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, index card, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, life extension, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, side hustle, Silicon Valley, software is eating the world, Steven Levy, the new new thing, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs

But there are a couple things that are essential to the history of light. One is, basically, practical applications of science. The important breakthrough wasn’t that the Earth orbits the sun or how the force of gravity changes based on the distance between two objects; the breakthrough was discovering a system for making new discoveries, the scientific method. Not all of these discoveries had practical applications, but some did. Around 1850, a scientist named Abraham Gesner (he was a physician who had also studied geology) discovered a new technique for turning pitch or oil into a fuel he called kerosene. It was an extraordinary breakthrough—it was just so much better than every light source that had come before.


pages: 296 words: 66,815

The AI-First Company by Ash Fontana

23andMe, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, blockchain, business intelligence, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Charles Babbage, chief data officer, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, DevOps, en.wikipedia.org, Geoffrey Hinton, independent contractor, industrial robot, inventory management, John Conway, knowledge economy, Kubernetes, Lean Startup, machine readable, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Network effects, optical character recognition, Pareto efficiency, performance metric, price discrimination, recommendation engine, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, single source of truth, software as a service, source of truth, speech recognition, the scientific method, transaction costs, vertical integration, yield management

Earning more in the latter case is a matter of, on the one side of the ledger, making sure to charge customers for custom feature development and, on the other side, completing that development in a short enough time to earn a 100 percent or more margin on an engineer’s effective hourly rate in order to at least cover her “all-in” cost to the company. Earning more in the former case is a more difficult task. The goal of figuring out what’s working is to make sure that they are indeed working on features that are likely to improve the global performance of the model. This seems challenging, but it just requires applying the scientific method. That is, form a hypothesis about what effort—adding a feature, adding some data, and so forth—will yield what result, be it improved accuracy, stability, and so on. Then perform the experiment and follow up diligently. For example, when trying to recognize the brand on a cereal box 98 percent of the time using supervised learning, experiment with training the model on labeled images of cereal boxes taken in low light or at an odd angle, then run the retrained model against real-world examples to see if accuracy improved across the board.


pages: 245 words: 71,886

Spike: The Virus vs The People - The Inside Story by Jeremy Farrar, Anjana Ahuja

"World Economic Forum" Davos, bioinformatics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data science, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, double helix, dual-use technology, Future Shock, game design, global pandemic, Kickstarter, lab leak, lockdown, machine translation, nudge unit, open economy, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, side project, social distancing, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, zoonotic diseases

There was great science, which gave us vaccines; there was science that could have been better, like clinical trials, which mostly ended up being patchy and uncoordinated (with the notable exception of RECOVERY and Solidarity* trials); and there was bad science, including speculation, without evidence, that there would be no second Covid-19 wave. Even now, there are still people who sincerely believe that lockdowns do not bring down transmission and that vaccines do more harm than good. If citizens reject the scientific method, which is at the heart of everything we do and which has given us the means to exit this pandemic, then our future struggles against climate change, water scarcity and diseases will be that much tougher. We need to be more open and engaging about what we do, how the scientific process works, how scientific research and analysis influences policy making and how its benefits can be shared fairly.


pages: 194 words: 63,798

The Milky Way: An Autobiography of Our Galaxy by Moiya McTier

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, Burning Man, Cepheid variable, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, Eddington experiment, Edward Charles Pickering, Ernest Rutherford, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, James Dyson, James Webb Space Telescope, Karl Jansky, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, Magellanic Cloud, overview effect, Pluto: dwarf planet, polynesian navigation, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method

Your astronomers are observing GN-z11 as it was only four hundred million years after the Big Bang. I will say this about those astronomers: they’ve done a lot with the little they were given. What is it you humans say? Make lemonade out of lemons? Well, in this scenario, all I did was show them a picture of a lemon tree and they figured out the rest. When—or if—you learned about the scientific method as a child, you likely learned that it requires experiments. But the truth, human, is that some sciences are observational in nature, not experimental. Your astronomers haven’t yet determined how to build miniature stars to experiment on. They can’t create groups of different galaxies and manipulate one to see how it affects their results.


pages: 719 words: 181,090

Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems by Betsy Beyer, Chris Jones, Jennifer Petoff, Niall Richard Murphy

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, Abraham Maslow, Air France Flight 447, anti-pattern, barriers to entry, business intelligence, business logic, business process, Checklist Manifesto, cloud computing, cognitive load, combinatorial explosion, continuous integration, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, database schema, defense in depth, DevOps, en.wikipedia.org, exponential backoff, fail fast, fault tolerance, Flash crash, George Santayana, Google Chrome, Google Earth, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, information asymmetry, job automation, job satisfaction, Kubernetes, linear programming, load shedding, loose coupling, machine readable, meta-analysis, microservices, minimum viable product, MVC pattern, no silver bullet, OSI model, performance metric, platform as a service, proprietary trading, reproducible builds, revision control, risk tolerance, side project, six sigma, the long tail, the scientific method, Toyota Production System, trickle-down economics, warehouse automation, web application, zero day

Practical Alerting from Time-Series Data Written by Jamie Wilkinson Edited by Kavita Guliani May the queries flow, and the pager stay silent. Traditional SRE blessing Monitoring, the bottom layer of the Hierarchy of Production Needs, is fundamental to running a stable service. Monitoring enables service owners to make rational decisions about the impact of changes to the service, apply the scientific method to incident response, and of course ensure their reason for existence: to measure the service’s alignment with business goals (see Chapter 6). Regardless of whether or not a service enjoys SRE support, it should be run in a symbiotic relationship with its monitoring. But having been tasked with ultimate responsibility for Google Production, SREs develop a particularly intimate knowledge of the monitoring infrastructure that supports their service.

Teach your SREs about the diagnostic and debugging surfaces of your applications and have them practice drawing inferences from the information these surfaces reveal, so that such behavior becomes reflexive when dealing with future outages. Statistical and Comparative Thinkers: Stewards of the Scientific Method Under Pressure You can think of an SRE’s approach to incident response for large-scale systems as navigating through a massive decision tree unfolding in front of them. In the limited time window afforded by the demands of incident response, the SRE can take a few actions out of hundreds with the goal of mitigating the outage, either in the short term or the long term.


pages: 667 words: 186,968

The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History by John M. Barry

Albert Einstein, Brownian motion, centralized clearinghouse, conceptual framework, coronavirus, discovery of penicillin, double helix, Edward Jenner, Fellow of the Royal Society, germ theory of disease, index card, Louis Pasteur, Marshall McLuhan, Mason jar, means of production, scientific management, seminal paper, statistical model, the medium is the message, the scientific method, traveling salesman, women in the workforce

Kuhn’s own theory recognizes that the propelling force behind the movement from one explanation to another comes from the methodology, from what we call the scientific method. But he takes as an axiom that those who ask questions constantly test existing hypotheses. In fact, with a methodology that probes and tests hypotheses—regardless of any paradigm—progress is inevitable. Without such a methodology, progress becomes merely coincendental. Yet the scientific method has not always been used by those who inquire into nature. Through most of known history, investigators trying to penetrate the natural world, penetrate what we call science, relied upon the mind alone, reason alone.


pages: 728 words: 182,850

Cooking for Geeks by Jeff Potter

3D printing, A Pattern Language, air gap, carbon footprint, centre right, Community Supported Agriculture, Computer Numeric Control, crowdsourcing, Donald Knuth, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, fear of failure, food miles, functional fixedness, hacker house, haute cuisine, helicopter parent, Internet Archive, iterative process, Kickstarter, lolcat, Parkinson's law, placebo effect, random walk, Rubik’s Cube, slashdot, stochastic process, TED Talk, the scientific method

When I was a Baby Buck, my father would take me into the pocket-knife factory on Saturday mornings and hand me off to a foreman so he could get some work done, and I’d make knives with a foreman. Did the background in chemistry, combined with your family’s history in knife making, complement each other? To some degree...but it was more of the scientific method and analytical techniques that you learn in a hard science, applying them to manufacturing. I looked at it from a different standpoint than a history major MBA would, or an English major MBA would. Coming from a real science, you take a different approach, an engineering approach. Can you give me an example?

Most people assume that knowing how things should be done is the best way, so they keep struggling within a very small circle, whereas I have a tendency to just try a much wider variety of things that may work and may not work. So when you get stuck on one of these problems even though you’re working in a wider circle, how do you go about getting unstuck? That’s an interesting question. Let me deviate from that slightly and then I’ll come back. Most people are familiar with the scientific method, which is holding everything exactly the same and changing this one thing. This reminds me of people trying to do one side of the Rubik’s Cube. Most of the good methods don’t involve getting any side. That’s the last thing you do. So people get stuck because they don’t want to toss in the towel on the progress they think they’ve made so far.


Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society by Nicholas A. Christakis

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, assortative mating, autism spectrum disorder, Cass Sunstein, classic study, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, deep learning, different worldview, disruptive innovation, domesticated silver fox, double helix, driverless car, Easter island, epigenetics, experimental economics, experimental subject, Garrett Hardin, intentional community, invention of agriculture, invention of gunpowder, invention of writing, iterative process, job satisfaction, Joi Ito, joint-stock company, land tenure, language acquisition, Laplace demon, longitudinal study, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, means of production, mental accounting, meta-analysis, microbiome, out of africa, overview effect, phenotype, Philippa Foot, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, replication crisis, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, social intelligence, social web, stem cell, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, twin studies, ultimatum game, zero-sum game

This type of experiment—in which exposure to the drug is controlled by the scientists, thus minimizing the impact of extraneous factors—is the gold standard of scientific research. Science encompasses diverse practices, and the role of experiments remains paramount.10 Still, experimentation should not be conflated with the scientific method in general. The scientific method, widely practiced by scientists since the seventeenth century, refers to a way of studying the natural world; it is characterized by systematic observation, careful measurement, and, sometimes, actual experimentation, all of which is coupled with the formulation, testing, and revision of hypotheses.


pages: 651 words: 186,130

This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race by Nicole Perlroth

4chan, active measures, activist lawyer, air gap, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boeing 737 MAX, Brexit referendum, Brian Krebs, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commoditize, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Vincenzetti, defense in depth, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, failed state, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, Firefox, gender pay gap, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Hacker News, index card, information security, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, lockdown, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral hazard, Morris worm, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, NSO Group, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open borders, operational security, Parler "social media", pirate software, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Russian election interference, Sand Hill Road, Seymour Hersh, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, web application, WikiLeaks, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

This is what Oleh Derevianko, the blond Ukrainian cybersecurity entrepreneur, told me one evening over vareniki dumplings in aspic, Ukrainian meat encased in some kind of fatty Jell-O. Derevianko’s firm had been on the front lines of the attacks. Over and over again, the forensics showed that the Russians were just experimenting. They were employing a cruel version of the scientific method: testing one capability here, one method there, honing their skills in Ukraine, demonstrating to their Russian overlords what could be done, earning their stripes. There was a reason that the NotPetya attack was so destructive, why it wiped 80 percent of Ukraine’s computers clean, Derevianko told me.

All discovered BlackEnergy and KillDisk on their systems, but the attackers had broke into each network using different techniques and methods, almost like they were tinkering. In one case, the attackers downloaded their tools over time—1:20 P.M. every day. In another, they downloaded them rapid-style. “They tried one technique here, one technique there,” Yasinsky told me. “This was the scientific method in action.” What Yasinsky couldn’t figure out was why the attackers would go to such lengths to attack media companies? Media companies had no particularly valuable intellectual property to speak of and little in the way of customer or financial data. The assembly-level mutations their attackers had used to install and hide their tools were as advanced as Yasinsky had ever seen.


How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett

airport security, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, autism spectrum disorder, Drosophila, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, framing effect, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, language acquisition, longitudinal study, luminiferous ether, meta-analysis, nocebo, phenotype, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, Shai Danziger, Skype, Steven Pinker, sugar pill, systems thinking, TED Talk, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

Centuries later, a radical revision of Buddhism recast the dharmas as human constructions dependent on concepts.29 From those initial skirmishes, the war has continued throughout recorded history. The eleventh-century scientist Ibn al-Haytham, who made seminal contributions to developing the scientific method, held the constructionist view that we perceive the world through judgment and inference. Medieval Christian theologians were essentialists, associating different cavities in the brain with distinct essences of memory, imagination, and intelligence. Philosophers in the seventeenth century, such as René Descartes and Baruch Spinoza, believed in emotion essences and catalogued them, while eighteenth-century philosophers like David Hume and Immanuel Kant argued more for construction and perception-based explanations for human experience.

Some of the most pressing questions about emotion remain unanswered, and important questions remain obscured, because many businesses and scientists continue practicing essentialism while the rest of us are figuring out how emotions are made.38 It’s hard to give up the classical view when it represents deeply held beliefs about what it means to be human. Nevertheless, the facts remain that no one has found even a single reliable, broadly replicable, objectively measurable essence of emotion. When mountains of contrary data don’t force people to give up their ideas, then they are no longer following the scientific method. They are following an ideology. And as an ideology, the classical view has wasted billions of research dollars and misdirected the course of scientific inquiry for over a hundred years. If people had followed evidence instead of ideology seventy years ago, when the Lost Chorus pretty solidly did away with emotion essences, who knows where we’d be today regarding treatments for mental illness or best practices for rearing our children.39 … Every scientific journey is a story.


pages: 193 words: 19,478

Memory Machines: The Evolution of Hypertext by Belinda Barnet

augmented reality, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bill Duvall, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, game design, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, hypertext link, Ian Bogost, information retrieval, Internet Archive, John Markoff, linked data, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, nonsequential writing, Norbert Wiener, Project Xanadu, publish or perish, Robert Metcalfe, semantic web, seminal paper, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, the scientific method, Vannevar Bush, wikimedia commons

Ever the biologist, Eldredge has them arranged in taxonomic relationships of shape, style and date of manufacture. Much of the variety in cornet design is based on the way the pipe is wound. Late in 2002, Eldredge’s curiosity got the better of him. He decided to feed these specimens through the phylogenetic computer program he uses for his trilobites, to apply the ‘scientific method’ to technical evolution 4 Memory Machines for the first time. As usual, he asked the computer to come up with all the possible evolutionary trees and then make a ‘best guess’ based on the existing specimens. The results were astounding. Compared to the phylogenetic diagram for trilobites, the diagram for a technical artefact seemed much more ‘retroactive’: new designs could borrow ideas from the distant past.


pages: 254 words: 76,064

Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future by Joi Ito, Jeff Howe

3D printing, air gap, Albert Michelson, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Burning Man, business logic, buy low sell high, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital rights, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double helix, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ferguson, Missouri, fiat currency, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, frictionless, game design, Gerolamo Cardano, informal economy, information security, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, move 37, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pirate software, power law, pre–internet, prisoner's dilemma, Productivity paradox, quantum cryptography, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Singh, Singularitarianism, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, the strength of weak ties, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Two Sigma, universal basic income, unpaid internship, uranium enrichment, urban planning, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Imagine: Charles Darwin first conceived of natural selection while reviewing the specimens he had collected as the HMS Beagle’s botanist, a post he had accepted when he was twenty-three years old. He then spent more than thirty years gathering data to back up his claim, an act so patient and cautious that it strikes the modern mind as otherworldly in its monklike devotion to the scientific method.15 But then, it was another world. Reliant on the libraries of the Athenaeum Club, the British Museum, and professional organizations like the Royal Society, as well as shipments of books that could take months to arrive from abroad, he could only access a tiny fraction of the information available to the modern scientist.


pages: 285 words: 78,180

Life at the Speed of Light: From the Double Helix to the Dawn of Digital Life by J. Craig Venter

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 11, Asilomar, Barry Marshall: ulcers, bioinformatics, borderless world, Brownian motion, clean water, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, discovery of DNA, double helix, dual-use technology, epigenetics, experimental subject, global pandemic, Gregor Mendel, Helicobacter pylori, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, John von Neumann, Louis Pasteur, Mars Rover, Mikhail Gorbachev, phenotype, precautionary principle, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, stem cell, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Turing machine

Science 332, no. 6034 (June 3, 2011): pp. 1196–201. 10. George M. Church, Yuan Gao, and Sriram Kosuri. “Next-generation digital information storage in DNA.” Science 337, no. 6102 (September 28, 2012): p. 1628. 11. Accessible at http://edge.org/conversation/what-is-life. Chapter 2 1. Steven Benner. Life, the Universe . . . and the Scientific Method (Gainesville, FL: Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution, 2009), p. 45. 2. Jacques Loeb. The Dynamics of Living Matter (New York: Columbia University Press, 1906). Accessible online at http://archive.org/stream/dynamicslivingm00loebgoog#page/n6/mode/2up. 3. Rebecca Lemov. World as Laboratory: Experiments with Mice, Mazes, and Men (New York: Hill and Wang, 2005). 4.


pages: 302 words: 74,878

A Curious Mind: The Secret to a Bigger Life by Brian Grazer, Charles Fishman

4chan, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 13, Apple II, Asperger Syndrome, Bonfire of the Vanities, Dr. Strangelove, en.wikipedia.org, game design, Google Chrome, Howard Zinn, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Norman Mailer, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, out of africa, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple

My strongest sense of curiosity is what I call emotional curiosity: I want to understand what makes people tick; I want to see if I can connect a person’s attitude and personality with their work, with their challenges and accomplishments. I met with Jonas Salk, the scientist and physician who cured polio, a man who was a childhood hero of mine. It took me more than a year to get an audience with him. I wasn’t interested in the scientific method Salk used to figure out how to develop the polio vaccine. I wanted to know what it was like to help millions of people avoid a crippling disease that shadowed the childhoods of everyone when I was growing up. And he worked in a different era. He was renowned, admired, successful—but he received no financial windfall.


pages: 258 words: 77,601

Everything Under the Sun: Toward a Brighter Future on a Small Blue Planet by Ian Hanington

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, Day of the Dead, disinformation, do what you love, energy security, Enrique Peñalosa, Exxon Valdez, Google Earth, happiness index / gross national happiness, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, hydraulic fracturing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Medieval Warm Period, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, planned obsolescence, precautionary principle, stem cell, sustainable-tourism, the scientific method, University of East Anglia, urban planning, urban sprawl

We don’t know what carbon capture and storage will cost, when it will be commercially viable, or what it will do, other than perhaps give us a way to keep relying on finite and polluting sources of energy. 4. Science Holds a Mirror to Existence AS A SCIENTIST, I find all science and the scientific method fascinating. But it isn’t perfect. Science has probably led to as many destructive and dangerous inventions as useful ones. It won’t save us on its own. After all, science is value neutral; it won’t help us with questions regarding morality or ethics. But science is still one of the best tools we have for analyzing our place in the world and our options for living well.


pages: 284 words: 79,265

The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date by Samuel Arbesman

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 11, bioinformatics, British Empire, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, data science, David Brooks, demographic transition, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Galaxy Zoo, Gregor Mendel, guest worker program, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, index fund, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, John Harrison: Longitude, Kevin Kelly, language acquisition, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, Marc Andreessen, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, National Debt Clock, Nicholas Carr, P = NP, p-value, Paul Erdős, Pluto: dwarf planet, power law, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, scientific worldview, SimCity, social contagion, social graph, social web, systematic bias, text mining, the long tail, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation

While the ancient philosophers worked to order their world, they were more than a little hit-or-miss. The world was ready for new types of knowledge by the late Middle Ages. As the Middle Ages and its accounting systems gave way to the Renaissance, which in turn laid the foundations for the Scientific Revolution, facts were given a new sort of prominence. As the scientific method was being codified, and our surroundings were subjected to experimental rigor the likes of which the world had never seen, facts were generated and overturned at an ever-increasing pace. Finally, the testable scientific fact had arrived. This is the critical insight of the Scientific Revolution: Science requires an idea to be refutable.


pages: 281 words: 78,317

But What if We're Wrong? Thinking About the Present as if It Were the Past by Chuck Klosterman

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, British Empire, citizen journalism, cosmological constant, dark matter, data science, Easter island, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, George Santayana, Gerolamo Cardano, ghettoisation, Golden age of television, Hans Moravec, Higgs boson, Howard Zinn, Isaac Newton, Joan Didion, Large Hadron Collider, Nick Bostrom, non-fiction novel, obamacare, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, the medium is the message, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, Y2K

I suspect the human conception of infinity is akin to a dog’s conception of a clock. 34 Greene is not exaggerating: He said he’s had the same argument at least ten times with David Gross, the winner of the Nobel Prize for physics in 2004. “Because we can’t falsify the idea,” Gross writes of the multiverse, “it isn’t science.” In other words, because there’s no way for the multiverse theory to be proven untrue, it can’t be examined through the scientific method. 35 When I first met this guy (his name is Mike Mathog), the only thing I knew about him was how much he hated an absurdist joke I’d made in one of my early books, where I claimed the probability of everything was always 50-50 (“Either something will happen, or something will not”).


Wonders of the Universe by Brian Cox, Andrew Cohen

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, California gold rush, Cepheid variable, cosmic microwave background, dark matter, Dmitri Mendeleev, Eddington experiment, Eyjafjallajökull, Ford Model T, heat death of the universe, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, Karl Jansky, Large Hadron Collider, Magellanic Cloud, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method, time dilation, trade route

The desire to understand events beyond the terrestrial seems to be innate, because all the great civilisations of antiquity have shared it, developing stories of beginnings, origins and endings. It is only recently that we have discovered that this quest is also profoundly useful in a practical sense. When coupled with the scientific method, this quest has allowed us not only to better understand nature, but to manipulate and control it for the enrichment of our lives through technology. The well-spring of all that we take for granted, from medical science to intercontinental air travel, is our curiosity. THE VALUE OF WONDER The idea that a journey to the edge of the Universe is deeply relevant to our everyday lives lies at the heart of Wonders of the Universe.


pages: 293 words: 78,439

Dual Transformation: How to Reposition Today's Business While Creating the Future by Scott D. Anthony, Mark W. Johnson

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Apollo 13, asset light, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, blockchain, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, diversified portfolio, driverless car, Internet of things, invention of hypertext, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, late fees, Lean Startup, long term incentive plan, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, obamacare, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, pez dispenser, recommendation engine, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, software as a service, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, subscription business, the long tail, the market place, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, transfer pricing, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, Zipcar

Fortunately, the past decade has concurrently seen an explosion of tools to help design and execute experiments and a rapid decline in the cost of these experiments. Books like Steve Blank’s Four Steps to the Epiphany, Eric Ries’s The Lean Startup, and coauthor Scott Anthony’s The First Mile provide practical toolkits to systematically de-risk an idea. The basic idea behind all these books is to apply the scientific method to strategic uncertainty. The First Mile uses two acronyms to explain the process. The first is DEFT, which stands for document, evaluate, focus, and test. First, document your idea thoroughly to make sure you have thought through all of its components. Evaluate it via multiple lenses to identify uncertainties and weak points.


pages: 266 words: 76,299

Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History by Stephen Jay Gould

Alfred Russel Wallace, British Empire, correlation coefficient, Drosophila, European colonialism, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Monroe Doctrine, Paul Samuelson, planned obsolescence, Scientific racism, sexual politics, the scientific method, twin studies

Today, just ten years later, my own students would dismiss with even more derision anyone who denied the evident truth of continental drift—a prophetic madman is at least amusing; a superannuated fuddy-duddy is merely pitiful. Why has such a profound change occurred in the short space of a decade? Most scientists maintain—or at least argue for public consumption—that their profession marches toward truth by accumulating more and more data, under the guidance of an infallible procedure called “the scientific method.” If this were true, my question would have an easy answer. The facts, as known ten years ago, spoke against continental drift; since then, we have learned more and revised our opinions accordingly. I will argue, however, that this scenario is both inapplicable in general and utterly inaccurate in this case.


pages: 268 words: 75,850

The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems-And Create More by Luke Dormehl

3D printing, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, call centre, Cass Sunstein, classic study, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, computer age, death of newspapers, deferred acceptance, disruptive innovation, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, Florence Nightingale: pie chart, Ford Model T, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, fulfillment center, Google Earth, Google Glasses, High speed trading, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Kodak vs Instagram, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, machine readable, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, price discrimination, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, Rosa Parks, scientific management, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Slavoj Žižek, social graph, speech recognition, stable marriage problem, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, technological solutionism, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, upwardly mobile, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator

The Googlization of Everything (and Why We Should Worry) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). 19 MacCormick, John. Nine Algorithms That Changed the Future: The Ingenious Ideas That Drive Today’s Computers (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2012). 20 Anderson, Chris. “The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete.” Wired, June 23, 2008. wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/16-07/pb_theory. 21 Doctorow, Cary. “How an Algorithm Came Up with Amazon’s ‘Keep Calm and Rape a Lot’ T-Shirt.” BoingBoing, March 2, 2013. boingboing.net/2013/03/02/how-an-algorithm-came-up-with.html. 22 “Google Sued over Bettina Wulff Search Results.”


pages: 272 words: 78,876

Heart: A History by Sandeep Jauhar

blue-collar work, clean water, correlation does not imply causation, Easter island, Future Shock, Honoré de Balzac, John Snow's cholera map, mass immigration, medical residency, placebo effect, publish or perish, Rubik’s Cube, selection bias, stem cell, the scientific method

Through the Middle Ages, his writings were scripture, immune to questioning. People focused on his conclusions, not the (often scant) observations upon which his conclusions were based. Though his reasoning was often spurious and analogical—water irrigating fields, a furnace heating pipes—the scientific method, careful measurement supporting or disproving falsifiable propositions, had not yet taken hold. When observations were made that did not concur with Galenism, they were marginalized and discounted. A more advanced understanding of the heart probably existed in Persia, where the physician Ibn al-Nafis wrote his Commentary on Anatomy in 1242.


pages: 290 words: 76,216

What's Wrong With Economics: A Primer for the Perplexed by Robert Skidelsky

additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, cognitive bias, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, full employment, George Akerlof, George Santayana, global supply chain, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, happiness index / gross national happiness, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, loss aversion, Mahbub ul Haq, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market friction, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, precariat, price anchoring, principal–agent problem, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

(i) Foley, Duncan (i), (ii) Foucault, Michel (i), (ii) Frankenstein (Shelley) (i) free trade advent of (i) critiques of (i) economic growth (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) free trade/protectionism clash (i), (ii) Friedman, Milton (i), (ii) Galbraith, John Kenneth (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) game theory (i), (ii) Georgescu-Roegen, Nicholas (i) German Historical School (i), (ii), (iii) globalization free trade doctrine (i) impact on absolute poverty rates (i) market-led (i), (ii) Gramsci, Antonio (i) Habermas, Jürgen (i) Hahn, Frank (i), (ii) Hayek, Friedrich (i), (ii) heterodox economics (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Hicks, John (i), (ii) hierarchies of wants (i) Hirsch, Fred (i) history biases of (i) conservatism of (i) cycles in (i) within a different approach to understanding (i) of economic doctrines (i) within economic study (i) stages of development thesis (i) see also economic history history of economic thought methodological debates (i) paradigm persistence (i) the study of (i), (ii), (iii) see also economic history Hobsbawm, Eric (i) Hodgson, Geoffrey (i), (ii), (iii) holism (i), (ii), (iii) homo economicus ethical objections to (i) fictionality of (i) model of (i), (ii), (iii) as a product of capitalism (i) rational behaviour of (i), (ii) income redistribution/justice of distribution (i) individuals agency of (i) behaviour within groups (i) constancy of human nature belief (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) and the Enlightenment (i) fallacy of composition (i) human behaviour within economic models (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) institutions’s influence on (i) methodological individualism (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi) in methodology (i) in neoclassical economics (i), (ii), (iii) in pre-modern society (i) representative agent hypothesis (i), (ii) within social networks (i) as sole choosing units (i), (ii), (iii) uncertainty and human behaviour (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi) utility maximisation (i), (ii), (iii) see also behavioural economics; homo economicus industrialisation free trade in industrialising countries (i), (ii) Marxist thought on industrial societies (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) role of the state (i) sociological thought on (i) Institutional Economics (i), (ii), (iii) institutionalism neoclassical (i) overview of (i) institutions the church (i) defined (i) digital technology and (i) influence on the individual (i) the institutional order (i), (ii) non-market coordination (i) principal-agent problem (i) public choice theory (i) role in economic growth (i), (ii), (iii) self-interest within (i) the state as (i) utility maximisation by (i) see also firms; states Jevons, William Stanley (i), (ii) Johnson, Harry (i) Jones, Richard (i) Kahneman, Daniel (i) Kaldor, Nicholas (i) Kant, Immanuel (i) Keppler, Joseph (i) Keynes, John Maynard ethics in economics (i) moral basis for economics (i) ontology of economics in (i) on power (i) the qualities of an economist (i) in relation to equilibrium theory (i) on the role of economics (i) theory of probability (i) on uncertainty (i), (ii), (iii) Keynesian economics 1970s reaction against (i), (ii), (iii) for employment (i) equilibrium (i) Keynesian revolution (i), (ii) macroeconomic forecasting models (i), (ii), (iii) role of the individual (i) Knight, Frank (i) Kondratieff cycle (i) Krugman, Paul (i), (ii), (iii) Kuhn, Thomas (i), (ii), (iii) Kuznets, Simon (i), (ii) labour theory of value (i) Lagarde, Christine (i) Lakatos, Imre (i), (ii), (iii) laws, economic ceteris paribus warnings (i), (ii), (iii) critiques of (i) deductive theories (i) economic generalizations (i) inductive theories (i) modelling and (i) orthodox economics theories (i) stadial theory (i) see also models Lawson, Tony (i), (ii) Leontief, Wassily (i) Leslie, Cliffe (i) liberalism liberal/collectivist cycles (i) liberal power (i) liberal theory of the state (i) liberalisation policies in developing economies (i), (ii) List, Friedrich (i), (ii), (iii) Lo, Andrew (i) Locke, John (i), (ii), (iii) Lucas, Robert (i), (ii) Lukes, Steven (i) macroeconomic theory Keynesian macroeconomic forecasting (i), (ii), (iii) macroeconomic models (i), (ii) as micro-founded (i), (ii) Maddison, Angus (i) Maine, Henry (i) mainstream economics see neoclassical economics Malthus, Thomas (i), (ii), (iii) marginalist revolution (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) market economies (i) markets auction markets (i) competitive market systems (i) consumer sovereignty (i), (ii), (iii) expanded world of business (i) general equilibrium (GE) in (i), (ii), (iii) the invisible hand of (i), (ii) market imperfections (i) market maximisation (i) market-led globalization (i), (ii) market/society relationship (i) monopolies in (i) monopolistic competition (i) monopsony power (i) oligopolies (i) origins of trade (i) pre-modern markets (i), (ii), (iii) role of institutions (i) self-regulating markets (i) state intervention in (i), (ii) transaction cost theory (i), (ii) uncertainty and (i), (ii) see also trade Marshall, Alfred (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Marx, Karl class analysis (i), (ii) Frankenstein as a metaphor for capitalism (i) labour theory of value (i) the moral cost of progress (i) need for social bonds (i) power relations (i) in relation to equilibrium theory (i) Marxism on bourgeois economics (i) on equilibrium theory (i) hegemonic power concept (i) on industrial society (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) theory of class power (i), (ii), (iii) theory of exploitation (i) mass consumption (i) maths mathematical language (i), (ii) mathematical modelling (i) role in economics (i), (ii) McCloskey, Deirdre (i), (ii) means choice of means (i) as data (i) opportunity costs (i) scarcity of (i), (ii), (iii) scarcity of time and (i) wealth and (i) means-end problem (i), (ii), (iii) Menger’s Hierarchy of Wants (i) methodological holism (i) methodological individualism (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi) methodology classical economics (i) homo economicus function within (i) human nature and (i) the individual in (i) marginal revolution (i) methodological debates (i) methodological persistence (i) of neoclassical economics (i) paradigm persistence (i) paradigm shifts (i), (ii) pluralism within (i) protective belts in research (i) relationship with sociology (i) the scientific method (i) the social in (i) the study of (i), (ii) subjective value theory (i) utility maximisation as (i), (ii), (iii) microeconomics (i), (ii), (iii) Mill, John Stuart (i), (ii), (iii) Miller Atlas of Brazil (i) models agent-based modelling (i) complex system modelling (i) econometric testing (i), (ii) within economic study (i), (ii) to establish laws (i) establishing the facts (i), (ii) fallibility of (i) falsification of theories (i), (ii) freezing technique (i), (ii) frictions (i) human behaviour within (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) logic and mathematical proof (i) macroeconomic models (i), (ii) Malthusian population problem (i), (ii) mathematical modelling (i) method for (i) of monopolies (i) network analysis (i) open and closed systems (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Phillips Curve (i) platonic modelling (i) Popper’s verification principle (i) predictability (i), (ii) a priori modelling (i), (ii) in relation to reality (i) rhetoric and (i) shocks, notion of (i) the study of (i) system dynamics (i) testing hypotheses (i) time-series analysis (i) see also homo economicus; laws, economic money within economic study (i) efficiency of choice and (i) as a means to an end (i), (ii) theory of money (i) for well-being (i), (ii) see also wealth monopolies (i) morality anomie (i) contracts and (i), (ii) just price doctrine (i) moral agency (i) moral behaviour (i) moral restraint for limiting population growth (i) morally efficient behaviour (i), (ii), (iii) of ownership (i) in relation to strategic rationality (i) see also ethics Nakamura, Emi (i) natural resources (i), (ii) neoclassical economics authority of (i), (ii) the individual and (i), (ii), (iii) institutionalism (i) methodology (i) overview of (i) parody of the state (i) within the political landscape (i) role of social relationships (i) New Institutional Economics (i) North, Douglass (i) Nozick, Robert (i) oligopolies (i) Olson, Mancur (i) ontology in Keynesian economics (i) lack of institutional mapping in (i) in relation to epistemology (i), (ii) open systems (i) opportunity costs (i) paradigm persistence (i) Pareto, Vilfredo (i) Parker, William (i) Phillips Curve (i) philosophy (i), (ii), (iii) physics concept of gravity (i), (ii) the laws of physics and economics (i) Pigou, Arthur (i) pluralism as alternative to heterodoxy (i) within economic methodology (i) in economic theory (i) parable of the blind men and the elephant (i), (ii), (iii) Polanyi, Karl (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) political economy (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) political science (i), (ii) Popper, Karl (i), (ii) positional goods (i) post-modernism (i) power advertising as a form of (i) agenda power (i), (ii) blunt/hard power (i) defined (i) disinterested power (i) economic theory and (i) in economics (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) economics/business relationship (i) forms of (i) hegemonic/ideological power (i) inducements (i) legitimacy of (i) liberal power (i) Machiavellian power (i), (ii) Marxist critiques of bourgeoise economics (i) Marxist theory of class power (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) of monopolies (i) monopolistic competition (i) monopsony power (i) oligopolies (i) as a positional good (i) relationship with ideas (i), (ii) Prebisch, Raúl (i) pre-modern society just price doctrine (i) markets in (i), (ii), (iii) sociology on (i), (ii), (iii) principal-agent problem (i) probability cardinal probabilities (i) Keynes’s theory of probability (i) in neoclassical epistemology (i) uncertainty as (i) production possibility frontier (PPF) (i) property ownership enclosure of the commons (i), (ii), (iii) exploitation of labour (i) justice of property rights (i) Lockean thought (i), (ii) protectionism (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) psychology biases of (i) within a different approach to understanding (i) in economic studies (i) see also homo economicus public choice theory (i) rational expectation theory (i), (ii) rationality communicative rationality (i) decision-making process (i) deviations from in behavioural economics (i), (ii) efficiency of choice (i) future conditions of uncertainty (i), (ii) neoclassical model of (i), (ii) rational behaviour of homo economicus (i), (ii) rational belief/true belief distinction (i) rational vs irrational human behaviour (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) strategic rationality (i) Rawls, John (i), (ii) Raworth, Kate (i) religion (i), (ii) representative agent hypothesis (i), (ii) research dominance of orthodox economics in (i) external interests and influences (i), (ii) intellectual independence of (i) paradigm persistence (i) protective belts in (i) rhetoric (i) Ricardo, David (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi) risk defined (i) risk-taking and profit (i), (ii), (iii) risk/uncertainty distinction (i) Robbins, Lionel definition of economics (i), (ii), (iii) on economic history (i) ethics and economics (i), (ii), (iii) on psychology (i) scarcity perspective (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi) on scientific generalizations (i) the state of well-being (i) Robinson, Joan (i), (ii) Roscoe, Philip (i) Routh, Guy (i) Samuelson, Paul (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) Sargent, Thomas (i), (ii) Say, J.B.


pages: 303 words: 74,206

GDP: The World’s Most Powerful Formula and Why It Must Now Change by Ehsan Masood

Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, biodiversity loss, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, centre right, clean water, colonial rule, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, energy security, European colonialism, financial engineering, government statistician, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, Mahbub ul Haq, mass immigration, means of production, Meghnad Desai, Mohammed Bouazizi, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, statistical model, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, zoonotic diseases

Gus O’Donnell, Angus Deaton, Martine Durand, David Halpern, and Richard Layard, Wellbeing and Policy, Report of the Commission on Wellbeing and Policy (London: Legatum Institute, 2014), accessed October 2, 2015, http://li.com/docs/default-source/commission-on-wellbeing-and-policy/commission-on-wellbeing-and-policy-report---march-2014-pdf.pdf. 13. Madeline Drexler, A Splendid Isolation: Lessons on Happiness from the Kingdom of Bhutan (published by the author, May 2014). Nine $33 Trillion Man Chemistry has outgrown alchemy and astronomy has emerged from astrology. —Herman Daly on economics’s reluctance to embrace the scientific method (2013) In 1970, a few years before the great publishing sensation that was The Limits to Growth, one of its lead authors saw an opinion article in the New York Times written by Herman Daly, a then relatively unknown economist based at Louisiana State University.1 In the article, headlined “The Canary Has Fallen Silent,” Daly questioned why economies must continually grow and what the long-term consequences of growth without limits might be.


pages: 277 words: 70,506

We Are Bellingcat: Global Crime, Online Sleuths, and the Bold Future of News by Eliot Higgins

4chan, active measures, Andy Carvin, anti-communist, anti-globalists, barriers to entry, belling the cat, Bellingcat, bitcoin, blockchain, citizen journalism, Columbine, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deepfake, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, failed state, fake news, false flag, gamification, George Floyd, Google Earth, hive mind, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, off-the-grid, OpenAI, pattern recognition, post-truth, rolodex, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, Tactical Technology Collective, the scientific method, WikiLeaks

That murkiness would frighten away a traditional journalist, but the Bellingcat method is independent verification. We did not need to know about Chris Postal, only whether we could replicate the research. To us, an online claim is nothing more than a hypothesis, one validated only with backing evidence that others should be able to corroborate themselves. It’s akin to the scientific method applied to journalism. We checked whether this supposed match lined up with the roadside in Google Street View. I even sketched limbs of the trees in that Paris Match image and in the Google image to check if the foliage and growth structure looked the same. Yes, we had it. But the location was not Snizhne, it was Donetsk.


The Smartphone Society by Nicole Aschoff

"Susan Fowler" uber, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, future of work, gamification, gig economy, global value chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Googley, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, late capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nomadland, occupational segregation, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, Patri Friedman, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, planned obsolescence, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological determinism, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, yottabyte

“Mamoudou Gassama: What the ‘Spider-Man’ of Paris Did Next.” Financial Times, January 25, 2019. Akuno, Kali, and Ajamu Nangwaya. Jackson Rising: The Struggle for Economic Democracy and Black Self-Determination in Jackson, Mississippi. Quebec: Daraja Press, 2017. Anderson, Chris. “The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete.” Wired, June 23, 2008. Anderson, Janna. “Future of the Internet IV.” Pew Research Center, February 19, 2010. Anderson, Jon Lee. “The Dangerous Absurdity of the Secret ‘Cuban Twitter.’” New Yorker, April 4, 2014. Angwin, Julia, Ariana Tobin, and Madeleine Varner. “Facebook (Still) Letting Housing Advertisers Exclude Users by Race.”


pages: 305 words: 75,697

Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should Be by Diane Coyle

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Al Roth, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic management, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, choice architecture, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, conceptual framework, congestion charging, constrained optimization, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, data science, DeepMind, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, endowment effect, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, framing effect, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Google bus, haute cuisine, High speed trading, hockey-stick growth, Ida Tarbell, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Les Trente Glorieuses, libertarian paternalism, linear programming, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low earth orbit, lump of labour, machine readable, market bubble, market design, Menlo Park, millennium bug, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, multi-sided market, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, Network effects, Occupy movement, Pareto efficiency, payday loans, payment for order flow, Phillips curve, post-industrial society, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, savings glut, school vouchers, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, software is eating the world, spectrum auction, statistical model, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Uber for X, urban planning, winner-take-all economy, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, Y2K

This is not to despair of the project of turning economics as a whole into a more soundly-based empirical science. But we do not have nearly enough data. We do not interpret it with sufficient care. And we over-claim for our knowledge. Nor do we use evidence to inform theorising enough, either. The scientific method is a combination of deductive and inductive reasoning, a duet between theory and data. Biology became a science through decades of careful observation and data collection, permitting inductive reasoning, which combined with deductive thinking about the biological processes involved. In economics we do not seem to have the habit of that interplay between deduction and induction needed for scientific progress.


pages: 250 words: 79,360

Escape From Model Land: How Mathematical Models Can Lead Us Astray and What We Can Do About It by Erica Thompson

Alan Greenspan, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Big Tech, Black Swan, butterfly effect, carbon tax, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, data is the new oil, data science, decarbonisation, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Drosophila, Emanuel Derman, Financial Modelers Manifesto, fudge factor, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, hindcast, I will remember that I didn’t make the world, and it doesn’t satisfy my equations, implied volatility, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), John von Neumann, junk bonds, Kim Stanley Robinson, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, moral hazard, mouse model, Myron Scholes, Nate Silver, Neal Stephenson, negative emissions, paperclip maximiser, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, random walk, risk tolerance, selection bias, self-driving car, social distancing, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical model, systematic bias, tacit knowledge, tail risk, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, The Great Resignation, the scientific method, too big to fail, trolley problem, value at risk, volatility smile, Y2K

When asked why a certain decision is made, the chain of responsibility may lead back to a mathematical model that said this outcome would probably be better than another outcome. ‘We were following the science’ is a common refrain: in the best case this results in high-impact decisions with no owner at all, and in the worst case any failures will be weaponised against science and the scientific method itself. If economic models fail to encompass even the possibility of a financial crisis, is nobody responsible for it? Who will put their name to modelled projections? In my view, institutions such as the IPCC should be able to bridge this accountability gap by offering an expert bird’s-eye perspective from outside Model Land.


pages: 636 words: 202,284

Piracy : The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates by Adrian Johns

active measures, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, business intelligence, Charles Babbage, commoditize, Computer Lib, Corn Laws, demand response, distributed generation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, full employment, Hacker Ethic, Howard Rheingold, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, Mont Pelerin Society, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, pirate software, radical decentralization, Republic of Letters, Richard Stallman, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, software patent, South Sea Bubble, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, Ted Nelson, The Home Computer Revolution, the scientific method, traveling salesman, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog

In the intellectual progress that they trace, the issue of patenting turns out to have been central. Briefly, he first projected a book to be called Science, directed squarely against the “planning of science” movement. This he pursued for three years, in 1940–43, only to abandon it and move on to another work provisionally called The Scientific Method in Society. This in turn gave way to The Autonomy of Science, which advanced a sweeping threestage view of the history of science extending back centuries. Elements of this then reappeared in what might seem a radically different text, on Economic Planning. Finally, Polanyi turned the book on planning into a volume named Full Employment in Theory and Practice.

Like most of them, it affected the technoelitist libertarianism and the language of exploration that had been such a feature of phreaking. It even affected the same lexical tics, in particular the ubiquitous ph. Above all, Legion of Doom hackers and likeminded digerati appropriated wholesale the phreaks’ presumptuous claim – itself descended from interwar radio culture – that as practitioners of the scientific method they should be supported, not restrained. A muchreissued posting of 1986 variously titled “Conscience of a Hacker” or “The Hacker’s Manifesto” declared all this explicitly. It was the work of a Legion of Doom hacker named The Mentor. Hackers were firstly explorers of a telephone system, it claimed – a system that ought to be cheap for all, but had been hijacked by “profiteering gluttons.”


pages: 789 words: 207,744

The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning by Jeremy Lent

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Atahualpa, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, complexity theory, conceptual framework, dematerialisation, demographic transition, different worldview, Doomsday Book, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, failed state, Firefox, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of gunpowder, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jevons paradox, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, language acquisition, Lao Tzu, Law of Accelerating Returns, mandelbrot fractal, mass immigration, megacity, Metcalfe's law, Mikhail Gorbachev, move 37, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, peak oil, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Solow, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, scientific management, Scientific racism, scientific worldview, seminal paper, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, South China Sea, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological singularity, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, ultimatum game, urban sprawl, Vernor Vinge, wikimedia commons

Nature was to be “put in constraint,” and the aim of the scientist was to “hound her in her wanderings.” With echoes of the witch trials, sexual innuendo lurked in the background: “Neither ought a man to make scruple of entering and penetrating into these holes and corners, when the inquisition of truth is his whole object.” The scientific method, Bacon declared, “may in very truth dissect nature” to discover “the secrets still locked in [her] bosom” so that she can then be “forced out of her natural state and squeezed and molded.”3 The images Bacon used to galvanize the spirit of scientific discovery helped to create a new metaphor of humanity's relationship with the natural world unlike any that had come before: CONQUERING NATURE.

He interpreted Matthew's famous statement, “Seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you,” as an invitation for humankind to seek the Truth about the natural world through rational investigation.24 Across the English Channel, similar views were expressed by Adelard of Bath, who asserted that reason could solve all inquiries “since we must assume that all nature is based on a sure and logical foundation.” Oxford University, established in 1214, spawned a scientific movement credited with laying the foundations of the modern practice of science. One key figure, Robert Grosseteste, developed the parameters for what is known today as the scientific method. His student, Roger Bacon, considered by some the first true scientist, viewed mathematics as the language of nature and believed that the science of optics would offer a way to understand the mind of the creator.25 The new approach of using reason to understand the natural world gained such prestige that theologians were enticed into viewing their own field as a branch of science.


pages: 695 words: 194,693

Money Changes Everything: How Finance Made Civilization Possible by William N. Goetzmann

Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Cass Sunstein, classic study, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, compound rate of return, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, delayed gratification, Detroit bankruptcy, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, en.wikipedia.org, equity premium, equity risk premium, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, frictionless, frictionless market, full employment, high net worth, income inequality, index fund, invention of the steam engine, invention of writing, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, means of production, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, passive investing, Paul Lévy, Ponzi scheme, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, spice trade, stochastic process, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, time value of money, tontine, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, tulip mania, wage slave

So Lin demonstrates that chance alone could not explain the difference. A number of brilliant scholars have taken a crack at solving what has become known as “the Needham Puzzle.” Lin explains it by introduction of the scientific method of experimentation in the West, which, in effect served to systematically speed up, organize, and make optimal use of random processes of discovery. In his view, it was the development of the scientific method that made the difference. Another is the sustained success of Chinese civilization itself. The financial solutions described in Part II of this book make it clear that China had successfully solved myriad complex problems involving planning, resource allocation, and risk mitigation.


pages: 312 words: 86,770

Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo by Sean B. Carroll

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Brownian motion, classic study, dark matter, Drosophila, Gregor Mendel, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Stuart Kauffman, the long tail, the scientific method

But while some denominations have explicitly accepted the reality of biological evolution, fundamentalists who insist upon a literal reading of the Bible (referred to here as “creationists”) remain firmly opposed to evolutionary science and actively promote legislation aimed at crippling the teaching of evolution in public schools. Goethe also said, “Nothing is worse than active ignorance,” and it is the agenda of these lost souls that the scientific and educational communities must thwart. I want to be very clear here in my position. I believe that the teaching of evolution and science is best served by promoting the scientific method and scientific knowledge and not by attacking religious views. The latter is a futile, counterproductive battle. However, I also believe, as many denominations have also concluded, that religion is better served by promoting and evolving its respective teachings and theologies, and not by attacking science, which is definitely a losing strategy.


pages: 273 words: 87,159

The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy by Peter Temin

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, clean water, corporate raider, Corrections Corporation of America, crack epidemic, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, full employment, income inequality, independent contractor, intangible asset, invisible hand, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, mandatory minimum, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, mortgage debt, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, plutocrats, Powell Memorandum, price stability, race to the bottom, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, the scientific method, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, white flight, working poor

Fields, Karen E., and Barbara J. Fields. 2012. Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life. New York: Verso. Fitzsimmons, Emma G., and David W. Chen. 2015. “Aging Infrastructure Plagues Nation’s Busiest Rail Corridor.” New York Times, July 26. Fogel, Robert W. 1987. “Some Notes on the Scientific Methods of Simon Kuznets.” NBER Working Paper No. 2461, December. Foner, Eric. 1988. Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–77. New York: Harper and Row. Forsberg, Mary E. 2010. “A Hudson Tunnel That Goes One Way.” New York Times, October 27. Fortner, Michael Javen. 2015. “The Real Roots of the ’70s Drug Laws.”


pages: 272 words: 83,378

Digital Barbarism: A Writer's Manifesto by Mark Helprin

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, carbon footprint, computer age, cotton gin, crowdsourcing, Easter island, hive mind, independent contractor, invention of writing, Jacquard loom, lateral thinking, plutocrats, race to the bottom, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, the scientific method, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Many things are involved, among which, very importantly, is academic orthodoxy: not politics of any sort as they now thoroughly intrude upon a university both unwilling and unable to resist their commanding influence, but the academic modus operandi, which is in itself valuable, necessary, and good, assuming it does not, like the scientific method, overreach like Germans seeking Lebensraum and force itself into places where for various reasons it does not belong. Whence the collaborative impulse and worship of collective effort that has so completely saturated American education? Marxism and the like simply do not have the power to sustain it.


pages: 345 words: 84,847

The Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes the World by David Eagleman, Anthony Brandt

active measures, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 13, Burning Man, cloud computing, computer age, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Dava Sobel, deep learning, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, Frank Gehry, Gene Kranz, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, James Dyson, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Large Hadron Collider, lone genius, longitudinal study, Menlo Park, microbiome, Netflix Prize, new economy, New Journalism, pets.com, pneumatic tube, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, Simon Singh, skeuomorphism, Solyndra, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the scientific method, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, wikimedia commons, X Prize

When it was made into a movie in the 1930s, the alleged affair was turned into a heterosexual one, due to the demands of the time. Several decades later, the same director, William Wyler, remade the movie: the moral prohibitions had been lifted and the original Hellman story was restored. As with plays and movies, scientific progress is also shaped by the moment in history. Many elements of the scientific method that we regard as indispensable today – experimentation, publication of results, detailed description of methods, replication, review of ideas by a community of peers – emerged in late-seventeenth-century England in the aftermath of the country’s civil war. Before then natural science was not investigated through experiment but rather through individual revelation and theoretical speculation.


pages: 266 words: 87,411

The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter, and Live Better in a World Addicted to Speed by Carl Honore

Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Apollo 13, Atul Gawande, Broken windows theory, call centre, carbon credits, Checklist Manifesto, clean water, clockwatching, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, Dava Sobel, delayed gratification, drone strike, Enrique Peñalosa, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Exxon Valdez, fail fast, fundamental attribution error, game design, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, index card, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, lateral thinking, lone genius, medical malpractice, microcredit, Netflix Prize, no-fly zone, planetary scale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, retail therapy, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, ultimatum game, urban renewal, War on Poverty

Like Edwards, many of the best Renaissance thinkers were blessed with a jack-of-all-trades erudition. When he wasn’t revolutionizing astronomy, Copernicus practised medicine and law. Kepler based his theory of planetary motion on the ebb and flow of musical harmony. Better known in his day as a lawyer, statesman, writer and courtier, Francis Bacon helped to pioneer the scientific method. A theologian named Robert Boyle laid the foundations of modern chemistry. Leonardo da Vinci, the poster boy for polymaths, was a gifted painter, sculptor, musician, anatomist and writer, as well as a startlingly prolific inventor. Ranging across the disciplines did not end with the Renaissance.


Quackery: A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything by Lydia Kang, Nate Pedersen

Albert Einstein, complexity theory, driverless car, Edward Jenner, germ theory of disease, helicopter parent, Honoré de Balzac, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Louis Pasteur, placebo effect, stem cell, the scientific method, traumatic brain injury, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, wikimedia commons, Y2K

Though the term is usually defined as the practice and promotion of intentionally fraudulent medical treatments, it also includes situations when people are touting what they truly believe works. Perhaps they’re ignoring­—­or challenging—scientific fact. Or perhaps they lived centuries ago, before the scientific method entered civilization’s consciousness. Through a modern-day lens, these treatments can seem absolutely absurd. Weasel nuts as a contraceptive? Bloodletting to help cure blood loss? Burning hot irons to fix the lovelorn? Yep. But behind every misguided treatment—from Ottomans eating clay to keep the plague away to Victorian gents sitting in a mercury steam room for their syphilis to epilepsy sufferers sipping gladiator blood in ancient Rome—is the incredible power of the human desire to live.


pages: 301 words: 85,126

AIQ: How People and Machines Are Smarter Together by Nick Polson, James Scott

Abraham Wald, Air France Flight 447, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, business cycle, Cepheid variable, Checklist Manifesto, cloud computing, combinatorial explosion, computer age, computer vision, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Edward Charles Pickering, Elon Musk, epigenetics, fake news, Flash crash, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Higgs boson, index fund, information security, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, late fees, low earth orbit, Lyft, machine translation, Magellanic Cloud, mass incarceration, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Moravec's paradox, more computing power than Apollo, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, North Sea oil, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, p-value, pattern recognition, Pierre-Simon Laplace, ransomware, recommendation engine, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, speech recognition, statistical model, survivorship bias, systems thinking, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, young professional

., Tom Simonite, “The Recipe for the Perfect Robot Surgeon,” MIT Technology Review, October 14, 2016, https://www.technologyreview.com/s/602595/the-recipe-for-the-perfect-robot-surgeon/. 51.  David Szondy, “IBM’s Watson Adapted to Teach Medical Students and Aid Diagnosis,” New Atlas, October 21, 2013, http://newatlas.com/ibm-supercomputer-watsonpath/29415/. CHAPTER 7   1.  Chris Anderson, “The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete,” Wired, June 23, 2008, https://www.wired.com/2008/06/pb-theory/.   2.  C. R. Cardwell et al., “Exposure to Oral Bisphosphonates and Risk of Esophageal Cancer,” JAMA 304, no. 6 (August 11, 2010): 657–63.   3.  J. Green et al., “Oral Bisphosphonates and Risk of Cancer of Oesophagus, Stomach, and Colorectum: Case-Control Analysis Within a UK Primary Care Cohort,” BMJ 2010;341:c4444.   4.  


pages: 290 words: 82,871

The Hidden Half: How the World Conceals Its Secrets by Michael Blastland

air freight, Alfred Russel Wallace, banking crisis, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Brexit referendum, central bank independence, cognitive bias, complexity theory, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, epigenetics, experimental subject, full employment, George Santayana, hindsight bias, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, nudge unit, oil shock, p-value, personalized medicine, phenotype, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, Richard Thaler, selection bias, the map is not the territory, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, twin studies

When I talk about the replication crisis to people who’ve not come across it, they express two main doubts: 1. How is it possible for so many honest researchers to think they’ve seen something that might not be there? 2. Surely the problem can’t be that common or that bad? The first doubt about how in practice an experiment can reach a fragile conclusion, despite commitment to the scientific method, is answered with another story that begins to show some of the practical limitations of finding out even apparently simple things, in this case about the approximate benefit of owning a cow. How hard can that be? At around 5.30 a.m., just as the sun comes up, Rajeev Gupta begins his day’s work by feeding his 60 Murrah buffaloes and 33 Jersey cows before milking, which starts at about 8 a.m. and takes about four hours.


pages: 304 words: 80,143

The Autonomous Revolution: Reclaiming the Future We’ve Sold to Machines by William Davidow, Michael Malone

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, AlphaGo, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, benefit corporation, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Gini coefficient, high-speed rail, holacracy, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, license plate recognition, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, QWERTY keyboard, ransomware, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skinner box, Snapchat, speech recognition, streetcar suburb, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, trade route, Turing test, two and twenty, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, zero day, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Desertification played a role in the collapse of the Harappan Civilization in the Indus Valley around 1300 BCE, and environmental degradation has been one of the biggest drivers of mass migrations.1 Paleoclimatologist Douglas Kennett has theorized that drought led to the decline of Mayan civilization.2 Christianity, Islam, democracy, Communism, the Enlightenment, free-market capitalism, and the scientific method are all examples of structural transformations that were driven by ideas and beliefs. That said, there is no shortage of evidence that technology is a great driver of new thought systems and vice versa. While the Protestant Reformation sprang from the minds of men such as Martin Luther and John Calvin, it was catalyzed by the generalized use of printing, which made it possible for vernacular Bibles and tracts to be widely disseminated.


The Golden Ratio: The Story of Phi, the World's Most Astonishing Number by Mario Livio

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Alfred Russel Wallace, Benoit Mandelbrot, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, classic study, cosmological constant, Elliott wave, Eratosthenes, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, mandelbrot fractal, music of the spheres, Nash equilibrium, power law, Ralph Nelson Elliott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Thales of Miletus, the scientific method

Kepler took the Pythagorean idea of a cosmos that can be explained by mathematics a huge step forward. He developed an actual mathematical model for the universe, which on one hand was based on existing observational measurements and on the other was falsifiable by observations that could be made subsequently. These are precisely the ingredients required by the “scientific method”—the organized approach to explaining observed facts with a model of nature. An idealized scientific method begins with the collection of facts, a model is then proposed, and the model's predictions are tested through experiments or further observations. This process is sometimes summed up by the sequence: induction, deduction, verification.


The Gene Machine by Venki Ramakrishnan

CRISPR, double helix, Fellow of the Royal Society, ghettoisation, Higgs boson, Mark Zuckerberg, Richard Feynman, Robert Shiller, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method

Yet, as described in the book, others who made key contributions were, by the three-recipient limitation of the prize, left out of this recognition despite the importance of their insights. The book provides a readable account of the author’s experiences and views on these matters that must be taken in the spirit of a memoir rather than an objective historical essay. Students of science and of the scientific method will find this story to be a fresh take on the process of discovery and the sometimes tortuous trail that leads to new knowledge. In the end, it is a fascinating contribution to the scientific literature and one that will be valued as both a description of fact and a dissection of the emotional side of a scientist’s approach and eventual achievement.


pages: 286 words: 87,168

Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World by Jason Hickel

air freight, Airbnb, Anthropocene, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, biodiversity loss, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, circular economy, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate personhood, cotton gin, COVID-19, David Graeber, decarbonisation, declining real wages, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, disinformation, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fairphone, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gender pay gap, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, land reform, liberal capitalism, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, meta-analysis, microbiome, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, new economy, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, passive income, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, quantitative easing, rent control, rent-seeking, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Rupert Read, Scramble for Africa, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, universal basic income

Those who sought to advance capitalism had to find a way not only to strip humans from the land, but to destroy the animist ideas that enjoyed such prominence – to strip the earth of its spirit and render it instead a mere stock of ‘natural resources’ for humans to exploit. * They found their first answer in Francis Bacon (1561–1626), the Englishman celebrated as the ‘father of modern science’. Bacon’s legacy is eulogised in school textbooks today, and for good reason: he made significant contributions to the scientific method. But there is a rather sinister side to his story that has largely fallen out of public consciousness. Bacon actively sought to destroy the idea of a living world, and to replace it with a new ethic that not only sanctioned but celebrated the exploitation of nature. To this end, he took the ancient theory of nature-as-female and transformed her from a nurturing mother into what he called a ‘common harlot’.


pages: 280 words: 82,393

Conflicted: How Productive Disagreements Lead to Better Outcomes by Ian Leslie

Atul Gawande, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, call centre, data science, different worldview, double helix, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Isaac Newton, longitudinal study, low cost airline, Mark Zuckerberg, medical malpractice, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, Paul Graham, Silicon Valley, Socratic dialogue, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, work culture , zero-sum game

But even among scientists, bias can get out of hand. * * * Four hundred years ago, Francis Bacon warned against what we now call confirmation bias: ‘The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion . . . draws all things else to support and agree with it.’ In order to solve this problem Bacon formulated what became known as the scientific method. He instructed scholars to test their theories against real-world observation, so that they could ‘analyse nature by proper rejection and exclusion’. Following Bacon, science developed into a discipline, and a community with a division of cognitive labour. Scientists publish research on the topics they care about and try to build a case for their theory.


pages: 253 words: 84,238

A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins

AI winter, Albert Einstein, artificial general intelligence, carbon-based life, clean water, cloud computing, deep learning, different worldview, discovery of DNA, Doomsday Clock, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, estate planning, Geoffrey Hinton, Jeff Hawkins, PalmPilot, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sensor fusion, Silicon Valley, superintelligent machines, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Turing machine, Turing test

That method is to actively seek evidence that contradicts our beliefs. Finding evidence that supports our beliefs is helpful, but not definitive. Finding contrary evidence, however, is proof that the model in our head is not right and needs to be modified. Actively looking for evidence to disprove our beliefs is the scientific method. It is the only approach we know of that can get us closer to the truth. Today, in the beginning of the twenty-first century, false beliefs are rampant in the minds of billions of people. This is understandable for mysteries that have not yet been solved. For example, it is understandable that people believed in a flat Earth five hundred years ago, because the spherical nature of the planet was not widely understood, and there was little to no evidence that the Earth was not flat.


pages: 309 words: 81,243

The Authoritarian Moment: How the Left Weaponized America's Institutions Against Dissent by Ben Shapiro

2021 United States Capitol attack, active measures, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, defund the police, delayed gratification, deplatforming, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, future of work, gender pay gap, George Floyd, global pandemic, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Herbert Marcuse, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, Jon Ronson, Kevin Roose, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, microaggression, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, obamacare, Overton Window, Parler "social media", Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, Susan Wojcicki, tech bro, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, War on Poverty, yellow journalism

“LISTEN TO THE EXPERTS” The Ultracrepidarian Problem crops up regularly in the realm of policy making, when scientists determine that they are not merely responsible for identifying data-driven problems and providing data-driven answers, but for answering all of humanity’s questions. The Ultracrepidarian Problem is nothing new in the realm of science. Indeed, it is an integral part of Scientism, the philosophy that morality can come from science itself—that all society requires is the management of experts in the scientific method to reach full human flourishing. Scientism says that it can answer ethical questions without resort to God; all that is required is a bit of data, and a properly trained scientist. The history of Scientism is long and bleak—it contains support for eugenics, genocide, and massively misguided social engineering—but the popularity of Scientism hasn’t waned.


pages: 288 words: 86,995

Rule of the Robots: How Artificial Intelligence Will Transform Everything by Martin Ford

AI winter, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Big Tech, big-box store, call centre, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, factory automation, fake news, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Googley, GPT-3, high-speed rail, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Law of Accelerating Returns, license plate recognition, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Ocado, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, passive income, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, post scarcity, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, remote working, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, SoftBank, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, Turing machine, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, very high income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

None of this implies that artificial intelligence will be a panacea for turbocharging innovation or that we should expect results to consistently be achieved on an accelerated time frame. Science is, after all, fundamentally about experimentation, and conducting and evaluating the outcomes of experiments takes time. In some cases, the scientific method can indeed be accelerated, perhaps through the use of laboratory robots or even by performing some experiments at high speed in simulated environments. In fields like medicine and biology, however, experiments often must be conducted within living organisms, and here, the potential for dramatically speeding up the process is quite limited.


pages: 740 words: 217,139

The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution by Francis Fukuyama

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, California gold rush, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Day of the Dead, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, double entry bookkeeping, endogenous growth, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, Garrett Hardin, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, John Perry Barlow, Khyber Pass, land reform, land tenure, means of production, offshore financial centre, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, principal–agent problem, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Right to Buy, Scramble for Africa, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), spice trade, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

The emergence of a modern state is a necessary condition for intensive economic development, but it is not a sufficient one. Other institutions needed to be in place for capitalism to emerge. The capitalist revolution in the West was preceded by a cognitive revolution in early modern times that created the scientific method, modern universities, technological innovations that produced new wealth from scientific observations, and a system of property rights that incentivized people to innovate in the first place. Qin China was in many ways an intellectually fertile place, but its major scholarly traditions tended to be backward looking and incapable of the abstraction needed by modern natural science.

Property was entailed by myriad rights and duties imposed by agnatic lineages, which up through the Chinese Republic in the twentieth century still recognized the rights of families to restrict the alienation of land.8 It is not clear, moreover, that even the best-specified modern property rights would be sufficient in themselves to raise productivity substantially, or to create the modern capitalist economic world out of a Malthusian society. Before the introduction of other institutions necessary to sustain continuous technological advance (such as the scientific method, universities, human capital, research laboratories, a cultural milieu that encouraged risk and experimentation, and so forth), there were limits to the kinds of productivity gains that good property rights on their own could induce, and thus no assumption that continuous technological advances would occur.9 Thus the economists’ emphasis on modern property rights and contract enforcement under a rule of law may be misplaced in two respects.


pages: 285 words: 86,853

What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing by Ed Finn

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, Charles Babbage, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Claude Shannon: information theory, commoditize, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, DeepMind, disruptive innovation, Donald Knuth, Donald Shoup, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Conference 1984, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Ian Bogost, industrial research laboratory, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Conway, John Markoff, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late fees, lifelogging, Loebner Prize, lolcat, Lyft, machine readable, Mother of all demos, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Netflix Prize, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, power law, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, ride hailing / ride sharing, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skinner box, Snow Crash, social graph, software studies, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, wage slave

The pragmatic definition lays bare the essential politics of the algorithm, its transparent complicity in the ideology of instrumental reason that digital culture scholar David Golumbia calls out in his critique of computation.11 Of course this is what algorithms do: they are methods, inheriting the inductive tradition of the scientific method and engineering from Archimedes to Vannevar Bush. They solve problems that have been identified as such by the engineers and entrepreneurs who develop and optimize the code. But such implementations are never just code: a method for solving a problem inevitably involves all sorts of technical and intellectual inferences, interventions, and filters.


Comedy Writing Secrets by Mel Helitzer, Mark Shatz

Albert Einstein, built by the lowest bidder, David Sedaris, Donald Trump, elephant in my pajamas, fake news, fear of failure, index card, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, the scientific method, Yogi Berra

Other group activities with a humorous spin include: • developing a class Web page with students' jokes, tongue twisters, riddles, funny anecdotes, and nonsense poems and songs • drawing an event or theory as a comic strip, comic book, or group mural • holding mock trials for notorious historical figures • acting out the functions of different body parts • creating a POW bulletin board or scrapbook with homonyms, euphemisms, double entendres, and Tom Swifties Even junk food can lend itself to the educational process: The T.WI.N.K.I.E.S. Project (www.twinkiesproject.com) teaches the scientific method via experiments with Twinkies. The experiments consist mostly of abusing Twinkies in extreme situations (dropping them from a skyscraper, bombarding them with radiation). Written in F u n Creative writing exercises allow for more opportunities to introduce humor into the classroom and can make a mundane assignment fresh and fun.


pages: 353 words: 91,520

Most Likely to Succeed: Preparing Our Kids for the Innovation Era by Tony Wagner, Ted Dintersmith

affirmative action, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Bernie Sanders, Clayton Christensen, creative destruction, David Brooks, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, immigration reform, income inequality, index card, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, language acquisition, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, new economy, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, school choice, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steven Pinker, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the scientific method, two and twenty, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Y Combinator

Students learn very little, if anything, about important recent discoveries, or even neglect entire sciences, such as ecology, which have more importance for our future survival as a species than any of the required sciences. Secondly, students aren’t learning what should be at the heart of science classes: how to think like a scientist and apply the scientific method. * * * William Wallace has a PhD in Biochemistry and ran his own lab in neuroscience research for twelve years. When he came to teach at Georgetown Day School in Washington, DC, he had taught AP biology for fourteen years, but he was very disappointed by how little real science students were learning.


pages: 324 words: 92,805

The Impulse Society: America in the Age of Instant Gratification by Paul Roberts

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, business cycle, business process, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, centre right, choice architecture, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Brooks, delayed gratification, disruptive innovation, double helix, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, game design, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, impulse control, income inequality, inflation targeting, insecure affluence, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge worker, late fees, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Michael Shellenberger, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, performance metric, postindustrial economy, profit maximization, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, reshoring, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Nordhaus, the built environment, the long tail, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, value engineering, Walter Mischel, winner-take-all economy

Because it’s uncomfortable, it’s upsetting.”10 A case in point: in the 1960s, the fraction of Americans who cared whether their children married someone from the “other” political party was less than one in twenty. Today, one in three Democrats and one in two Republicans regard “interparty marriage” as taboo.11 The rift in our political culture now runs so deep that we can no longer agree even on such basic notions as the legitimacy of the scientific method or the immorality of false campaign ads. Even the idea that there is one universal truth is now in dispute. “Disagreements in our culture are now not just over values and not just over the facts, they’re over how we even conceive of facts, how we come to consider what knowledge is a fact,” says Michael Lynch, the University of Connecticut professor of philosophy we met in chapter 5.


pages: 295 words: 89,280

The Narcissist Next Door by Jeffrey Kluger

Albert Einstein, always be closing, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Columbine, dark triade / dark tetrad, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, impulse control, Jony Ive, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, theory of mind, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, twin studies, Walter Mischel, zero-sum game

The idea intrigued me, and the only way to test it was to run the experiment. I had an available subject, and looking around, I realized that I had the necessary equipment: the toy boat lying on the floor within easy reach. The whole thing was really nothing more than a rudimentary exercise of the scientific method—not a bad concept for someone so young to stumble across, even if I was about to execute it in a decidedly criminal way. I picked up the boat, hefted it once and found it suitable, then raised it above my head and advanced wordlessly on the unsuspecting man. He had been looking away, but finally he turned his attention toward me and realized what I was up to.


pages: 302 words: 92,507

Cold: Adventures in the World's Frozen Places by Bill Streever

Albert Einstein, carbon footprint, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, company town, Easter island, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Exxon Valdez, Mason jar, Medieval Warm Period, ocean acidification, refrigerator car, San Francisco homelessness, South China Sea, Thales of Miletus, the scientific method, University of East Anglia

Drebbel worked a hundred years before Fahrenheit and forty-five years before Robert Boyle’s extensive work on cold, heat, and pressure. This was a time when controlled experiments and open communication about those experiments were not expected, when curiosity was by no means a virtue, when Francis Bacon was still formulating and promoting what would come to be called the scientific method. Neither the scientists nor their audiences were interested in sharing knowledge. The interest was in entertaining and being entertained, in amazing and being amazed. Flash forward nearly four centuries. A verger shows a group of tourists around the abbey. I tag along asking questions. The verger is olive-skinned, wearing a black robe, his voice musical and his words and sentences made by combining clearly clipped syllables.


pages: 322 words: 88,197

Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, Alfred Russel Wallace, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Book of Ingenious Devices, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, colonial exploitation, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cotton gin, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Drosophila, Edward Thorp, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, game design, global village, Great Leap Forward, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, HyperCard, invention of air conditioning, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, Islamic Golden Age, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, mass immigration, megacity, Minecraft, moral panic, Murano, Venice glass, music of the spheres, Necker cube, New Urbanism, Oculus Rift, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pets.com, placebo effect, pneumatic tube, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Oldenburg, SimCity, spice trade, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, talking drums, the built environment, The Great Good Place, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trade route, Turing machine, Turing test, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white flight, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, working poor, Wunderkammern

We invented a whole host of institutions and conventions that would ultimately turn out to be extremely useful in improving our health: diets and cookbooks shaped by a complex understanding of bodily systems, chemical compounds designed to treat illness and prescribed using standardized systems of measurement, printing presses and pharmacists that could disseminate those prescriptions. These were all significant innovations, not easily established. But as it happened, they arrived before the invention of the scientific method, randomized double-blind control drug trials, and other regulatory mechanisms that separated the genuine healers from the charlatans. On some basic level, the medical properties of the spices were pure fantasy. But that fantasy, for all its absurdities, established a regimen of health and improvement that has carried on into modern life with better success.


pages: 286 words: 90,530

Richard Dawkins: How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think by Alan Grafen; Mark Ridley

Alfred Russel Wallace, Arthur Eddington, bioinformatics, Charles Babbage, cognitive bias, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Dava Sobel, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Easter island, epigenetics, Fellow of the Royal Society, Haight Ashbury, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John von Neumann, loose coupling, Murray Gell-Mann, Necker cube, phenotype, profit maximization, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

I have been very pleased to be associated with him in writing letters and articles opposing the reported teaching of creationism in at least one new school. Like him I believe that science has a proper integrity which needs to be fought for and preserved. This means that letting evidence decide, allowing evidence to modify or refute even one’s most cherished notion, is fundamental; as is the scientific method of rigorous testing of hypotheses by experiment. I also have other reasons for being antagonistic to creationism. It involves an unhistorical, uncritical approach to the biblical texts. It misunderstands what those texts set out to do and as a result they belittle God and bring Christianity into disrepute.


pages: 315 words: 93,628

Is God a Mathematician? by Mario Livio

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Brownian motion, cellular automata, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, cosmological constant, Dava Sobel, double helix, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, Future Shock, Georg Cantor, Gerolamo Cardano, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, music of the spheres, Myron Scholes, Plato's cave, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, Russell's paradox, seminal paper, Thales of Miletus, The Design of Experiments, the scientific method, traveling salesman

Remarkably, Hamming concluded his article with an admission that “all of the explanations I have given when added together simply are not enough to explain what I set out to account for” (namely, the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics). So, should we close by conceding that the effectiveness of mathematics remains as mysterious as it was when we started? Before giving up, let us try to distill the essence of Wigner’s puzzle by examining what is known as the scientific method. Scientists first learn facts about nature through a series of experiments and observations. Those facts are initially used to develop some sort of qualitative models of the phenomena (e.g., the Earth attracts apples; colliding subatomic particles can produce other particles; the universe is expanding; and so on).


pages: 322 words: 87,181

Straight Talk on Trade: Ideas for a Sane World Economy by Dani Rodrik

3D printing, airline deregulation, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, central bank independence, centre right, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, continuous integration, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, failed state, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, floating exchange rates, full employment, future of work, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, global value chain, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Kenneth Rogoff, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market fundamentalism, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, new economy, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, open immigration, Pareto efficiency, postindustrial economy, precautionary principle, price stability, public intellectual, pushing on a string, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, World Values Survey, zero-sum game, éminence grise

Models that emphasize expectations are sometimes best for analyzing inflation and unemployment levels; at other times, models with Keynesian elements will do a superior job. Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine writer, once wrote a short story—a single paragraph in fact—that is perhaps the best guide to the scientific method.10 In it, he described a distant land where cartography—the science of making maps—was taken to ridiculous extremes. A map of a province was so detailed that it was the size of an entire city. The map of the empire occupied an entire province. In time, the cartographers became even more ambitious: they drew a map that was an exact, one-to-one replica of the whole empire.


Hothouse Kids: The Dilemma of the Gifted Child by Alissa Quart

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, cognitive dissonance, deliberate practice, Flynn Effect, haute couture, helicopter parent, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Stephen Hawking, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, Two Sigma, War on Poverty

Terman endlessly defended the gifted population against the popular assumption of the time that these kids were effete freaks. He believed they had great potential for so-called normal lives, but normal plus. Terman and others like him seem driven by an almost metaphysical wish: an aspiration not merely to sort children’s minds, but to become seers by way of the scientific method, to peer into the essence of individual minds. From relatively early on, IQ tests were seen as biased against minorities. Testing’s checkered history revolves around three things. The first is the whole proposition that intelligence tests alone measure “true” intellectual capacity. The second is the way the tests were developed, designed with a bias against minorities.


pages: 333 words: 86,662

Zeitgeist by Bruce Sterling

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, cotton gin, Frank Gehry, Grace Hopper, informal economy, invisible hand, Iridium satellite, jitney, market bubble, Maui Hawaii, new economy, offshore financial centre, PalmPilot, rolodex, sexual politics, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Ted Kaczynski, the scientific method, undersea cable, upwardly mobile, urban decay, Y2K

“What’s wrong with videocams?” “Haven’t you noticed yet?” She shrugged. “I know that videocams don’t like me. I break ’em all the time. I even break cameras sometimes.” “That’s because of two important things, babe. Surveillance and documentation. It’s all about mechanical objectivity, proper observation, the scientific method, reproducible results, and all of that scary crap. If we’re going to find your grandpa, we can’t be pinned down like that, not even one little bit. We’ve got to be looser and farther away from the consensus narrative than you’ve ever gotten before. You understand me? I know this is kind of hard to understand.”


pages: 318 words: 92,257

Floating City: A Rogue Sociologist Lost and Found in New York's Underground Economy by Sudhir Venkatesh

creative destruction, East Village, gentrification, illegal immigration, public intellectual, side project, Silicon Valley, the scientific method, urban renewal, working poor

At the same time, I knew I was hired because my research spoke to social issues like race, inequality, and the fate of our cities, subjects that fell squarely into Columbia’s legacy of encouraging the public intellectual tradition. In this regard, I had already been schooled by working with Professor William Julius Wilson in Chicago. As my graduate adviser, Wilson always insisted that the scientific method alone was incapable of swaying the opinion of policy makers or the public. You also had to write well. You had to tell a story. Wilson would do it with epochal books like The Declining Significance of Race and The Truly Disadvantaged, in which his vivid and passionate writing reached beyond the academic community and changed the way his generation looked at poverty.


pages: 342 words: 94,762

Wait: The Art and Science of Delay by Frank Partnoy

algorithmic trading, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, blood diamond, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, corporate governance, cotton gin, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, Flash crash, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, Google Earth, Hernando de Soto, High speed trading, impulse control, income inequality, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Long Term Capital Management, Menlo Park, mental accounting, meta-analysis, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Nick Leeson, paper trading, Paul Graham, payday loans, Pershing Square Capital Management, Ralph Nader, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, six sigma, social discount rate, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical model, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, upwardly mobile, Walter Mischel, work culture

According to journalist Laurie Abraham, “What Gottman did wasn’t really a prediction of the future but a formula built after the couples’ outcomes were already known. This isn’t to say that developing such formulas isn’t a valuable—indeed, a critical—first step in being able to make a prediction. The next step, however—one absolutely required by the scientific method—is to apply your equation to a fresh sample to see whether it actually works. That is especially necessary with small data slices (such as 57 couples), because patterns that appear important are more likely to be mere flukes. But Gottman never did that.” Laurie Abraham, “Can You Really Predict the Success of a Marriage in 15 Minutes?”


pages: 422 words: 89,770

Death of the Liberal Class by Chris Hedges

1960s counterculture, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, call centre, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbine, corporate governance, deindustrialization, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, food desert, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, hive mind, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, military-industrial complex, Murray Bookchin, Pearl River Delta, Plato's cave, post scarcity, power law, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, strikebreaker, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tobin tax, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, W. E. B. Du Bois, WikiLeaks, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Preachers and lay people may say, “In a church, through rituals and traditions, black-robed priests proclaim the revelations of God, helping us learn the beliefs and wisdom that can lead to our salvation.” Scientists and many lay people say, “In a laboratory, under controlled conditions, following the rituals of the scientific method, white-robed scientists proclaim the new theories and discoveries of Science, helping us to gain the understanding and the knowledge that can lead us both toward a good life, and Progress.” During the twentieth century, the churches lost even more of their fundamental contributions. Psychologists took over the role of hearing confessions and forgiving sins—for both the laity and the ministers.


pages: 339 words: 94,769

Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI by John Brockman

AI winter, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bill Joy: nanobots, Bletchley Park, Buckminster Fuller, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Danny Hillis, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, finite state, friendly AI, future of work, Geoffrey Hinton, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hype cycle, income inequality, industrial robot, information retrieval, invention of writing, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Hawkins, Johannes Kepler, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Laplace demon, Large Hadron Collider, Loebner Prize, machine translation, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, mirror neurons, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, optical character recognition, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, Picturephone, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological determinism, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telemarketer, telerobotics, The future is already here, the long tail, the scientific method, theory of mind, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K, you are the product, zero-sum game

In this essay, he reminds us that AIs, above all, should be regarded—and treated—as tools and not as humanoid colleagues. He has been interested in information theory since his graduate school days at Oxford. In fact, he told me that early in his career he was keenly interested in writing a book about Wiener’s cybernetic ideas. As a thinker who embraces the scientific method, one of his charms is his willingness to be wrong. Of a recent piece titled “What Is Information?” he has announced, “I stand by it, but it’s under revision. I’m already moving beyond it and realizing there’s a better way of tackling some of these issues.” He will most likely remain cool and collected on the subject of AI research, although he has acknowledged, often, that his own ideas evolve—as anyone’s ideas should.


pages: 358 words: 93,969

Climate Change by Joseph Romm

biodiversity loss, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, Climatic Research Unit, data science, decarbonisation, demand response, disinformation, Douglas Hofstadter, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, failed state, gigafactory, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), knowledge worker, mass immigration, ocean acidification, performance metric, renewable energy transition, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, the scientific method

The signatories note, “These are not equivalent statements” and the two terms should not be conflated. “Proper skepticism promotes scientific inquiry, critical investigation, and the use of reason in examining controversial and extraordinary claims,” the letter reads. “It is foundational to the scientific method. Denial, on the other hand, is the a priori rejection of ideas without objective consideration.” The scientists and journalists point out that Inhofe’s assertion that global warming is “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people” is a very extraordinary claim of a “vast alleged conspiracy.”


pages: 322 words: 89,523

Ecovillages: Lessons for Sustainable Community by Karen T. Litfin

active transport: walking or cycling, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, back-to-the-land, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, collaborative consumption, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, congestion pricing, corporate social responsibility, degrowth, glass ceiling, global village, hydraulic fracturing, intentional community, megacity, new economy, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, planetary scale, publish or perish, Silicon Valley, systems thinking, the built environment, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, urban planning, Zipcar

Since most people in the world identify as members of one religion or another, how does the Great Unfoldment fit with those religions? Christianity in particular the dominant faith in my own country, has a long-standing quarrel with evolutionary science. Likewise, “tapping nature’s intelligence” might sound like New Age baloney to a scientific ear. What happens to the scientific method in the new story? Finally, integrating nature and spirit sounds like a great ideal but what does it mean in practice? As with all of my questions, I found illuminating answers across the metaphysical spectrum. Los Angeles Eco-Village is a fairly secular ecovillage – so much so that a proposal to hold hands in silence before community meals was defeated by a handful of atheists who saw it as a religious ritual.


pages: 350 words: 90,898

A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload by Cal Newport

Cal Newport, call centre, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, collaborative editing, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, COVID-19, creative destruction, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, fault tolerance, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, Garrett Hardin, hive mind, Inbox Zero, interchangeable parts, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Nash: game theory, Joseph Schumpeter, Kanban, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Marshall McLuhan, Nash equilibrium, passive income, Paul Graham, place-making, pneumatic tube, remote work: asynchronous communication, remote working, Richard Feynman, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, technological determinism, the medium is the message, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, web application, work culture , Y Combinator

“Print put forward a definition of intelligence that gave priority to the objective, rational use of the mind,” he writes, “and at the same time encouraged forms of public discourse with serious, logically ordered content.”16 It was this new way of thinking—not just newly available information—that suddenly made intellectual innovations such as Enlightenment philosophy and the scientific method natural next steps. Gutenberg, in other words, thought he was setting information free, but in reality, he was changing fundamentally what information we treated as important. A more modern example of technological determinism is the introduction of the Like button to Facebook. As revealed by contemporaneous blog posts written by the design team, the original purpose of this feature was to clean up the comments below users’ posts.


pages: 345 words: 92,063

Power, for All: How It Really Works and Why It's Everyone's Business by Julie Battilana, Tiziana Casciaro

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Andy Rubin, Asperger Syndrome, benefit corporation, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, deep learning, different worldview, digital rights, disinformation, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, feminist movement, fundamental attribution error, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, Greta Thunberg, hiring and firing, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, mega-rich, meritocracy, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, School Strike for Climate, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech worker, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, zero-sum game

., “New Ice Core Evidence for a Volcanic Cause of the A.D. 536 Dust Veil,” Geophysical Research Letters 35, no. 4 (2008). 8 Greg Williams, “Disrupting Poverty: How Barefoot College Is Empowering Women through Peer-to-Peer Learning and Technology,” Wired UK, March 7, 2011, https://www.wired.co.uk/article/disrupting-poverty. 9 Meagan Fallone, in discussion with the authors, December 2020. 10 René Descartes, A Discourse on Method, trans. John Veitch (London: J. M. Dent, 1912), 49. 11 The scientific method uses observations and rigorous testing of falsifiable hypotheses to acquire knowledge about the world. 12 Meghan Bartels, “How Do You Stop a Hypothetical Asteroid From Hitting Earth? NASA’s On It,” Space.com, May 2, 2019, https://www.space.com/asteroid-threat-simulation-nasa-deflection-idea.html. 13 Keenan Mayo and Peter Newcomb, “The Birth of the World Wide Web: An Oral History of the Internet,” Vanity Fair, July 2008, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2008/07/internet200807. 14 Naím, The End of Power; Heimans and Timms, New Power. 15 Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh, Innovation + Equality: How to Create a Future that is More Star Trek Than Terminator (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2019): 7. 16 Jean Luc Chabert, A History of Algorithms: From the Pebble to the Microchip (Berlin: Springer, 1999): 7. 17 “Coding,” Explained, Vox Media (Netflix, 2019). 18 Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (New York: Basic Books, 2015), 1. 19 “Coding,” Vox Media; Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb, Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence (Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press, 2018). 20 Sara Reardon, “Rise of Robot Radiologists,” Nature (London) 576, no. 7787 (2019): S54–58. 21 For an analysis of the opportunities and challenges in this domain, see Miriam Mutebi et al., “Innovative Use of MHealth and Clinical Technology for Oncology Clinical Trials in Africa,” JCO Global Oncology, no. 6 (2020): 948–53. 22 Susan Wharton Gates, Vanessa Gail Perry, and Peter M.


Gang Leader for a Day by Sudhir Venkatesh

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", crack epidemic, desegregation, Multics, Ronald Reagan, Steven Levy, the scientific method, urban planning, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois

Wilson gave me a box of old questionnaires. I should experiment, he said, by borrowing some of their questions and developing new ones as needed. Sociologists liked to use survey questions that their peers had already used, I learned, in order to produce comparable results. This was a key part of the scientific method in sociology. I thanked Wilson and went to the library to begin looking over the questionnaires he’d given me. I quickly realized I had no idea how to interview anyone. Washington Park, situated just across Cottage Grove Avenue from the U of C, is one of Chicago’s stateliest parks. Designed in the 1870s by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, it has a beautiful swimming pool, indoor and outdoor basketball courts, dazzling flower gardens, and long, winding paths that crisscross its nearly four hundred acres.


pages: 1,201 words: 233,519

Coders at Work by Peter Seibel

Ada Lovelace, Bill Atkinson, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Conway's Game of Life, Dennis Ritchie, domain-specific language, don't repeat yourself, Donald Knuth, fallacies of distributed computing, fault tolerance, Fermat's Last Theorem, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, functional programming, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Guido van Rossum, history of Unix, HyperCard, industrial research laboratory, information retrieval, Ken Thompson, L Peter Deutsch, Larry Wall, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Metcalfe's law, Multics, no silver bullet, Perl 6, premature optimization, publish or perish, random walk, revision control, Richard Stallman, rolodex, Ruby on Rails, Saturday Night Live, side project, slashdot, speech recognition, systems thinking, the scientific method, Therac-25, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, type inference, Valgrind, web application

What's ten times more productive when one person works ten times the hours and thinks about it nonstop and the other person just does it at his job? Seibel: You just mentioned taking a scientist's approach to debugging. Do you consider yourself a scientist, an engineer, an artist, or a craftsman? Fitzpatrick: Either scientist or engineer. Probably more engineer. I would say scientist was second, but only in the sense of the scientific method of changing one thing at a time and how you diagnose problems. Engineer for the design aspect of things. I definitely have friends who call themselves artists or craftsmen. I've never thought of myself as that. Seibel: On the other hand, there's a lot of engineering envy in software. You hear the jokes about, “If people built skyscrapers the way we build software, the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.”

And it's a very physical feeling I have about stuff that's also really spatial—how things work together and how things that might be different could be the same and how that would make a better architecture. I remember one of the early talks I had to give about Smalltalk; I said, “What we do in this group is like the scientific method, which is you make an observation, you come up with a theory to explain it, and you perform an experiment to verify it.” And that's very much what we did in the successive generations of Smalltalk. We had a theory for how to make something work. We built a system that worked that way. We used it for a while and we found out, “Oh, it'd be good if we did this and this and this differently,” and we built a new one.


pages: 756 words: 228,797

Ayn Rand and the World She Made by Anne C. Heller

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, American ideology, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Bolshevik threat, Charles Lindbergh, conceptual framework, Future Shock, gentleman farmer, greed is good, laissez-faire capitalism, Lewis Mumford, Milgram experiment, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, open borders, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, rent control, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, wage slave, War on Poverty, Works Progress Administration, young professional

“She spoke about him with more respect than I can recall her ever speaking about anybody,” said a friend who knew Rand in the 1950s. There was one area of conflict between the girl and her father: He opposed her chosen course of study at the university. Without asking her to give up writing, he wanted her to apply her math training and love of the scientific method to a more remunerative occupation, such as engineering. This would have been an unusual profession for an early-twentieth-century Jewish father to urge on any daughter other than Rand, who was to make it Kira’s frustrated calling in We the Living. Having grown up in the Russian Pale, he was more aware than Anna or the children of the crucial role that work and money played in protecting against the onslaughts of anti-Semitism.

They briefly considered “contextual absolutism” and “contextualism” but gave them up for lack of sex appeal. They settled on the only slightly spicier name “Objectivism,” which they intended as an homage to the immutability of objective reality and the competence of perception and reason to grasp and understand it. It also conveyed an urgent emphasis on the scientific method, Rand thought; she had become especially concerned with countering the influence of John Dewey and his followers’ subjectivist theories of education. She was probably unaware that such ideas partly derived from Oliver Wendell Holmes’s eloquent responses to the unintended consequences of the abolitionist movement and the Civil War.


The Art of Scalability: Scalable Web Architecture, Processes, and Organizations for the Modern Enterprise by Martin L. Abbott, Michael T. Fisher

always be closing, anti-pattern, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, business climate, business continuity plan, business intelligence, business logic, business process, call centre, cloud computing, combinatorial explosion, commoditize, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, database schema, discounted cash flows, Dunning–Kruger effect, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, finite state, friendly fire, functional programming, hiring and firing, Infrastructure as a Service, inventory management, machine readable, new economy, OSI model, packet switching, performance metric, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, power law, RFC: Request For Comment, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, software as a service, the scientific method, transaction costs, Vilfredo Pareto, web application, Y2K

The approach to scaling must be crafted around the ecosystem created by the intersection of the current technology platform, the characteristics of the organization, and the maturity and appropriateness of the existing processes. Consistent with this use of art, our book focuses on providing skills and lessons regarding approaches rather than improperly teaching that a one-size-fits-all approach will solve any need. This is not to say that we don’t advocate the application of the scientific method in nearly any approach, because we absolutely do. Art here is a nod to the notion that you simply cannot take a cookie cutter approach for any potential system and expect to meet with success. Who Needs Scalability? Any company that continues to grow ultimately will need to figure out how to scale its systems, organizations, and processes.

—Sun Tzu We started this book with a discussion of how scalability is a combination of art and science. The art aspect of scaling is seen in the interactions between platforms, organizations, and processes, which impact any structured approach in a company. The science of scalability is embodied within the method by which we measure our efforts and in the application of the scientific method. A particular company’s approach to scaling must be crafted around the ecosystem fashioned by the intersection of the technology platform, the uniqueness of the organization, and the maturity and capabilities of the existing processes. Because a one-size-fits-all implementation or answer does not exist, we have focused this book on providing skills and lessons regarding approaches.


pages: 317 words: 101,074

The Road Ahead by Bill Gates, Nathan Myhrvold, Peter Rinearson

Albert Einstein, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Berlin Wall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, business process, California gold rush, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Donald Knuth, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, glass ceiling, global village, informal economy, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, medical malpractice, Mitch Kapor, new economy, packet switching, popular electronics, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, SimCity, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, Von Neumann architecture

Gates, I am a poet who has Dyslexia, which basically means I can not spell worth a damn, and I would never have any hope of getting my poetry or my novels published if not for this computer Spellcheck. I may fail as a writer, but thanks to you I will succeed or fail because of my talent, or a lack of talent, and not because of my disability" We are watching something historic happen, and it will affect the world seismically, rocking us the same way the discovery of the scientific method, the invention of printing, and the arrival of the Industrial Age did. If the information highway is able to increase the understanding citizens of one country have about their neighboring countries, and thereby reduce international tensions, that, in and of itself, could be sufficient to justify the cost of implementation.


pages: 360 words: 100,991

Heart of the Machine: Our Future in a World of Artificial Emotional Intelligence by Richard Yonck

3D printing, AI winter, AlphaGo, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, backpropagation, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, brain emulation, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, deep learning, DeepMind, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Fairchild Semiconductor, friendly AI, Geoffrey Hinton, ghettoisation, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of writing, Jacques de Vaucanson, job automation, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, Loebner Prize, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, mirror neurons, Neil Armstrong, neurotypical, Nick Bostrom, Oculus Rift, old age dependency ratio, pattern recognition, planned obsolescence, pneumatic tube, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Skype, social intelligence, SoftBank, software as a service, SQL injection, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, theory of mind, Turing test, twin studies, Two Sigma, undersea cable, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Review, working-age population, zero day

In another study of 509 people, including law enforcement personnel such as members of the US Secret Service, Central Intelligence Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation, National Security Agency, and Drug Enforcement Agency, only the Secret Service performed significantly better than chance at detecting if a subject was lying. Even then, the Secret Service observers had only a 64 percent success rate. Small wonder then that the world has a long history of seeking out reliable methods of deception detection. Skipping ahead past ducking stools and witch burnings, it wasn’t until the late nineteenth century that the scientific method began to be applied to the question of whether or not someone was telling a lie. A number of discoveries and inventions dealing with human autonomic responses were made around that time that were eventually combined into an early version of the modern lie detector. The lie detector, or polygraph (meaning “many writings”), was invented in 1921 by John A.


pages: 300 words: 99,432

Godforsaken Sea by Derek Lundy

Apollo 11, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, Neil Armstrong, Parkinson's law, the scientific method, William Langewiesche, Winter of Discontent

And most noticeably, yacht designers, like all computer users, can try out ideas, backtrack, tweak a variable here and there, and make changes easily. There’s a flexibility in the whole routine that allows for instant feedback on the consequences for speed, stability, or looks of any alteration in any part of the boat’s complicated structure. There is a lot of data. The result? A boat—a Vendée Globe rocket, say—as a product of the scientific method, a Cartesian construct by way of the microprocessor chip. Well, not quite. The machine still has a soul. For several reasons, the technique of designing a sailboat remains an uncertain and indeterminate affair. This is sometimes the case because a boat may have to be a number of contradictory things at the same time: a dormitory for ten people, yet small enough that it’s cheap to make and buy; a fast sailer, yet with sails a small, ham-handed crew can deal with; low and handsome in profile, but with headroom for a basketball player.


pages: 317 words: 100,414

Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction by Philip Tetlock, Dan Gardner

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Black Swan, butterfly effect, buy and hold, cloud computing, cognitive load, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, desegregation, drone strike, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, forward guidance, Freestyle chess, fundamental attribution error, germ theory of disease, hindsight bias, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, index fund, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Kenneth Arrow, Laplace demon, longitudinal study, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, operational security, pattern recognition, performance metric, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, placebo effect, precautionary principle, prediction markets, quantitative easing, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, scientific worldview, Silicon Valley, Skype, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, tail risk, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

In 1976 I was a clueless twenty-two-year-old Canadian who, like countless others, was about to make choices that would shape the rest of my life. I had just graduated from the University of British Columbia. I thought I might accept a Commonwealth scholarship to study the humanities at Oxford. My adviser, Peter Suedfeld, thought that was a terrible idea. Go to the United States and commit to the scientific method, he said. I took his advice, but only hesitantly. My decision could have gone the other way. And if I had left for Oxford and a career in the humanities, I can easily guess what I would have said about the research outlined in this book, and the next steps it will take. Numbers are fine and useful things, I would say in that alternate universe, but we must be careful not to be smitten with them.


Future Files: A Brief History of the Next 50 Years by Richard Watson

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, bank run, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Black Swan, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, cashless society, citizen journalism, commoditize, computer age, computer vision, congestion charging, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, deglobalization, digital Maoism, digital nomad, disintermediation, driverless car, epigenetics, failed state, financial innovation, Firefox, food miles, Ford Model T, future of work, Future Shock, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, hive mind, hobby farmer, industrial robot, invention of the telegraph, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, linked data, low cost airline, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, mass immigration, Northern Rock, Paradox of Choice, peak oil, pensions crisis, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, prediction markets, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, RFID, Richard Florida, self-driving car, speech recognition, synthetic biology, telepresence, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Turing test, Victor Gruen, Virgin Galactic, white flight, women in the workforce, work culture , Zipcar

It may seem simplistic to some people that my source material is news and media organizations, but I am a great believer in simplicity — as I am in the power of the encapsulating anecdote. Moreover, this methodology of content analysis (or environmental scanning as it’s sometimes called) is not dissimilar to the scientific method, consisting as it does of observing what is happening in a dispassionate manner and looking for simple patterns that have some robustness. In other words, getting your sieve full of information is only the beginning. Next you have to shake the sieve rigorously until the insignificant details fall away.


pages: 321 words: 96,349

Among Chimpanzees by Nancy J. Merrick

biodiversity loss, carbon footprint, clean water, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, experimental subject, Global Witness, Google Earth, impulse control, language acquisition, microcredit, profit motive, the scientific method

Robert Hinde, of Cambridge University, who helped redesign the methods with which data were collected at Gombe and who helped her earn her PhD. Jane proved herself a capable scientist and resisted pressure from a faction of the scientific community to treat the chimps as subjects by assigning them numbers rather than names.2 She revels to this day in having let common sense triumph over the scientific method taken to the extreme. Dr. David Hamburg was a second powerful influence on Jane’s life during this period. A psychiatrist interested in the biological basis of human aggression, he believed the chimps provided a natural model. When Gombe was struggling financially, he helped secure financial support to keep it open.


pages: 346 words: 102,625

Early Retirement Extreme by Jacob Lund Fisker

8-hour work day, active transport: walking or cycling, barriers to entry, book value, buy and hold, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, delayed gratification, discounted cash flows, diversification, dogs of the Dow, don't be evil, dumpster diving, Easter island, fake it until you make it, financial engineering, financial independence, game design, index fund, invention of the steam engine, inventory management, junk bonds, lateral thinking, lifestyle creep, loose coupling, low interest rates, market bubble, McMansion, passive income, peak oil, place-making, planned obsolescence, Plato's cave, Ponzi scheme, power law, psychological pricing, retail therapy, risk free rate, sunk-cost fallacy, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, time value of money, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, wage slave, working poor

Perhaps now more than ever there's a need for people who understand and are able to connect different interdisciplinary topics, lest we end up in a Tower of Babel situation where specialists and experts no longer understand each other. The ability to connect disparate fields or items in complex ways and reach new creative solutions creates paradigm shifts. It was the universal ideal that led to the discovery of the scientific method, the rediscovery of democracy, and the settling of a new continent, all of which created the world we see today (see Succession and the cycle of change). It's also the universal ideal that spurs the occasional renegade to discover something completely different like the general theory of relativity, string theory, or chaos theory.


Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age by Alex Wright

1960s counterculture, Ada Lovelace, barriers to entry, British Empire, business climate, business intelligence, Cape to Cairo, card file, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Babbage, Computer Lib, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, Deng Xiaoping, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, folksonomy, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Great Leap Forward, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, index card, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, linked data, Livingstone, I presume, lone genius, machine readable, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, Norman Mailer, out of africa, packet switching, pneumatic tube, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, semantic web, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, Ted Nelson, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog

For years, the camera had proved a popular attraction for Edinburgh residents and visitors alike.1 Geddes purchased the tower in hopes of using the camera as a popular draw for a more ambitious experiment: a first of its kind “sociological laboratory.” Though originally trained as a biologist, he 108 T he I nde x M u se u m had taken a keen interest in the emerging field of sociology, where he applied the principles of the scientific method to the study of human societies, promoting the importance of careful observation in exploring the interplay between people, their work, and the places in which they lived. Eventually he would make important contributions to the field of urban planning, advocating a human-centered approach to building that stood in stark contrast to the centralized urban grid planning that had gained so much traction in cities like New York.


pages: 343 words: 101,563

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Blockadia, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Chekhov's gun, climate anxiety, cognitive bias, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, effective altruism, Elon Musk, endowment effect, energy transition, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, failed state, fiat currency, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, it's over 9,000, Joan Didion, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kevin Roose, Kim Stanley Robinson, labor-force participation, life extension, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, megastructure, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, microplastics / micro fibres, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Solow, Sam Altman, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, the built environment, The future is already here, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Whole Earth Catalog, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator

But one way we might manage to navigate that path without crumbling collectively in despair is, perversely, to normalize climate suffering at the same pace we accelerate it, as we have so much human pain over centuries, so that we are always coming to terms with what is just ahead of us, decrying what lies beyond that, and forgetting all that we had ever said about the absolute moral unacceptability of the conditions of the world we are passing through in the present tense, and blithely. IV The Anthropic Principle What if we’re wrong? Perversely, decades of climate denial and disinformation have made global warming not merely an ecological crisis but an incredibly high-stakes wager on the legitimacy and validity of science and the scientific method itself. It is a bet that science can win only by losing. And in this test of the climate we have a sample size of just one. No one wants to see disaster coming, but those who look, do. Climate science has arrived at this terrifying conclusion not casually, and not with glee, but by systematically ruling out every alternative explanation for observed warming—even though that observed warming is more or less precisely what would be expected given only the rudimentary understanding of the greenhouse effect advanced by John Tyndall and Eunice Foote in the 1850s, when America was reaching its first industrial peak.


pages: 379 words: 99,340

The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium by Martin Gurri

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, Ayatollah Khomeini, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Burning Man, business cycle, citizen journalism, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, currency manipulation / currency intervention, dark matter, David Graeber, death of newspapers, disinformation, Eddington experiment, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, facts on the ground, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, job-hopping, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nate Silver, Occupy movement, Port of Oakland, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Skype, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, too big to fail, traveling salesman, University of East Anglia, urban renewal, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, young professional

This was true in Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia no less than in democratic countries.[92] The power of government over research has inevitably introduced political considerations. President Richard Nixon, for example, declared a “war on cancer.” Today research on HIV/AIDS and climate change take political pride of place. The pressure generated by public expectation of specific outcomes has complicated the conduct of honest science. Much has been claimed for the scientific method, but the only method to which all scientists subscribe is the peer review process. It too has been under strain. Peer review presupposes the existence of independent-minded experts who evaluate manageable data sets. Often, in the age of the Fifth Wave, neither condition applies. Scientists today work in teams, and the subject matter can be so specialized that only a handful of individuals will be able to understand and review the literature.


pages: 362 words: 104,308

Forty Signs of Rain by Kim Stanley Robinson

bioinformatics, business intelligence, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, experimental subject, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Kim Stanley Robinson, phenotype, precautionary principle, prisoner's dilemma, Ronald Reagan, social intelligence, stem cell, the scientific method, zero-sum game

Besides which, it won’t work.” People laughed shortly at this extra measure of disdain, which was palpable, and to those who didn’t know Thornton, a little surprising. But Frank had seen Stuart Thornton on panels before. He was the kind of scientist who habitually displayed an ultrapure devotion to the scientific method, in the form of a relentless skepticism about everything. No study was designed tightly enough, no data were clean enough. To Frank it seemed obvious that it was really a kind of insecurity, part of the gestural set of a beta male convincing the group he was tough enough to be an alpha male, and maybe already was.


pages: 326 words: 97,089

Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search for Life Among the Stars by Lee Billings

addicted to oil, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, California gold rush, Colonization of Mars, cosmological principle, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Dava Sobel, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Ford Model T, full employment, Hans Moravec, hydraulic fracturing, index card, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, Kuiper Belt, Late Heavy Bombardment, low earth orbit, Magellanic Cloud, music of the spheres, Neil Armstrong, out of africa, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, planetary scale, private spaceflight, profit motive, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, random walk, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, selection bias, Silicon Valley, space junk, synthetic biology, technological singularity, the scientific method, transcontinental railway

Thales was the scion of a noble Phoenician family, and in his youth spent time in Egypt, where he learned geometry and studied ancient astronomical records. He was known throughout the ancient world for predicting a total solar eclipse that occurred over Central Anatolia on May 28, 585 B.C., but his greatest legacy is what we now call the “scientific method.” Thales rejected the supernatural, teaching instead that rational thought and experimentation were the proper approach to making sense of the world. Thales believed everything in existence to be composed of one or more primeval substances and controlled by interacting forces—a belief that, in its essence, would be shared by any of today’s particle physicists.


pages: 321 words: 97,661

How to Read a Paper: The Basics of Evidence-Based Medicine by Trisha Greenhalgh

call centre, complexity theory, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, deskilling, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, microbiome, New Journalism, p-value, personalized medicine, placebo effect, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, selection bias, systematic bias, systems thinking, the scientific method

Being human, they have usually set out to demonstrate a difference between the two arms of their study. But the way scientists do this is to say ‘let’s assume there's no difference; now let's try to disprove that theory'. If you adhere to the teachings of Popper, this hypotheticodeductive approach (setting up falsifiable hypotheses that you then proceed to test) is the very essence of the scientific method [4]. If you have not discovered what the authors' research question was by the time you are halfway through the methods section, you may find it in the first paragraph of the discussion. Remember, however, that not all research studies (even good ones) are set up to test a single definitive hypothesis.


pages: 372 words: 101,174

How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed by Ray Kurzweil

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anesthesia awareness, anthropic principle, brain emulation, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Dean Kamen, discovery of DNA, double helix, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, George Gilder, Google Earth, Hans Moravec, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jacquard loom, Jeff Hawkins, John von Neumann, Law of Accelerating Returns, linear programming, Loebner Prize, mandelbrot fractal, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, strong AI, the scientific method, theory of mind, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, X Prize

Before we proceed to parse this question further, it is important to reflect on the most significant distinction relating to it: What is it that we can ascertain from science, versus what remains truly a matter of philosophy? One view is that philosophy is a kind of halfway house for questions that have not yet yielded to the scientific method. According to this perspective, once science advances sufficiently to resolve a particular set of questions, philosophers can then move on to other concerns, until such time that science resolves them also. This view is endemic where the issue of consciousness is concerned, and specifically the question “What and who is conscious?”


pages: 351 words: 100,791

The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction by Matthew B. Crawford

airport security, behavioural economics, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, David Brooks, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital Maoism, Google Glasses, hive mind, index card, informal economy, Jaron Lanier, large denomination, new economy, new new economy, Norman Mailer, online collectivism, Plato's cave, plutocrats, precautionary principle, Richard Thaler, Rodney Brooks, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Stanford marshmallow experiment, tacit knowledge, the built environment, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Walter Mischel, winner-take-all economy

He draws a parallel between science and craft that I take to be stronger than a mere analogy—rather, they are two expressions of the same mode of apprehending the world: by grappling with real things. Writing after the war, he pointed out: While the articulate contents of science are successfully taught all over the world in hundreds of new universities, the unspecifiable art of scientific research has not yet penetrated to many of these. The regions of Europe in which the scientific method first originated 400 years ago are scientifically still more fruitful today [1958], in spite of their impoverishment, than several overseas areas where much more money is available for scientific research. Without the opportunity offered to young scientists to serve an apprenticeship in Europe, and without the migration of European scientists to the new countries, research centres overseas could hardly ever have made much headway.9 LIBERAL EDUCATION AS APPRENTICESHIP It would be a gross misreading to take this as an expression of “Eurocentrism.”


pages: 329 words: 103,159

People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil by M Scott Peck

Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, profit motive, school choice, the scientific method

And when they are behaving with love, Satan is completely ignorant of the ground rules Interestingly, particularly in view of the purpose of this book, Satan also does not understand science. Science is an anti-narcissistic phenomenon. It assumes a profound human tendency to self-deception, employs the scientific method to counteract it, and holds truth higher than any personal desire. Deceiver of itself as of others, Satan cannot understand why any beings would not want to deceive themselves. Enamored with its own will and hater of the light of truth, it basically finds human science incomprehensible. Satan’s weaknesses should not encourage us to overlook its strength.


pages: 377 words: 97,144

Singularity Rising: Surviving and Thriving in a Smarter, Richer, and More Dangerous World by James D. Miller

23andMe, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, artificial general intelligence, Asperger Syndrome, barriers to entry, brain emulation, cloud computing, cognitive bias, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, en.wikipedia.org, feminist movement, Flynn Effect, friendly AI, hive mind, impulse control, indoor plumbing, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, John Gilmore, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Netflix Prize, neurotypical, Nick Bostrom, Norman Macrae, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, placebo effect, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skype, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, sugar pill, supervolcano, tech billionaire, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Turing test, twin studies, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture

., if we didn’t end up with a billion people insisting that everyone be Christian and another billion insisting that we all be Muslim). But I think that much of our religious disagreement results from irrationalities and incomplete information. For example, while Christians in the seventeenth century disagreed over whether Earth was at the center of the universe, telescopes, better math, and an improved understanding of the scientific method eventually resolved the conflict. Dilbert creator Scott Adams insightfully wrote that most disagreements have four basic causes:104 1.People have different information. 2.People have different selfish interests. 3.People have different superstitions. 4.People have different skills for comparing.


pages: 349 words: 98,868

Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason by William Davies

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, citizen journalism, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, Colonization of Mars, continuation of politics by other means, creative destruction, credit crunch, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, digital divide, discovery of penicillin, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, first-past-the-post, Frank Gehry, gig economy, government statistician, housing crisis, income inequality, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Mont Pelerin Society, mutually assured destruction, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, planetary scale, post-industrial society, post-truth, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Social Justice Warrior, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, Turing machine, Uber for X, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Valery Gerasimov, W. E. B. Du Bois, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

It has become a cliché to celebrate the rugged individualism, cold rationality, and truth-seeking courage of the scientific pioneers. But in our current age, when intelligence and calculation are performed faster and more accurately by machines than by people, an alternative ideal is needed. Perhaps the great virtue of the scientific method is not that it is smart (which is now an attribute of phones, cities, and fridges) but that it is slow and careful. Maybe it is not more intelligence that we need right now, but less speed and more care, both in our thinking and our feeling. After all, emotions (including anger) can be eminently reasonable, if they are granted the time to be articulated and heard.


pages: 346 words: 97,890

The Road to Conscious Machines by Michael Wooldridge

Ada Lovelace, AI winter, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Andrew Wiles, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, British Empire, call centre, Charles Babbage, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, factory automation, fake news, future of work, gamification, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Glasses, intangible asset, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John von Neumann, Loebner Prize, Minecraft, Mustafa Suleyman, Nash equilibrium, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, NP-complete, P = NP, P vs NP, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Philippa Foot, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, strong AI, technological singularity, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Von Neumann architecture, warehouse robotics

. –– Cardiogram company website4 Anybody with even the vaguest interest in politics and economics will recognize that the provision of healthcare is one of the most important global financial problems for private citizens and for governments. On the one hand, improvements in healthcare provision over the past two centuries are probably the most important single achievement of the scientific method in the industrialized world: in 1800, life expectancy for someone in Europe would have been less than 50 years;5 someone born in Europe today could reasonably expect to live late into their seventies. Maternal deaths in childbirth are now a rarity in the developed world. These dramatic changes are in part the result of a better understanding of hygiene.


The Last Stargazers by Emily Levesque

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Boeing 747, Carrington event, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, cosmic microwave background, dark matter, Eddington experiment, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, it's over 9,000, Kuiper Belt, Kwajalein Atoll, lolcat, Magellanic Cloud, mass immigration, messenger bag, Neil Armstrong, Pluto: dwarf planet, polynesian navigation, the scientific method

About thirty minutes later, the urgency dropped with his follow-up email: “Never mind. Am a horse’s ass. Mercury is at that position.” • • • Astronomy, like any other field, loves its false alarm stories: the microwave ovens mistaken for radio bursts, the planets misidentified as dying stars. They serve as excellent hands-on proofs of the scientific method for young observers, teaching us how to be skeptical and how to “think horses, not zebras” when hoofbeats show up in our data. In a field of science where we can convincingly prove that two colliding stars, supported by principles of quantum physics, can produce flashes of gamma rays and compression waves in the fabric of spacetime, it’s important to keep our sense of skepticism well calibrated.


pages: 535 words: 103,761

100 Years of Identity Crisis: Culture War Over Socialisation by Frank Furedi

1960s counterculture, 23andMe, Abraham Maslow, behavioural economics, Brexit referendum, Cass Sunstein, classic study, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, epigenetics, Greta Thunberg, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, knowledge worker, libertarian paternalism, lockdown, New Urbanism, nocebo, nudge theory, nudge unit, scientific management, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen, work culture

Dewey wrote of ‘the technique of social and moral engineering’, which relied on the natural sciences acquiring a normative content.458 He hoped that in this way the ethical value of science would form the foundation for human moral conduct. Moral life comes to resemble the pursuit of science. ‘It is rendered flexible, vital, growing’, argued Dewey.459 Thus, moral reasoning turns into a species of scientific inquiry that can be tested, modified and re-engineered. For Dewey, the scientific method is the moral method used for investigation of the ‘engineering of mind’. For Dewey, the reconstruction of morality was conterminous with science acquiring a status previously accorded to religion. Decades later, one of Dewey’s disciples, the philosopher Richard Rorty, declared that his goal was to revive Deweyan ‘social engineering’, conceived as the ‘substitute for traditional religion’.460 The search for the ‘science of rational control’ invariably led progressive social engineers to the conclusion that ‘science, guided by expert minds, would enable the control of social phenomena, primarily by adjusting people to their changing environment’.461 This was to be achieved by drawing on the resources provided by psychology, a science that held out the promise of adjusting people to adopt the ethos of social engineering.


pages: 289 words: 95,046

Chaos Kings: How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the New Age of Crisis by Scott Patterson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Bitcoin "FTX", Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black Swan Protection Protocol, Black-Scholes formula, blockchain, Bob Litterman, Boris Johnson, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, centre right, clean tech, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, commodity super cycle, complexity theory, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decarbonisation, disinformation, diversification, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, effective altruism, Elliott wave, Elon Musk, energy transition, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Extinction Rebellion, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, Gail Bradbrook, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Greta Thunberg, hindsight bias, index fund, interest rate derivative, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Joan Didion, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Spitznagel, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, money market fund, moral hazard, Murray Gell-Mann, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, panic early, Pershing Square Capital Management, Peter Singer: altruism, Ponzi scheme, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, proprietary trading, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative easing, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Ralph Nelson Elliott, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, rewilding, Richard Thaler, risk/return, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rory Sutherland, Rupert Read, Sam Bankman-Fried, Silicon Valley, six sigma, smart contracts, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, systematic trading, tail risk, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, too big to fail, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, value at risk, Vanguard fund, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

He made his apocalyptic pronouncements in a calm, steady voice, occasionally gesticulating toward the crowd with a sweep of his hand. Financial markets, and the world itself, were far more volatile than many believed, as giant institutions toppled like dominoes. His concern with Black Swans, he said, extended beyond financial markets to the scientific method itself. Wild, unforeseen, chaotic moves happen all the time. But the financial geniuses on Wall Street can’t see them. Their sophisticated models are backward looking, and they rely on the bell curve. The fact is, Black Swans can wipe out entire portfolios—or entire banks—in the blink of an eye.


pages: 325 words: 101,669

The Wine-Dark Sea Within: A Turbulent History of Blood by Dhun Sethna

An Inconvenient Truth, Copley Medal, Fellow of the Royal Society, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Harrison: Longitude, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

And to science they turned for such knowledge of the hazardous future as can be gained by mortals. In Homer’s time, it was believed that such information might be sought among the dead. At Circe’s instigation, Odysseus reached toward the mist-shrouded land of Hades at the world’s edge to divine his own fate. In later times, thinking about the world in the Greek way became the scientific method. And it comes as no wonder that the sciences have rarely existed in the West except among peoples who came under the influence of the Greek mind. WRINKLES IN BLOOD FLOW We must collect the facts and the things to which the facts happen. —Aristotle eight A Different Drumbeat If you want to get on in life, my boy, lace up your boots and get out to Alexandria ad Aegyptum (Alexandria by Egypt).


pages: 1,034 words: 241,773

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, access to a mobile phone, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Alignment Problem, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Arthur Eddington, artificial general intelligence, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charlie Hebdo massacre, classic study, clean water, clockwork universe, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, distributed generation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edward Jenner, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, endogenous growth, energy transition, European colonialism, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, frictionless market, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hacker Conference 1984, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, l'esprit de l'escalier, Laplace demon, launch on warning, life extension, long peace, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Mahbub ul Haq, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, obamacare, ocean acidification, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, post-truth, power law, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, prediction markets, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, radical life extension, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, Social Justice Warrior, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supervolcano, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, technological determinism, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey, Y2K

(Hume’s analysis of the nature of causality, to take just one example, took off from his insights about the psychology of causality, and Kant was, among other things, a prescient cognitive psychologist.)16 Today most philosophers (at least in the analytic or Anglo-American tradition) subscribe to naturalism, the position that “reality is exhausted by nature, containing nothing ‘supernatural,’ and that the scientific method should be used to investigate all areas of reality, including the ‘human spirit.’”17 Science, in the modern conception, is of a piece with philosophy and with reason itself. What, then, distinguishes science from other exercises of reason? It certainly isn’t “the scientific method,” a term that is taught to schoolchildren but that never passes the lips of a scientist. Scientists use whichever methods help them understand the world: drudgelike tabulation of data, experimental derring-do, flights of theoretical fancy, elegant mathematical modeling, kludgy computer simulation, sweeping verbal narrative.18 All the methods are pressed into the service of two ideals, and it is these ideals that advocates of science want to export to the rest of intellectual life.


pages: 502 words: 107,657

Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die by Eric Siegel

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apollo 11, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, backtesting, Black Swan, book scanning, bounce rate, business intelligence, business process, butter production in bangladesh, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, commoditize, computer age, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data is the new oil, data science, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Everything should be made as simple as possible, experimental subject, Google Glasses, happiness index / gross national happiness, information security, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, lifelogging, machine readable, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, mass immigration, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Norbert Wiener, personalized medicine, placebo effect, prediction markets, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Shai Danziger, software as a service, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, statistical model, Steven Levy, supply chain finance, text mining, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Davenport, Turing test, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, X Prize, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

In the context of healthcare, crime, and terrorism, it can save lives. In the context of advertising, using predictions is more efficient, and could conceivably save both trees (for direct mail and catalogs) and the time and attention of the recipient. In politics, it seems to reward those candidates who respect the scientific method (some might disagree, but I see that as a positive). However, as Siegel points out—early in the book, which is admirable—these approaches can also be used in somewhat harmful ways. “With great power comes great responsibility,” he notes in quoting Spider-Man. The implication is that we must be careful as a society about how we use predictive models, or we may be restricted from using and benefiting from them.


pages: 372 words: 110,208

Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past by David Reich

23andMe, agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, carbon credits, Easter island, European colonialism, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, invention of agriculture, invention of the wheel, invention of writing, mass immigration, meta-analysis, new economy, out of africa, phenotype, Scientific racism, sparse data, supervolcano, the scientific method, transatlantic slave trade

Palop created languages, one for each group, and scattered the groups across the earth.1 This origins story was documented by an anthropologist working to understand Suruí culture, and, like origins stories the world over, it is viewed by scholars as fictional, of interest because of what it reveals about a society. But we scientists too have origins stories. We like to think these are superior because they are tested by the scientific method against a range of evidence. But some humility is in order. In 2012, I led a study that claimed that all Native Americans from Mesoamerica southward—including the Suruí—derived all of their ancestry from a single population, one that moved south of the ice sheets sometime after fifteen thousand years ago.2 I was so confident of this theory, which fit with the consensus derived from archaeology, that I used the term “First American” to signal that the lineage we had highlighted was a founding lineage.


pages: 427 words: 112,549

Freedom by Daniel Suarez

augmented reality, big-box store, British Empire, Burning Man, business intelligence, call centre, cloud computing, corporate personhood, digital map, game design, global supply chain, illegal immigration, Naomi Klein, new economy, Pearl River Delta, plutocrats, private military company, RFID, Shenzhen special economic zone , special economic zone, speech recognition, Stewart Brand, telemarketer, the scientific method, young professional

It's easier than trying to explain the cultural significance of midwinter celebrations to a three-year-old. If false magic or a white lie about the god-monster in the mountain will get people to stop killing one another and learn, then the truth can wait. When the time is right, it can be replaced with a reverence for the scientific method." "And this is why Sobol created the Daemon?" She shook her head. "No, this is why they call it the shamanic interface. Because it resembles sorcery--and might as well be to low-tech people. But unlike sorcery, it exists and conveys real power." Riley raised her hands in front of her. "Now let's teach you how to use it."


pages: 345 words: 105,722

The Hacker Crackdown by Bruce Sterling

Apple II, back-to-the-land, Future Shock, game design, ghettoisation, Hacker Conference 1984, Haight Ashbury, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, index card, informal economy, information security, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, machine readable, Mitch Kapor, pirate software, plutocrats, radical decentralization, Silicon Valley, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, technological determinism, The Hackers Conference, the scientific method, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review

"See what happens when you drop a 'silver box' tone or two down your local exchange or through different long distance service carriers," advises 2600 contributor "Mr. Upsetter" in "How To Build a Signal Box." "If you experiment systematically and keep good records, you will surely discover something interesting." This is, of course, the scientific method, generally regarded as a praiseworthy activity and one of the flowers of modern civilization. One can indeed learn a great deal with this sort of structured intellectual activity. Telco employees regard this mode of "exploration" as akin to flinging sticks of dynamite into their pond to see what lives on the bottom. 2600 has been published consistently since 1984.


pages: 377 words: 110,427

The Boy Who Could Change the World: The Writings of Aaron Swartz by Aaron Swartz, Lawrence Lessig

Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, Alfred Russel Wallace, American Legislative Exchange Council, Benjamin Mako Hill, bitcoin, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brewster Kahle, Cass Sunstein, deliberate practice, do what you love, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, failed state, fear of failure, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, full employment, functional programming, Hacker News, Howard Zinn, index card, invisible hand, Joan Didion, John Gruber, Lean Startup, low interest rates, More Guns, Less Crime, peer-to-peer, post scarcity, power law, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, semantic web, single-payer health, SpamAssassin, SPARQL, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the scientific method, Toyota Production System, unbiased observer, wage slave, Washington Consensus, web application, WikiLeaks, working poor, zero-sum game

Math is a whole world of abstract beauty, full of puzzles to test your mind. Science is not the memorization of uninteresting facts, as 12 years of science classes may lead you to believe. Science is merely a process of asking questions and searching answers, along with the combined knowledge accumulated from this search. The process is called the scientific method, and the best science teacher I ever had simply explained it to us and let us explore the world. Her room was filled with toys and puzzles to solve, and things to experiment with. She would often warn us of teachers she once had who had few hands-on activities and simply asked us to read through a textbook.


pages: 274 words: 93,758

Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception by George A. Akerlof, Robert J. Shiller, Stanley B Resor Professor Of Economics Robert J Shiller

Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, collapse of Lehman Brothers, compensation consultant, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, David Brooks, desegregation, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, equity premium, financial intermediation, financial thriller, fixed income, full employment, George Akerlof, greed is good, income per capita, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, late fees, loss aversion, market bubble, Menlo Park, mental accounting, Michael Milken, Milgram experiment, money market fund, moral hazard, new economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, publication bias, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, Silicon Valley, stock buybacks, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transaction costs, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave

We will comment on both of these, reflecting on the lessons from Vioxx. An appendix to this chapter will describe how Big Pharma also phishes for the prices they receive. Obtaining FDA Approval The public and the doctors, and possibly also the FDA, were taken by surprise largely because of their overconfidence in the “scientific method” of randomized trials. Just as Radam sold Microbe Killer on the basis of the science of the late nineteenth century, Vioxx was sold with the confidence that it represented the best from modern science, with checks on its validity by trials such as VIGOR. But an important concept in statistics shows why randomized controlled testing will often fail, and especially why it failed with VIGOR.


pages: 316 words: 105,384

Moneyball by Michael Lewis

Cass Sunstein, high batting average, Norman Mailer, old-boy network, placebo effect, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, systematic trading, the new new thing, the scientific method, upwardly mobile

The research and development department in the Oakland front office liberated them from this prejudice, and allowed them to demonstrate their true worth. A baseball team, of all things, was at the center of a story about the possibilities—and the limits—of reason in human affairs. Baseball—of all things—was an example of how an unscientific culture responds, or fails to respond, to the scientific method. As I say, I fell in love with a story. The story is about professional baseball and the people who play it. At its center is a man whose life was turned upside down by professional baseball, and who, miraculously, found a way to return the favor. In an effort to learn more about that man, and the revolution he was inspiring, I spent a few days with J.


pages: 355 words: 106,952

Visit Sunny Chernobyl: And Other Adventures in the World's Most Polluted Places by Andrew Blackwell

Anthropocene, carbon footprint, clean water, Google Earth, gravity well, liberation theology, nuclear paranoia, off-the-grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, place-making, ride hailing / ride sharing, sensible shoes, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, the scientific method, young professional

Kelsey, who had done her Berkeley thesis on marine debris, piped up before I did, pointing out that it was consistency that mattered, not a higher number per se. Nikki made an impassioned counterargument, centered on what a rare opportunity it was to be here in the Gyre. Then Art and Henry joined in, and Kaniela, and in this way, aboard the brigantine Kaisei, near latitude 34°36′ North and longitude 143°21′ West, at approximately 1930 hours, the scientific method was reinvented from the waterline up. Had there only been a high school science class present, it would have been one of the purest, most spontaneous moments of experiential education ever to unfold. Empiric consistency won the day. The two-member debris watch was reratified, and the scientific community resumed its celebrations.


pages: 451 words: 103,606

Machine Learning for Hackers by Drew Conway, John Myles White

call centre, centre right, correlation does not imply causation, data science, Debian, Erdős number, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, off-by-one error, p-value, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, recommendation engine, social graph, SpamAssassin, statistical model, text mining, the scientific method, traveling salesman

Cross-validation, at its core, simply refers to this ability of ours to simulate testing our model on future data by ignoring part of our historical data during the model-fitting process. Note If you went through the cases in Chapters 3 and 4, you’ll remember that we did exactly this then. In each case we split our data to train and test our classification and ranking models. Arguably, it’s simply an instantiation of the scientific method that we were all taught as children: (1) formulate a hypothesis, (2) gather data, and (3) test it. There’s just a bit of sleight of hand because we don’t formulate a hypothesis based on existing data and then go out and gather more data. Instead, we ignore part of our data while formulating our hypotheses, so that we can magically rediscover that missing data when it comes time to test our predictions.


pages: 398 words: 111,333

The Einstein of Money: The Life and Timeless Financial Wisdom of Benjamin Graham by Joe Carlen

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, Bernie Madoff, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business intelligence, discounted cash flows, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, full employment, index card, index fund, intangible asset, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Bogle, laissez-faire capitalism, margin call, means of production, Norman Mailer, oil shock, post-industrial society, price anchoring, price stability, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, the scientific method, Vanguard fund, young professional

As Buffett said, “There are no undervalued stocks, these theorists argue, because there are smart security analysts who utilize all available information to ensure unfailingly appropriate prices.”57 Of course, the fact that a particular investment approach would outperform the market by a significant margin certainly calls the universality of EMT into question and strengthens the validity of Graham's core premise that there are superior long-term rewards for identifying and purchasing securities that are underpriced relative to their intrinsic value. As a market commentator wrote in 2010 regarding a more current perspective on “The Superinvestors of Graham and Doddsville,” “Overall Warren Buffett beats Eugene Fama and the Efficient Market Hypothesis crowd by 5–2.”58 Or, in the language of the scientific method, the data is clearly in favor of the “Graham and Dodd” hypothesis (of superior returns through capitalizing upon high price-value discrepancies), not the EMT. Indeed, the performance of the gold miner equipped with a powerful sensor system is consistently better than the miner who's just taking random stabs in the ground.


pages: 410 words: 106,931

Age of Anger: A History of the Present by Pankaj Mishra

anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Brexit referendum, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, continuation of politics by other means, creative destruction, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Santayana, global village, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, informal economy, invisible hand, liberal capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, Oklahoma City bombing, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, planetary scale, plutocrats, power law, precariat, public intellectual, Republic of Letters, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, smart cities, Snapchat, stem cell, technological solutionism, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, traveling salesman, urban planning, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

They produced no single doctrine; their views could range from soberly comparativist (Montesquieu) to Voltaire’s militant resolves to crush the ‘infamous thing’ (the Catholic Church) and the technicism of Diderot’s and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie. But the future belonged to them and their determination to hold nothing sacred in the political and social world, to examine all phenomena in the light of reason, and regard everything as susceptible to change and manipulation through human will and power. The philosophes hoped to apply the scientific method discovered in the previous century to phenomena beyond the natural world, to government, economics, ethics, law, society and even the inner life. As D’Alembert put it, ‘philosophy is the experimental physics of the soul’. Nicolas de Condorcet hoped that science would ensure ‘the indefinite perfectability of the human species’.


pages: 323 words: 107,963

Ask Me About My Uterus: A Quest to Make Doctors Believe in Women's Pain by Abby Norman

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, complexity theory, correlation does not imply causation, double helix, Downton Abbey, feminist movement, financial independence, Kickstarter, messenger bag, period drama, phenotype, quantum entanglement, Saturday Night Live, the scientific method, women in the workforce

The years I’d spent doing so had not been out of interest; I’d been trying to solve a problem. It had been work. If I’d wanted to devote my life to these subjects out of passion, I would have been a biology major, not a dancer. It was only because I had an underlying aptitude for science and a deep respect for the scientific method that medicine as a discipline was something I could assimilate. And after years of working on it, I certainly found aspects of it that I enjoyed. I had to—otherwise it would have been very difficult to stay motivated to forge ahead. But just because I think negative-stranded RNA viruses are fascinating doesn’t mean I’m a hypochondriac.


pages: 444 words: 107,664

The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories by Edward Hollis

A Pattern Language, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, gentrification, place-making, South China Sea, the scientific method, Wunderkammern

Robinson and Warren had been appalled by the Christians that they found living in the land of Christ, sunk in Byzantine rituals and superstitions. The imperial powers hoped to save these Christians from their error and convert them to the more rational precepts of Protestantism. Impressing the locals with the scientific methods of history, archaeology, and geography would, the missionaries assumed, replace their childish cosmologies with a modern worldview. The British weren’t too enamored of the religious practices of the other natives of the Holy Land either. They observed how the Jews used to stand before a ruined wall in the middle of Jerusalem, weeping and rocking with grief; and with amused detachment, they called it the Wailing Wall.


pages: 361 words: 105,938

The Map That Changed the World by Simon Winchester

British Empire, gentleman farmer, Gregor Mendel, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, mortgage debt, spinning jenny, the market place, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, trade route, traveling salesman

His findings were to prove vitally important in triggering the collision that was eventually to take place between the religious beliefs that were in the ascendant at the time and the scientific reasoning that would provide the spur for the intellectual activities of a century later. Science was the key—along with the scientific method, with all its underpinnings of observation, deduction, and rational thought. The consequence, once the theories of Charles Darwin in particular had begun to sink in, was a profound modification of the way in which people thought of nature, of society, and of themselves. Which makes it all the more appropriate, given the impact his ideas would have, that it was into a time of suddenly accelerating scientific achievement and technological application that William Smith was born.


pages: 370 words: 105,085

Joel on Software by Joel Spolsky

AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, Apple Newton, barriers to entry, Beos Apple "Steve Jobs" next macos , business logic, c2.com, commoditize, Dennis Ritchie, General Magic , George Gilder, index card, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, machine readable, Metcalfe's law, Mitch Kapor, Multics, Network effects, new economy, off-by-one error, PageRank, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, pneumatic tube, profit motive, reality distortion field, Robert X Cringely, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, six sigma, slashdot, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, thinkpad, VA Linux, web application

I wound up saying Hire even though he was a crappy candidate. You know what? Everybody else who interviewed him said No Hire. So, don't listen to recruiters, don't ask around about the person before you interview them, and never, ever talk to the other interviewers about the candidate until you've both made your decisions independently. That's the scientific method. 1. Introduction The introduction phase of the interview is intended to put the candidates at ease. I ask them if they had a nice flight. I spend about 30 seconds telling them who I am and how the interview will work. I always reassure candidates that we are interested in how they go about solving problems, not the actual answer. 2.


The Case for Israel by Alan Dershowitz

affirmative action, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, different worldview, disinformation, facts on the ground, Jeffrey Epstein, Nelson Mandela, one-state solution, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, Yom Kippur War

As Husseini wrote in his memoirs, Our fundamental condition for cooperating with Germany was a free hand to eradicate every last Jew from Palestine and the Arab world. I asked Hitler for an explicit undertaking to allow us to solve the Jewish problem in a manner befitting our national and racial aspirations and according to the scientific methods innovated by Germany in the handling of its Jews. The answer I got was: “The Jews are yours.”7 The mufti was apparently planning to return to Palestine in the event of a German victory and to construct a death camp modeled after Auschwitz, near Nablus. Husseini incited his pro-Nazi followers with the words “Arise, o sons of Arabia.


pages: 335 words: 107,779

Some Remarks by Neal Stephenson

airport security, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bletchley Park, British Empire, cable laying ship, call centre, cellular automata, edge city, Eratosthenes, Fellow of the Royal Society, Hacker Ethic, high-speed rail, impulse control, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, Kim Stanley Robinson, megaproject, music of the spheres, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, oil shock, packet switching, pirate software, Richard Feynman, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Snow Crash, social web, Socratic dialogue, South China Sea, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method, trade route, Turing machine, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Vernor Vinge, X Prize

I distinctly remember looking at the kernels in the palm of my hand and noting that they had been washed with paint or ink of two or three different colors, and, though the color code was not explained to us (not, at least, before the expiration of my attention span), I caught the spoor of the Scientific Method, and guessed that different batches had been exposed to greater or lesser amounts of radiation. In any case, we were directed to take these seeds home and plant them and water them. In a few weeks’ time, we would bring the results to a meeting where two prizes would be handed out: one for the tallest, healthiest corn plant, the other for the weirdest mutation.


pages: 398 words: 107,788

Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking by E. Gabriella Coleman

activist lawyer, Benjamin Mako Hill, commoditize, Computer Lib, crowdsourcing, Debian, disinformation, Donald Knuth, dumpster diving, Eben Moglen, en.wikipedia.org, financial independence, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, ghettoisation, GnuPG, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, Herbert Marcuse, informal economy, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, Jaron Lanier, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, Jean Tirole, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Wall, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, means of production, Multics, Neal Stephenson, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, pirate software, popular electronics, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, software patent, software studies, Steve Ballmer, Steven Levy, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Hackers Conference, the scientific method, The Soul of a New Machine, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, web application, web of trust, Yochai Benkler

Early in their relationship with this technology, most hackers developed a strong pragmatic and utilitarian commitment to free software. But the underlying philosophy underwent change as more developers started to attach and make their own meanings. Access to source code and the model of open development represented by Linux, they said, was a superior technical methodology. Many likened it to the scientific method as an ideal. They saw it as under assault, corrupted by abuse of intellectual property law by corporations and, worse, universities that had started to patent inventions liberally in the 1980s. Others emphasized the pedagogical freedom that F/OSS provided them. “I realized,” a developer named Wolfgang wrote me over email, “that I could delve through that code and learn things that I could never learn from a high school teacher.


pages: 379 words: 108,129

An Optimist's Tour of the Future by Mark Stevenson

23andMe, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andy Kessler, Apollo 11, augmented reality, bank run, Boston Dynamics, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon-based life, clean water, computer age, decarbonisation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, flex fuel, Ford Model T, Future Shock, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, Hans Rosling, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, Leonard Kleinrock, life extension, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nick Bostrom, off grid, packet switching, peak oil, pre–internet, private spaceflight, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social intelligence, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the scientific method, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, X Prize

It might seem odd, therefore, that both are seen as key figures in the history of reason. But both Socrates and Bacon were very good at asking useful questions. In fact, Socrates is largely credited with coming up with a way of asking questions, ‘the Socratic method,’ which itself is at the core of the ‘scientific method,’ popularised by Bacon during the Enlightenment – a period of European history when ‘evidence’ and ‘faith’ had an almighty bun fight and the balance of power between church, state and citizen was questioned as philosophers and scientists challenged the prevailing orthodoxy of religious authority.


Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution by Howard Rheingold

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", A Pattern Language, Alvin Toffler, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, business climate, citizen journalism, computer vision, conceptual framework, creative destruction, Dennis Ritchie, digital divide, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, experimental economics, experimental subject, Extropian, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, Hacker Ethic, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Herman Kahn, history of Unix, hockey-stick growth, Howard Rheingold, invention of the telephone, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, Metcalfe's law, Metcalfe’s law, more computing power than Apollo, move 37, Multics, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, pez dispenser, planetary scale, pre–internet, prisoner's dilemma, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, RFID, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, SETI@home, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, slashdot, social intelligence, spectrum auction, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, urban planning, web of trust, Whole Earth Review, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

But they include also, and perhaps ultimately more importantly, the gradual smartening up and interconnection of the many everyday objects which populate our homes and offices.” 74 Clark’s notions support the conjecture that smart mobs in computation-pervaded environments could enable some people to transform the way they think and the way civilization operates, the way some people used printing presses, literacy, the scientific method, and new social contracts to transform feudalism into modernism. Enlightenment rationality has its limits, but the reason it is called “the Enlightenment” is that the changes enabled by the systematic use of reason, aided by mathematics and literacy, represented a step toward a more democratic and humane world.


pages: 371 words: 109,320

News and How to Use It: What to Believe in a Fake News World by Alan Rusbridger

airport security, basic income, Bellingcat, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Climategate, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, crisis actor, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of journalism, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global pandemic, Google Earth, green new deal, hive mind, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Jeremy Corbyn, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Murray Gell-Mann, Narrative Science, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, post-truth, profit motive, public intellectual, publication bias, Seymour Hersh, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, tech baron, the scientific method, TikTok, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, yellow journalism

British health ministers repeatedly denied the possible risk of transmission of the cattle-borne illness BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy) to humans, but ate their words when it caused a public health crisis and collapse of beef sales in the 1990s – as well as a major crisis of public trust. In the worst cases, of course, experts can hide the truth and intentionally harm the public for personal gain, as Exxon’s scientists did when they understood human-made climate change in the 1980s. Experts may even defend the idea of experts getting things wrong. Isn’t that what the scientific method is all about: hypothesise, be wrong, try again? It does take a leap of faith to trust experts to tell the truth. But the question of honest wrongness is more complex. The public tends to be highly averse to risks related to unknown unknowns: the gulf between public and scientific support for GMOs, for example, is a result of public concern for future disasters that scientists can’t predict, while scientists and policymakers are often content with evaluating known unknowns.


pages: 419 words: 109,241

A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond by Daniel Susskind

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Big Tech, blue-collar work, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, computerized trading, creative destruction, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Google Glasses, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Hargreaves, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, low skilled workers, lump of labour, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, precariat, purchasing power parity, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social intelligence, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, tacit knowledge, technological solutionism, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, wealth creators, working poor, working-age population, Y Combinator

Economists tend to agree with one another that this growth was propelled by sustained technological progress, though not on the reasons why it started just where and when it did—in Western Europe, toward the end of the eighteenth century.3 One reason may be geographical: certain countries had bountiful resources, a hospitable climate, and easily traversable coastlines and rivers for trade. Another may be cultural: people in different communities, shaped by very different intellectual histories and religions, had different attitudes toward the scientific method, finance, hard work, and each other (the level of “trust” in a society is said to be important). The most common explanation of all, though, is institutional: certain states protected property rights and enforced the rule of law in a way that encouraged risk taking, hustle, and innovation, while others did not.


pages: 344 words: 104,522

Woke, Inc: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam by Vivek Ramaswamy

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-bias training, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, carbon footprint, clean tech, cloud computing, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, critical race theory, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, defund the police, deplatforming, desegregation, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fudge factor, full employment, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, green new deal, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, impact investing, independent contractor, index fund, Jeff Bezos, lockdown, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, military-industrial complex, Network effects, Parler "social media", plant based meat, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, random walk, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Bork, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, single source of truth, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, source of truth, sovereign wealth fund, Susan Wojcicki, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, Vanguard fund, Virgin Galactic, WeWork, zero-sum game

As The Washington Post describes it, DiAngelo believes that whites are “an undifferentiated racist collective, socialized to ‘fundamentally hate blackness’ and to institutionalize that prejudice in politics and culture.”2 DiAngelo’s rise is emblematic of the increased adoption of a previously fringe school of thought that has now spread across corporate America through mandated Diversity trainings and has even made its way into exhibits at the Smithsonian.3 DiAngelo and her devotees seem to believe that things like the scientific method, use of written word, punctuality, and hard work are “hallmarks of whiteness” and that it perpetuates white supremacy for employers and teachers to valorize them. In DiAngelo’s telling, the idea of meritocracy is a white supremacist myth meant to justify existing racial hierarchies as the product of hard work.


pages: 375 words: 105,586

A Small Farm Future: Making the Case for a Society Built Around Local Economies, Self-Provisioning, Agricultural Diversity and a Shared Earth by Chris Smaje

agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alfred Russel Wallace, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, biodiversity loss, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, climate change refugee, collaborative consumption, Corn Laws, COVID-19, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, energy transition, European colonialism, Extinction Rebellion, failed state, fake news, financial deregulation, financial independence, Food sovereignty, Ford Model T, future of work, Gail Bradbrook, garden city movement, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Hans Rosling, hive mind, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jevons paradox, land reform, mass immigration, megacity, middle-income trap, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, post-industrial society, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, rent-seeking, rewilding, Rutger Bregman, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

The route to unlocking the mysteries of the transcendent changed from spiritual introspection to practical enquiry into the vastness of space-time or the minuteness of atomic and cellular architectures. I don’t mean to minimise the differences between modern science and premodern religion. But it’s worth emphasising a continuity. As a mode of enquiry, science in the form of the scientific method has sharpened the self-critical pursuit of transcendent religious knowledge by flawed and ignorant humans into an edifice of progressive knowledge which has been so spectacularly successful that, ironically, we’ve returned to a way of being not so different from an ancient world of spirits, where everyday objects like mobile phones, virtual assistants and robotic machinery work in mysterious and uncanny ways beyond the comprehension of most of us.


pages: 404 words: 107,356

The Future of Fusion Energy by Jason Parisi, Justin Ball

Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, Boeing 747, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Colonization of Mars, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, heat death of the universe, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, ITER tokamak, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, nuclear winter, performance metric, profit motive, random walk, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Stuxnet, the scientific method, time dilation, uranium enrichment

In 1945, the nuclear sword mainly cut militarily. In 2017, its use is much more balanced. As our mastery of fusion energy systems improves, the balance could tip even further. Regardless, the history of humanity’s relationship with science is fraught with complexity. From agriculture to germ theory, computing to quantum mechanics, the scientific method does not filter for benevolence. Rather, human nature shapes knowledge into a wide spectrum of applications. Science may set the paint palette, the canvas texture, the brush thickness, but humans will determine how and what to paint. While nuclear physics is not the only field of knowledge with a dark side, its applications are among the most consequential.


pages: 446 words: 109,157

The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth by Jonathan Rauch

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, active measures, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Ayatollah Khomeini, Black Lives Matter, centre right, classic study, Climategate, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, deplatforming, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, framing effect, hive mind, illegal immigration, information asymmetry, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, jimmy wales, Jon Ronson, Louis Pasteur, market bubble, meta-analysis, microaggression, mirror neurons, Peace of Westphalia, peer-to-peer, post-truth, profit motive, QAnon, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Russian election interference, social software, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

“Younger people have tuned in, too,” reported the New York Times.78 Trust in scientists, which had never collapsed as trust in journalists had done, also rose. By 2019 almost 90 percent of the public said they had a great deal or a fair amount of confidence in scientists to act in the public interest, and almost two-thirds said that the scientific method generally produces accurate conclusions, according to polling by the Pew Research Center.79 What one saw, then, was the reality-based community scrambling and struggling, innovating and improvising, to adapt to troll epistemology. With success? Yes. Falling short? Also yes. How well troll epistemology could thrive without a troll-in-chief in the White House was an open question.


pages: 432 words: 106,612

Trillions: How a Band of Wall Street Renegades Invented the Index Fund and Changed Finance Forever by Robin Wigglesworth

Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big Tech, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Blitzscaling, Brownian motion, buy and hold, California gold rush, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, cloud computing, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, COVID-19, data science, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, Henri Poincaré, index fund, industrial robot, invention of the wheel, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John Bogle, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, lockdown, Louis Bachelier, machine readable, money market fund, Myron Scholes, New Journalism, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, RAND corporation, random walk, risk-adjusted returns, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, rolodex, seminal paper, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, subprime mortgage crisis, the scientific method, transaction costs, uptick rule, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund

Fouse resolved to work for someone who valued innovation, and picked up the phone to call McQuown, whom he had met through the CRSP conventions for heretical investment thinkers. He even sent McQuown a long memo explaining why Wells Fargo should hire him, describing himself as “keenly analytical, innovative, independent of thought, dedicated to the scientific method, outspoken, and somewhat impatient with ignorance.” McQuown snapped him up, and Fouse was promptly made head of stock market research in Wells Fargo’s financial analysis department, working under Vertin, who finally had his bridge between the new and the old. At this stage, Vertin’s shift was far along, but there were still plenty of office politics skirmishes.


pages: 407 words: 108,030

How to Talk to a Science Denier: Conversations With Flat Earthers, Climate Deniers, and Others Who Defy Reason by Lee McIntyre

2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alfred Russel Wallace, An Inconvenient Truth, Boris Johnson, carbon credits, carbon tax, Climategate, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crisis actor, different worldview, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dunning–Kruger effect, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, experimental subject, fake news, false flag, green new deal, Higgs boson, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Shellenberger, obamacare, off-the-grid, Paris climate accords, post-truth, precautionary principle, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, scientific mainstream, selection bias, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steven Levy, the scientific method, University of East Anglia, Upton Sinclair, Virgin Galactic, WikiLeaks

What is the benefit of believing in Flat Earth? Because it’s the truth! And it’s consistent with the Bible. What about the scientific proofs of a round Earth? They are all flawed, which is what the rest of the conference was about. To spend two days attending seminars with titles such as “Globebusters,” “Flat Earth with the Scientific Method,” “Flat Earth Activism,” “NASA and Other Space Lies,” “14+ Ways the Bible Says Flat Earth,” and “Talking to Your Family and Friends about Flat Earth” is in some ways to spend two days in an asylum. The arguments were absurd yet intricate and not easily run to ground, especially if one buys into the Flat Earther’s insistence on immediate first-person sensory proof.


pages: 384 words: 105,110

A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life by Heather Heying, Bret Weinstein

autism spectrum disorder, biofilm, Carrington event, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, dark matter, delayed gratification, discovery of DNA, double helix, epigenetics, Francisco Pizarro, germ theory of disease, Gregor Mendel, helicopter parent, hygiene hypothesis, lockdown, meta-analysis, microbiome, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, phenotype, planned obsolescence, precautionary principle, profit motive, Silicon Valley, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, theory of mind

Trade-offs being ubiquitous, a focus on memorized details, then, will likely come at the expense of a focus on the big picture. School can also be useful in teaching both science and art, a task made easier if the assumption is that children have latent scientific and artistic tendencies already. While people don’t intuit the formalization of the scientific method, children are inclined to observe pattern, to postulate reasons for the pattern, and to try to figure out if they’re right. All people are inclined to be verificationists, to look for verifying evidence of their own correctness, rather than to look for falsifying evidence that, if it doesn’t show up, makes their precious idea look more and more likely.


Life Is Simple by Johnjoe McFadden

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Alfred Russel Wallace, animal electricity, anthropic principle, Astronomia nova, Bayesian statistics, Brownian motion, Commentariolus, complexity theory, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, COVID-19, dark matter, double helix, Edmond Halley, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, gentleman farmer, Gregor Mendel, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, horn antenna, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, lockdown, music of the spheres, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Plato's cave, retrograde motion, Richard Feynman, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, William of Occam

When he was only twenty-two, he published a small treatise on a new kind of weighing balance that earned him, in 1589, the position of chair of mathematics at Pisa. Remarkably, many of his lecture notes survive from this period. Although written in his own hand, it appears that, rather than composing his own notes, he plagiarised those written by another academic, a scholar called Paulus Vallius who taught logic and the scientific method at the Collegio Romano in Rome. From these notes we can see that Galileo taught mathematics and physics in the scholastic Aristotelian tradition and was aware of the nominalist philosophers including the Merton Calculators and William of Occam, whom he refers to several times.3 In 1592, he obtained a position at the more prestigious University of Padua, where he lectured on mathematics, mechanics and astronomy.


pages: 371 words: 107,141

You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All by Adrian Hon

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", 4chan, Adam Curtis, Adrian Hon, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Astronomia nova, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, bread and circuses, British Empire, buy and hold, call centre, computer vision, conceptual framework, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, David Sedaris, deep learning, delayed gratification, democratizing finance, deplatforming, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, electronic logging device, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, fake news, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, Galaxy Zoo, game design, gamification, George Floyd, gig economy, GitHub removed activity streaks, Google Glasses, Hacker News, Hans Moravec, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, job automation, jobs below the API, Johannes Kepler, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, linked data, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, LuLaRoe, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, megaproject, meme stock, meta-analysis, Minecraft, moral panic, multilevel marketing, non-fungible token, Ocado, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Parler "social media", passive income, payment for order flow, prisoner's dilemma, QAnon, QR code, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, r/findbostonbombers, replication crisis, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Coase, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skinner box, spinning jenny, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, why are manhole covers round?, workplace surveillance

These misrepresentations come at a time when behavioural science itself has been in the midst of a “replication crisis,” along with fields like economics and medicine.6 Influential findings like the results of the marshmallow test, which showed that children’s ability to delay gratification predicted their future academic achievement, have failed to be replicated after repeated retesting.7 In other words, a lot of what’s published in scientific journals has turned out to be completely wrong. In response to this crisis, scientists are adopting better practices, such as using better statistical methods, more diligently retracting bad papers, and preregistering studies to avoid cherry-picking results. But even well-constructed studies can turn out to be wrong; the scientific method is a process, not a way of guaranteeing truth. Ignorance of how science works is no excuse when you’re using its imprimatur to draw customers in, especially when it comes to health and fitness. Designers should resist placing too much (or, frankly, any) faith in studies with weird new ways to boost intelligence or lose weight—at least until they’ve been thoroughly replicated.


pages: 1,042 words: 266,547

Security Analysis by Benjamin Graham, David Dodd

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, asset-backed security, backtesting, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, book value, business cycle, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, carried interest, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, diversification, diversified portfolio, fear of failure, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, flag carrier, full employment, Greenspan put, index fund, intangible asset, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, land bank, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, low cost airline, low interest rates, Michael Milken, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, prudent man rule, Right to Buy, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, secular stagnation, shareholder value, stock buybacks, The Chicago School, the market place, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, two and twenty, zero-coupon bond

It took Graham 20 years—which is to say, a complete cycle from the bull market of the Roaring Twenties through the dark, nearly ruinous days of the early 1930s—to refine his investment philosophy into a discipline that was as rigorous as the Euclidean theorems he had studied in college. An Analytical Discipline This analytical approach is evident from the first chapter; indeed, it is the cornerstone of Part I, in which Graham and Dodd set forth the fundamentals. They promise to use “established principles and sound logic,” or what the authors term “the scientific method,” and yet they recognize that, as with law or medicine, investing is not hard science but a discipline in which both skill and chance play a role. Security Analysis is their prescription for maximizing the influence of the former and minimizing that of the latter. If you want to trust your portfolio to luck, this is not the book for you.

Chapter 1 THE SCOPE AND LIMITATIONS OF SECURITY ANALYSIS. THE CONCEPT OF INTRINSIC VALUE Copyright © 2009 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Click here for terms of use. ANALYSIS CONNOTES the careful study of available facts with the attempt to draw conclusions therefrom based on established principles and sound logic. It is part of the scientific method. But in applying analysis to the field of securities we encounter the serious obstacle that investment is by nature not an exact science. The same is true, however, of law and medicine, for here also both individual skill (art) and chance are important factors in determining success or failure.


Trading Risk: Enhanced Profitability Through Risk Control by Kenneth L. Grant

backtesting, business cycle, buy and hold, commodity trading advisor, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, delta neutral, diversification, diversified portfolio, financial engineering, fixed income, frictionless, frictionless market, George Santayana, global macro, implied volatility, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Meriwether, Long Term Capital Management, managed futures, market design, Myron Scholes, performance metric, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Sharpe ratio, short selling, South Sea Bubble, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, two-sided market, uptick rule, value at risk, volatility arbitrage, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

Many of these concepts were well established long before that fateful day when I ventured into the field of risk management; but at least from where I stand, the process of applying them cohesively to the practice of portfolio management has been painfully slow to take hold. Most of my work over the years has thus involved the application of simple statistical principals to a practical risk-taking setting. Throughout the evolution of these efforts, I have attempted, at least nominally, to apply the scientific method (OGHET—Observe, Generalize, Hypothesize, Experiment, Theorize—to those who remember their school days) and would summarize the conclusions that I have drawn in the process in the following manner: • There is a bona fide science that underlies the activities of trading, investment, and portfolio management. 6 TRADING RISK • The various components of this science can be isolated and evaluated in terms of their impact on financial performance. • Using an extremely simple set of statistical and arithmetic tools, it is possible to evaluate which elements of a given portfolio management process are working efficiently and which are not. • In turn, by making these quantitative comparisons across periods of time and intervals of varying success, it is possible to gain insights into the specific elements of the process that are underperforming in periods of performance difficulty versus those that are working when things are going right. • Although it is not always possible to correct problems without generating other inefficiencies in the portfolio management process, it is extremely useful to understand these undercurrents, such that traders can harness their strengths and minimize their weaknesses in the most effective manner available. • The methodology is also very useful in determining which types of market conditions work most directly in portfolio managers’ favor and which work against them.


pages: 372 words: 111,573

10% Human: How Your Body's Microbes Hold the Key to Health and Happiness by Alanna Collen

Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, Barry Marshall: ulcers, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, biofilm, clean water, correlation does not imply causation, David Strachan, discovery of penicillin, Drosophila, Edward Jenner, Fall of the Berlin Wall, friendly fire, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, Helicobacter pylori, hygiene hypothesis, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, illegal immigration, John Snow's cholera map, Kickstarter, Louis Pasteur, Maui Hawaii, meta-analysis, microbiome, phenotype, placebo effect, seminal paper, the scientific method

In cases of mania or severe melancholy, surgical removal of the colon was often prescribed – known as a ‘short-circuit’ procedure. Despite a frighteningly high death rate, and a huge impact on quality of life, this radical intervention was deemed worthwhile by the doctors of the day. Far be it from me to critique the degree of adherence to the scientific method of a Nobel prize-winner, but Metchnikoff’s dabblings in intestinal microbiology, in this book at least, barely met reasonable standards of repeatability, comparison against a control, or concerns of causation. His scientific coming-of-age coincided with a period of history in which medical scientists were overcome with excitement about the research avenues opened up by Louis Pasteur’s germ theory.


pages: 412 words: 115,266

The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values by Sam Harris

Albert Einstein, banking crisis, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, cognitive bias, cognitive load, end world poverty, endowment effect, energy security, experimental subject, framing effect, higher-order functions, hindsight bias, impulse control, John Nash: game theory, language acquisition, longitudinal study, loss aversion, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, Monty Hall problem, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, peak-end rule, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, public intellectual, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, scientific worldview, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, the scientific method, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem, ultimatum game, World Values Survey

The scientific community’s reluctance to take a stand on moral issues has come at a price. It has made science appear divorced, in principle, from the most important questions of human life. From the point of view of popular culture, science often seems like little more than a hatchery for technology. While most educated people will concede that the scientific method has delivered centuries of fresh embarrassment to religion on matters of fact, it is now an article of almost unquestioned certainty, both inside and outside scientific circles, that science has nothing to say about what constitutes a good life. Religious thinkers in all faiths, and on both ends of the political spectrum, are united on precisely this point; the defense one most often hears for belief in God is not that there is compelling evidence for His existence, but that faith in Him is the only reliable source of meaning and moral guidance.


pages: 424 words: 114,905

Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again by Eric Topol

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Big Tech, bioinformatics, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, cognitive bias, Colonization of Mars, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital twin, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, fault tolerance, gamification, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Santayana, Google Glasses, ImageNet competition, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, Joi Ito, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, meta-analysis, microbiome, move 37, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, nudge unit, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pattern recognition, performance metric, personalized medicine, phenotype, placebo effect, post-truth, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, techlash, TED Talk, text mining, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem, War on Poverty, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population

There are many science apprentice functions that AI can help with, including conducting far better literature searches (as with Iris.ai and Semantic Scholar), designing or running experiments (as with Zymergen and Transcriptic), interpreting data (like Nutonian, which produces a mathematical theory based in data ingestion), and writing the paper (with Citeomatic, which finds missing citations in the manuscript draft).77 In cellular and molecular biology, the manual labor of plating cells and counting colonies can be preempted. Accuracy and efficiency of executing certain experiments have been enhanced. Some researchers have embraced AI for its data-driven approach to “designing” (many have questioned this term since it involves human intuition) the next set of experiments. The concept of “accelerating the scientific method” has already been validated by many of the advances I’ve summarized and so many more in the pipeline.78 But it’s fair to say there are plenty of constraints for the types of lab-related work that can even be partially automated by AI tools. Apprenticeship opportunities will continue to emerge throughout all disciplines of science.


pages: 463 words: 118,936

Darwin Among the Machines by George Dyson

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, backpropagation, Bletchley Park, British Empire, carbon-based life, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Danny Hillis, Donald Davies, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, finite state, IFF: identification friend or foe, independent contractor, invention of the telescope, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Watt: steam engine, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, launch on warning, low earth orbit, machine readable, Menlo Park, Nash equilibrium, Norbert Wiener, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, pattern recognition, phenotype, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, spectrum auction, strong AI, synthetic biology, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture, zero-sum game

“The little insectoid units themselves carried on these operations consciously, though without understanding their significance; but the mind of the swarm had lost the power of attending to them. Its concern was almost wholly with such activities as called for unified conscious control.”33 Until we understand our own consciousness, there is no way to agree on what, if anything, constitutes consciousness among machines. The subject leads us into nonfalsifiable hypotheses, where the scientific method comes to an end. Three results are possible, given any supposedly conscious machine. Either the machine says, “Yes, I am conscious,” or it says, “No, I am not conscious,” or it says nothing at all. Which are we to believe? All we can do at this point is use our imaginations. And in this Olaf Stapledon was sixty years ahead.


pages: 410 words: 114,005

Black Box Thinking: Why Most People Never Learn From Their Mistakes--But Some Do by Matthew Syed

Abraham Wald, Airbus A320, Alfred Russel Wallace, Arthur Eddington, Atul Gawande, Black Swan, Boeing 747, British Empire, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, crew resource management, deliberate practice, double helix, epigenetics, fail fast, fear of failure, flying shuttle, fundamental attribution error, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Henri Poincaré, hindsight bias, Isaac Newton, iterative process, James Dyson, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, luminiferous ether, mandatory minimum, meta-analysis, minimum viable product, publication bias, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, selection bias, seminal paper, Shai Danziger, Silicon Valley, six sigma, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, US Airways Flight 1549, Wall-E, Yom Kippur War

., with the relatively small amount of knowledge of early mankind], we wouldn’t get any further than Adam did.”8 But theories that claim to furnish knowledge of the world, that claim to have never failed, held in place by authority alone, are a different matter. It is these ideas, and the underlying belief that they are sacrosanct, that is so destructive. The scientific method is about pushing out the frontiers of our knowledge through a willingness to embrace error. Think back to Galileo’s disproof of Aristotle’s theory about heavier objects falling faster than lighter ones (perhaps apocryphally he did this by dropping balls from the Leaning Tower of Pisa).


pages: 384 words: 118,572

The Confidence Game: The Psychology of the Con and Why We Fall for It Every Time by Maria Konnikova

Abraham Maslow, attribution theory, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bluma Zeigarnik, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, coherent worldview, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark triade / dark tetrad, endowment effect, epigenetics, Higgs boson, higher-order functions, hindsight bias, lake wobegon effect, lateral thinking, libertarian paternalism, Milgram experiment, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, post-work, publish or perish, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, seminal paper, side project, Skype, Steven Pinker, sunk-cost fallacy, the scientific method, tulip mania, Walter Mischel

It’s imagistic. It’s personally convincing. It’s emotional. And it’s strong. In fact, Bruner argues, it’s responsible for far more than its logical, systematic counterpart. It’s the basis of myth and history, ritual and social relations. “Popper proposed that falsifiability is the cornerstone of the scientific method,” Bruner told the American Psychological Association at their annual meeting in Toronto in the summer of 1984. “But believability is the hallmark of the well-formed narrative.” Even science constructs narratives all the time. There is no scientific method without the narrative thread that holds the whole enterprise together.


pages: 402 words: 110,972

Nerds on Wall Street: Math, Machines and Wired Markets by David J. Leinweber

"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 11, asset allocation, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bob Litterman, book value, business cycle, butter production in bangladesh, butterfly effect, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, collateralized debt obligation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Danny Hillis, demand response, disintermediation, distributed generation, diversification, diversified portfolio, electricity market, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, fake news, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Gordon Gekko, Hans Moravec, Herman Kahn, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index fund, information retrieval, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Ivan Sutherland, Jim Simons, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, Kenneth Arrow, load shedding, Long Term Capital Management, machine readable, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, market fragmentation, market microstructure, Mars Rover, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, negative equity, Network effects, optical character recognition, paper trading, passive investing, pez dispenser, phenotype, prediction markets, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, semantic web, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Small Order Execution System, smart grid, smart meter, social web, South Sea Bubble, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, time value of money, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, Turing machine, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, value engineering, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine, yield curve, Yogi Berra, your tax dollars at work

It takes forever to distinguish luck from skill with 100 percent certainty, so definitive claims in this regard must be viewed with caution. But these A Gentle Intr oduction to Computerized Investing 131 approaches are not weird black-box ideas. They are based on a few very fundamental ideas: • Market inefficiencies are out there. Use the scientific method to systematically evaluate potential market inefficiencies on an ongoing basis. Look at stocks individually and in groups. • All the stocks, all the time. Search for these inefficiencies in all the stocks, all the time. The progress in computer technology is one of the wonders of history. IBM’s Deep Blue used an analogous relentless approach to chess. • Keep what you find.


pages: 476 words: 118,381

Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier by Neil Degrasse Tyson, Avis Lang

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Arthur Eddington, asset allocation, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, carbon-based life, centralized clearinghouse, cosmic abundance, cosmic microwave background, dark matter, Gordon Gekko, high-speed rail, informal economy, invention of movable type, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, Karl Jansky, Kuiper Belt, Large Hadron Collider, Louis Blériot, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Pluto: dwarf planet, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, space junk, space pen, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, trade route

They forever changed the nature of discovery and the paths taken to achieve it; no longer would common sense be accepted as an effective tool of intellectual investigation. Our unaided five senses were shown to be not only insufficient but untrustworthy. To understand the world required trustworthy measurements—which might not agree with one’s preconceptions—derived from experiments conducted with care and precision. The scientific method of hypothesis, unbiased testing, and retesting would rise to significance and continue unabated thenceforth, unavoidably shutting out the ill-equipped layperson from modern research and discovery. Incentives to Discovery Travel was the method of choice for most historic explorers because technology had not yet progressed to permit discovery by other means.


pages: 298 words: 43,745

Understanding Sponsored Search: Core Elements of Keyword Advertising by Jim Jansen

AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Black Swan, bounce rate, business intelligence, butterfly effect, call centre, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, content marketing, correlation does not imply causation, data science, en.wikipedia.org, first-price auction, folksonomy, Future Shock, information asymmetry, information retrieval, intangible asset, inventory management, life extension, linear programming, longitudinal study, machine translation, megacity, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, PageRank, place-making, power law, price mechanism, psychological pricing, random walk, Schrödinger's Cat, sealed-bid auction, search costs, search engine result page, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, sentiment analysis, social bookmarking, social web, software as a service, stochastic process, tacit knowledge, telemarketer, the market place, The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, yield management

Although the analyst always wants to maximize all three of these criteria simultaneously, it cannot be done. This is one fundamental dilemma of the analysis process. The very things that increase one of these three features will reduce one or both of the others. Credibility, Validity, and Reliability The elementary steps of the scientific method are: • • • • Construct a hypothesis Test the hypothesis Analysis the data Report the findings. You basically follow the same steps in SSA. Trace data from sponsored-search logs should be examined during analysis with the same criteria used for all research data. These criteria are credibility, validity, and reliability.


pages: 390 words: 114,538

Digital Wars: Apple, Google, Microsoft and the Battle for the Internet by Charles Arthur

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, cloud computing, commoditize, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, disintermediation, don't be evil, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, gravity well, Jeff Bezos, John Gruber, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Network effects, PageRank, PalmPilot, pre–internet, Robert X Cringely, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, software patent, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, the long tail, the new new thing, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, turn-by-turn navigation, upwardly mobile, vertical integration

The mechanics of running a gigantic search engine that essentially contains a constantly updated copy of the internet mean that decisions have to be based around what will be most effective with the largest number of people. If a 5-pixel border can be shown to lead to more clicks than a 3-pixel one, then there is no room for discussion, because Page and Brin built their company around, and its ethos flows from, empiricism. Google borrowed its process from a method of ranking scientific papers, but imported the scientific method wholesale as a mode of problem solving. Microsoft, meanwhile, also deals with huge numbers of people, through its main products – Windows and Office. But, as they are desktop software, they can be tweaked and added to endlessly, which has led over the years to a kitchen-sink approach in which no feature has been left out of either, especially not if a few key business users have demanded it.


pages: 422 words: 119,123

To the Edges of the Earth: 1909, the Race for the Three Poles, and the Climax of the Age of Exploration by Edward J. Larson

back-to-the-land, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, Livingstone, I presume, Scientific racism, the scientific method, trade route, yellow journalism

When the first attempt failed at 100 feet due to faulty drilling methods, David signed on to lead a second effort in 1897. His expertise as a geologist coupled with his experience drilling shafts for the New South Wales Geological Survey made him a perfect candidate to finish the job. Though unmentioned at the time, David also welcomed the chance to defend science and the scientific method from religiously motivated critics. The son of a Welsh minister and a direct descendant of James Ussher, the seventeenth-century Anglican bishop best known for calculating the date of creation from the timeline provided in Genesis, David had a religious upbringing. Then, in what his authoritative biographer depicted as “a real crisis of faith” while a science student at Oxford, he rejected biblical Christianity in favor of a spiritual sense of a guiding providence.45 With the Funafuti drilling project, he could lend support to scientific progress over religious traditionalism while leading a potentially significant and exciting expedition.


pages: 391 words: 112,312

The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid by Lawrence Wright

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blockchain, business cycle, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, fake news, full employment, George Floyd, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, lab leak, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, meta-analysis, mouse model, Nate Silver, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, plutocrats, QAnon, RAND corporation, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Steve Bannon, the scientific method, TikTok, transcontinental railway, zoonotic diseases

Michelangelo, da Vinci, Palladio, Brunelleschi, Boccaccio, Petrarch, Machiavelli, and Dante Alighieri became foundation stones of European thought. Italian explorers, including Christopher Columbus, Giovanni da Verrazano, and Amerigo Vespucci, changed the map of the world. Galileo established the scientific method. The Italian Renaissance was the greatest efflorescence of science and art in Western civilization. I believe we are at another inflection point, when society will make a radical adjustment, for good or ill. History offers mixed lessons. The Plague of Athens, in 430 BC, led to a prolonged period of lawlessness and immorality.


Succeeding With AI: How to Make AI Work for Your Business by Veljko Krunic

AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, anti-fragile, anti-pattern, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, Bayesian statistics, bioinformatics, Black Swan, Boeing 737 MAX, business process, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, correlation coefficient, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, en.wikipedia.org, fail fast, Gini coefficient, high net worth, information retrieval, Internet of things, iterative process, job automation, Lean Startup, license plate recognition, minimum viable product, natural language processing, recommendation engine, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, six sigma, smart cities, speech recognition, statistical model, strong AI, tail risk, The Design of Experiments, the scientific method, web application, zero-sum game

Stealing machine learning models via prediction APIs. arXiv. 2016 Sep;arXiv:1609.02943 [cs.CR]. Marcus G. Deep learning: A critical appraisal. arXiv. 2018 Jan;arXiv:1801.00631 [cs.AI]. APPENDIX 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 C Bibliography 253 Anderson C. The end of theory: The data deluge makes the scientific method obsolete. WIRED. 2008 Jun 23 [cited 2018 Jul 2]. Available from: https:// www.wired.com/2008/06/pb-theory/ Wikimedia Foundation. AlphaGo versus Lee Sedol. Wikipedia. [Cited 2018 Jun 21.] Available from: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=AlphaGo_versus _Lee_Sedol&oldid=846917953 DeepMind.


pages: 458 words: 116,832

The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism by Nick Couldry, Ulises A. Mejias

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, behavioural economics, Big Tech, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, corporate governance, dark matter, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, different worldview, digital capitalism, digital divide, discovery of the americas, disinformation, diversification, driverless car, Edward Snowden, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, extractivism, fake news, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Infrastructure as a Service, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, PageRank, pattern recognition, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, profit maximization, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Salesforce, scientific management, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, social intelligence, software studies, sovereign wealth fund, surveillance capitalism, techlash, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, Thomas Davenport, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, trade route, undersea cable, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, work culture , workplace surveillance

Science, Technology, & Human Values 41, no. 1 (2016): 93–117. Ananny, Mike, and Kate Crawford. “Seeing Without Knowing: Limitations of the Transparency Ideal and Its Application to Algorithmic Accountability.” New Media & Society 20, no. 3 (2018): 973–89. Anderson, Chris. “The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete.” Wired, June 23, 2008. Andrejevic, Mark. Infoglut. London: Routledge, 2013. Andrejevic, Mark, Alison Hearn, and Helen Kennedy. “Cultural Studies of Data Mining: Introduction.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 19, nos. 4–5 (2015): 379–94. Angwin, Julia, and Terry Parris. “Facebook Lets Advertisers Exclude Users by Race.”


pages: 397 words: 113,304

Spineless: The Science of Jellyfish and the Art of Growing a Backbone by Juli Berwald

clean water, complexity theory, crowdsourcing, Downton Abbey, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Kickstarter, microplastics / micro fibres, ocean acidification, Panamax, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Skype, sparse data, stem cell, Suez canal 1869, TED Talk, the scientific method, Wilhelm Olbers

He strode across the room and ripped my notebook from under my pen, folded it closed, and set it on the far side of the U-shaped table. “Seriously?” I asked. “I can’t take notes?” “No,” he growled. “This isn’t published yet.” “All right,” I replied, and leaned back in my chair to just listen. — Models are at the heart of science because they define the scientific method. Every hypothesis is really just a model of something in the world. And despite their simplifications and assumptions, computer models are one of the most effective tools we have for making predictions about the future. That’s why many scientists use them so much. Historically, jellyfish have been considered an ecological dead end, meaning they weren’t important to the cycling of the ecosystem.


pages: 495 words: 114,451

Life on the Rocks: Building a Future for Coral Reefs by Juli Berwald

23andMe, 3D printing, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Black Lives Matter, carbon footprint, Charles Lindbergh, circular economy, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, en.wikipedia.org, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial innovation, Garrett Hardin, George Floyd, Google Earth, Gregor Mendel, Greta Thunberg, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), lateral thinking, Maui Hawaii, microbiome, mouse model, ocean acidification, Panamax, Paris climate accords, Skype, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, TED Talk, the scientific method, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons

Asking the people involved in those struggles for advice, the coral scientists heard the same thing over and over: Don’t be cautious. Either the mood in the room shifted or my own mood shifted—maybe both. This wasn’t a typical science meeting at all. Scientists are generally conservative by nature. The scientific method demands the accumulation of information before drawing conclusions. These scientists were saying, “Not in this case. There’s no time for that.” Tom flipped through slides of coral farms: orchards of PVC pipes hung with coral fragments, metal stands studded with coral branches. He spoke of coral restoration scientists developing corals that could withstand repeated exposure to warming temperatures.


Hacking Capitalism by Söderberg, Johan; Söderberg, Johan;

Abraham Maslow, air gap, Alvin Toffler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Debian, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, Donald Davies, Eben Moglen, Erik Brynjolfsson, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, frictionless, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, IBM and the Holocaust, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of radio, invention of the telephone, Jacquard loom, James Watt: steam engine, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Ken Thompson, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Mitch Kapor, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Norbert Wiener, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, patent troll, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, planned obsolescence, post scarcity, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, profit motive, RFID, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, safety bicycle, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, software patent, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, tech worker, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, tragedy of the anticommons, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Whole Earth Catalog, Yochai Benkler

Herbert Marcuse is iconic for formulating a pessimistic, leftist position on technology. His reproach was not directed against any technology in particular but against technological rationality as such. In Marcuse’s view, the master-servant perspective is embedded in the instrumentality of the scientific method. It mirrors the domination of humans in the capitalist, patriarchal society. These remarks ought to caution us against an overly optimistic assessment of current trends within the FOSS movement. In the second half of the chapter, it will be argued that the seizure of the means of production is no longer a philosopher’s stone that could dissolve capitalism once and for all.


pages: 405 words: 130,840

The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom by Jonathan Haidt

Abraham Maslow, classic study, coherent worldview, crack epidemic, delayed gratification, do well by doing good, feminist movement, hedonic treadmill, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, invisible hand, job satisfaction, Lao Tzu, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, Paradox of Choice, Peter Singer: altruism, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, placebo effect, prisoner's dilemma, Ralph Waldo Emerson, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), social intelligence, stem cell, tacit knowledge, telemarketer, the scientific method, twin studies, ultimatum game, Walter Mischel, zero-sum game

One of the most important ideas in positive psychology is what Lyubomirsky, Sheldon, Schkade, and Seligman call the "happiness formula:" H = S + C + V T h e level of happiness that you actually experience (H) is determined by your biological set point (S) plus the conditions of your life ( C ) plus the voluntary activities (V) you do.34 T h e challenge for positive psychology is to use the scientific method to find out exactly what kinds of C a n d V can push H up to the top of your potential range. T h e extreme biological version of the happiness hypothesis says that H = S, and that C and V don't matter. But we have to give Buddha and Epictetus credit for V b e c a u s e Buddha prescribed the "eightfold noble path" (including meditation and mindfulness), and Epictetus urged methods of thought to cultivate indifference (apatheia) to externals.


Stock Market Wizards: Interviews With America's Top Stock Traders by Jack D. Schwager

Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Black-Scholes formula, book value, commodity trading advisor, computer vision, East Village, Edward Thorp, financial engineering, financial independence, fixed income, implied volatility, index fund, Jeff Bezos, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, junk bonds, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, managed futures, margin call, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, money market fund, Myron Scholes, paper trading, passive investing, pattern recognition, proprietary trading, random walk, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, statistical arbitrage, Teledyne, the scientific method, transaction costs, Y2K

We take great care to avoid the methodological pitfalls associated with "overfitting the data." Although we use a number of different mathematical techniques to establish the robustness and predictive value of our strategies, one of our most powerful tools is the straightforward application of the scientific method. Rather than blindly searching through the data for patterns—an approach whose methodological dangers are widely appreciated within, for example, the natural science and medical research communities—we typically start by formulating a hypothesis based on some sort of structural theory or qualitative understanding of the market, and then test that hypothesis to see whether it is supported by the data.


pages: 467 words: 116,094

I Think You'll Find It's a Bit More Complicated Than That by Ben Goldacre

Aaron Swartz, call centre, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, Desert Island Discs, Dr. Strangelove, drug harm reduction, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, Firefox, Flynn Effect, Helicobacter pylori, jimmy wales, John Snow's cholera map, Loebner Prize, meta-analysis, moral panic, nocebo, placebo effect, publication bias, selection bias, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), seminal paper, Simon Singh, social distancing, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Fry, sugar pill, the scientific method, Turing test, two and twenty, WikiLeaks

The results were as you might imagine: each group found extensive methodological holes in the evidence they disagreed with, but ignored the very same holes in the evidence that reinforced their views. Some people go even further than this, when presented with unwelcome data, and decide that science itself is broken. Politicians will cheerfully explain that the scientific method simply cannot be used to determine the outcomes of a drugs policy. Alternative therapists will explain that their pill is special, among all pills, and you simply cannot find out if it works by using a trial. How deep do these views go, and how far do they generalise? In a study now published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, Professor Geoffrey Munro took around a hundred students and told them they were participating in research about ‘judging the quality of scientific information’.


pages: 481 words: 125,946

What to Think About Machines That Think: Today's Leading Thinkers on the Age of Machine Intelligence by John Brockman

Adam Curtis, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic trading, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, bread and circuses, Charles Babbage, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, constrained optimization, corporate personhood, cosmological principle, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital rights, discrete time, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elon Musk, Emanuel Derman, endowment effect, epigenetics, Ernest Rutherford, experimental economics, financial engineering, Flash crash, friendly AI, functional fixedness, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, hive mind, Ian Bogost, income inequality, information trail, Internet of things, invention of writing, iterative process, James Webb Space Telescope, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, lolcat, loose coupling, machine translation, microbiome, mirror neurons, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, planetary scale, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, RFID, Richard Thaler, Rory Sutherland, Satyajit Das, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, social intelligence, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuxnet, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Turing machine, Turing test, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Y2K

But we have no such information, so we must assign probabilities accordingly. (This type of reasoning has been articulated by astrophysicists J. Richard Gott and Alexander Vilenkin, among many others.) The assumption that we may consider ourselves randomly chosen is sometimes questioned, but in fact it lies at the heart of the scientific method. In physics and other sciences, theories almost never predict definite outcomes. Instead, we compute a probability distribution from the theory. Consider a hydrogen atom: the probability of finding the electron a mile from the proton is not exactly zero, just very, very small. Yet when we find an electron, we don’t seriously entertain the possibility that it’s part of a remote hydrogen atom.


pages: 425 words: 122,223

Capital Ideas: The Improbable Origins of Modern Wall Street by Peter L. Bernstein

Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, corporate raider, debt deflation, diversified portfolio, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index fund, interest rate swap, invisible hand, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, law of one price, linear programming, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, martingale, means of production, Michael Milken, money market fund, Myron Scholes, new economy, New Journalism, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, stochastic process, Thales and the olive presses, the market place, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, transfer pricing, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

McQuown in turn had found Fouse, “a real interesting character—I always got a kick out of him.” In a long memorandum dated May 5, 1970, Fouse presents the case for himself to McQuown. He begins by asserting that he has a reputation for being “keenly analytical, innovative, independent of thought, dedicated to the scientific method, outspoken, and somewhat impatient with ignorance.” He then lists his views of the investment management business, reflecting both the theoretical sophistication he had acquired and his realistic sense of what the security markets are all about. He emphasizes the difference between earning an above-market return by taking above-average risks and winning at the expense of other players who lose more than the winners win because “the costs of trading make the contest less than a zero-sum game.”


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The Long Boom: A Vision for the Coming Age of Prosperity by Peter Schwartz, Peter Leyden, Joel Hyatt

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, American ideology, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, business cycle, centre right, classic study, clean water, complexity theory, computer age, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, Danny Hillis, dark matter, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, double helix, edge city, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, George Gilder, glass ceiling, global village, Gregor Mendel, Herman Kahn, hydrogen economy, industrial cluster, informal economy, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, life extension, market bubble, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shock, open borders, out of africa, Productivity paradox, QR code, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, The Hackers Conference, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Y2K, zero-sum game

The Net has become the means of unifying this network of techies. It is the tool through which these people self-organize. There has long been a code of honor on the Internet to share ideas for the greater good. When the Internet was little more than an academic medium, this code of honor simply continued the tradition of the scientific method. In science, those who make a discovery are obligated to share the results and to explain clearly how they arrived at their conclusions, so that the entire scientific community can subject The GREAT EwftbleR 29 the discovery to rigorous analysis. If the discovery passes that scrutiny, it becomes common intellectual property, and everyone gets to reap the benefits.


pages: 482 words: 122,497

The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule by Thomas Frank

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, business cycle, classic study, collective bargaining, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, disinformation, edge city, financial deregulation, full employment, George Gilder, guest worker program, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, invisible hand, job satisfaction, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, P = NP, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Nader, rent control, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, stem cell, stock buybacks, Strategic Defense Initiative, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the scientific method, too big to fail, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, War on Poverty

OIRA and the Council on Competitiveness worked by shooting down regulations at the terminus of the process, after agencies had labored over their proposed rules for years; the Data Quality Act exposed the regulatory process to interception and attack at every point. And, yes, attack is the correct word. Although technically the law merely provides for the familiar give-and-take of the scientific method, it has in fact been used almost exclusively to slow things down and screw things up; studies of global warming, action on dangerous herbicides, and warnings against eating too much sugar have all been crushed in the regulatory logjam. According to one reporter, Tozzi, the author of the law, has been “gumming up the regulatory works,” dreaming of finding a way “to induce regulatory sclerosis.”


pages: 442 words: 127,300

Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker

A. Roger Ekirch, active measures, autism spectrum disorder, Boeing 747, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, clockwatching, Dmitri Mendeleev, Donald Trump, Exxon Valdez, impulse control, lifelogging, longitudinal study, medical residency, meta-analysis, microbiome, mouse model, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Pepsi Challenge, placebo effect, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, systems thinking, the scientific method, time dilation

Science could never prove him wrong, which is why Freud continues to cast a long shadow on dream research to this day. But by the very same token, we could never prove the theory right. A theory that cannot be discerned true or false in this way will always be abandoned by science, and that is precisely what happened to Freud and his psychoanalytic practices. As a concrete example, consider the scientific method of carbon dating, used to determine the age of an organic object like a fossil. To validate the method, scientists would have the same fossil analyzed by several different carbon-dating machines that operated on the same underlying principle. If the method was scientifically robust, these independent machines should all return the same value of the fossil’s age.


pages: 424 words: 119,679

It's Better Than It Looks: Reasons for Optimism in an Age of Fear by Gregg Easterbrook

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air freight, Alan Greenspan, Apollo 11, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Branko Milanovic, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, coronavirus, Crossrail, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Exxon Valdez, factory automation, failed state, fake news, full employment, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, Home mortgage interest deduction, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, independent contractor, Indoor air pollution, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, longitudinal study, Lyft, mandatory minimum, manufacturing employment, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, Modern Monetary Theory, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, plant based meat, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, supervolcano, The Chicago School, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, uber lyft, universal basic income, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, WikiLeaks, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Just a generation ago, the US Republican Party supported science-based conservation: Ronald Reagan backed the CFC ban, and the elder President George Bush endorsed 1990 legislation to reduce air pollution. By the year of Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy, Republicans had begun to shun conservation and the scientific method, while in the hyperpartisan politics of the moment, for advocates of every variety, “sound science” came to mean “whatever supports our donors’ agenda.” Trump would call climate change a hoax “created by and for the Chinese.” This harebrained galimatias helped him win the White House. In 2017, China reduced greenhouse emissions by canceling construction of more than one hundred coal-fired power stations, leaving unclear why the Chinese government would fall for its own hoax.


pages: 428 words: 126,013

Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions by Johann Hari

Adam Curtis, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, Berlin Wall, call centre, capitalist realism, correlation does not imply causation, Donald Trump, gig economy, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, John Snow's cholera map, Joi Ito, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, Naomi Klein, Occupy movement, open borders, placebo effect, precariat, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, Rat Park, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Stephen Fry, sugar pill, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, Tipper Gore, twin studies, universal basic income, urban planning, zero-sum game

There is a different science studying them, and they largely do have a different set of causes to depression or what most people regard as generalized anxiety problems. It was a fight Throughout this book I draw on two different kinds of experiences I have accumulated over the years. The first is that I was given a rigorous training in the social sciences when I studied at Cambridge University. The social sciences are where you apply the scientific method not to what’s happening in a test tube or a particle collider, but to how you and I live every day—to social life. It’s the scientific study of how people live. It ranges from psychology to sociology to anthropology. This training meant, I hope, that I knew how to sift the evidence I was going to have to pore over, and to see what was legit.


Multicultural Cities: Toronto, New York, and Los Angeles by Mohammed Abdul Qadeer

affirmative action, business cycle, call centre, David Brooks, deindustrialization, desegregation, edge city, en.wikipedia.org, Frank Gehry, game design, gentrification, ghettoisation, global village, immigration reform, industrial cluster, Jane Jacobs, knowledge economy, market bubble, McMansion, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, place-making, Richard Florida, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, Skype, telemarketer, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, urban planning, urban renewal, working-age population, young professional

The modernist bias of planning, its “enlightenment epistemology,” rational-positivist approach, and scientific analytics have been held to be a barrier keeping out the voices and stories of minorities, women, and other citizens.13 Leonie Sandercock calls the current approach a “heroic model of modernist planning” in which rationality, comprehensiveness, the scientific method, and faith in planners’ ability to know what is good for people generally and political neutrality come together.14 3. Another theme that courses through academic writings concerns planners’ and their political masters’ lack of sensitivity to cultural rights.15 It is expressed either directly as a drawback of the planning system, or indirectly as exhortations for planners to be sensitive to racial-cultural differences.


pages: 401 words: 119,488

Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg

Air France Flight 447, Asperger Syndrome, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Black Swan, cognitive dissonance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Brooks, digital map, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, framing effect, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, index card, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, meta-analysis, new economy, power law, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, statistical model, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, theory of mind, Toyota Production System, William Langewiesche, Yom Kippur War

Then someone would propose a new theory or experiment and the process would start all over again. “When you track every call and keep notes and talk about what just happened with the person in the next cubicle, you start paying attention differently,” Fludd told me. “You learn to pick up on things.” To the consultants, this was an example of someone using the scientific method to isolate and test variables. “Charlotte’s peers would generally change multiple things at once,” wrote Niko Cantor, one of the consultants, in a review of his findings. “Charlotte would only change one thing at a time. Therefore she understood the causality better.” But something else was going on, as well.


pages: 571 words: 124,448

Building Habitats on the Moon: Engineering Approaches to Lunar Settlements by Haym Benaroya

3D printing, anti-fragile, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, biofilm, Black Swan, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, carbon-based life, centre right, clean water, Colonization of Mars, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, data acquisition, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, fault tolerance, Gene Kranz, gravity well, inventory management, Johannes Kepler, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, performance metric, RAND corporation, restrictive zoning, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, stochastic process, tacit knowledge, telepresence, telerobotics, the scientific method, Two Sigma, urban planning, Virgin Galactic, X Prize, zero-sum game

Mendell pointed to the historical interest by humans in discovery, citing space as the ultimate opportunity for discoveries of all kinds. ( 7 ) He noted the rapidity of change in today’s world; change that has come to signify progress. Generally, progress has been tied either to technology and science , or to abilities derived from their expansion. The scientific method and process of inquiry is seen to be the best approach we have to understand nature, and to create the technology upon which humanity depends for its survival and satisfaction. According to Bacon, knowledge is power. Figure 2.3.This painting was used as a visual at an April 1988 conference in Houston titled ‘Lunar Bases and Space Strategies of the 21st Century’.


pages: 502 words: 124,794

Nexus by Ramez Naam

artificial general intelligence, bioinformatics, Brownian motion, crowdsourcing, Golden Gate Park, Great Leap Forward, hive mind, Ken Thompson, low earth orbit, mandatory minimum, Menlo Park, pattern recognition, the scientific method, upwardly mobile, VTOL

"The methods of science are statistical, quantitative, reproducible, reductionist, and, as much as possible, objective." He paused. "The methods of meditation, on the other hand, are qualitative, subjective, reproducible often only through hard work disciplining and quieting the mind, and yet equally profound." Drugs are faster, Kade thought. Mental tools. "I have a deep respect for the scientific method," Rama said. "Decades ago, the fourteenth Dalai Lama was asked: 'What if neuroscience proves that Buddhism is in some way incorrect?' "'Well,' he replied, 'in that case we would need to change Buddhism.'" The crowd laughed. Rama X smiled. "What I would ask you to consider is the complementary idea.


pages: 391 words: 123,597

Targeted: The Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower's Inside Story of How Big Data, Trump, and Facebook Broke Democracy and How It Can Happen Again by Brittany Kaiser

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Asian financial crisis, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Carl Icahn, centre right, Chelsea Manning, clean water, cognitive dissonance, crony capitalism, dark pattern, data science, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Etonian, fake news, haute couture, illegal immigration, Julian Assange, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Nelson Mandela, off grid, open borders, public intellectual, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, rolodex, Russian election interference, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, statistical model, Steve Bannon, subprime mortgage crisis, TED Talk, the High Line, the scientific method, WeWork, WikiLeaks, you are the product, young professional

Some saw her as an evil genius, an image she abhorred.13 In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in 2018, Bekah wrote that her “natural reluctance to speak with reporters has left me vulnerable to the media’s sensational fantasies.” She described herself as someone committed to research and the scientific method; to small and localized government; and, among other things, to “fighting entrenched corruption on both sides of the aisle.”14 In New York City in June 2015, Alexander introduced me to Bekah at her office on the twenty-seventh floor of the Newscorp Building near dusk. He kindly told Bekah that I was the “new genius in the crew,” that I had already quite a bit of success at SCL, and that I’d be heading up all Cambridge’s business development from then on.


pages: 475 words: 127,389

Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live by Nicholas A. Christakis

agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Atul Gawande, Boris Johnson, butterfly effect, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, classic study, clean water, Columbian Exchange, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark matter, data science, death of newspapers, disinformation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Jenner, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, helicopter parent, Henri Poincaré, high-speed rail, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, job satisfaction, lockdown, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, mass incarceration, medical residency, meta-analysis, New Journalism, randomized controlled trial, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, school choice, security theater, social contagion, social distancing, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, the scientific method, trade route, Upton Sinclair, zoonotic diseases

In fact, Americans are evenly divided on whether scientific experts make better policy decisions than other people, with 45 percent saying they do and 48 percent saying they do not (7 percent say their decisions are usually worse than other people’s). But there is a partisan divide here, too, with 54 percent of Democrats saying scientists’ policy decisions are usually better and just 34 percent of Republicans feeling this way. And despite the overall confidence in science, many Americans also express suspicion: 63 percent say the scientific method “generally produces accurate conclusions,” but 35 percent think it “can be used to produce any conclusion the researcher wants.” These unfortunate features of American culture, coupled with a centuries-old history of embracing visionaries, charlatans, and quacks, intersected with the especially politically polarized environment of 2020, making a bad situation worse.109 A national survey conducted in April 2020 evaluated partisan divides across a range of public health behaviors recommended by experts.


From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia by Pankaj Mishra

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, British Empire, classic study, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Deng Xiaoping, European colonialism, financial innovation, Great Leap Forward, invention of the telegraph, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Monroe Doctrine, New Urbanism, plutocrats, profit motive, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the scientific method, upwardly mobile, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, young professional

‘As I have grown older … I have come to feel that Western progress during the last three hundred years has only led to selfishness, slaughter, corruption and shamelessness.’69 Putting the learning of the past in the service of China’s nascent modernity, the neo-traditionalists were encouraged by such disillusioned Western philosophers as Bertrand Russell, who, after a wildly successful lecture tour of China in the post May-Fourth era, asserted: ‘The distinctive merit of our civilization, I should say, is the scientific method; the distinctive merit of the Chinese is a just conception of life.’70 Russell was appalled by both Soviet communism and Europe’s destructive war. Beguiled by traditional China, he claimed that ‘those who value wisdom or beauty, or even the simple enjoyment of life, will find more of these things in China than in the distraught and turbulent West’.71 Even Sun Yat-sen, disenchanted by lack of support from the West, had begun to speak out against Western materialism and economic imperialism, upholding Chinese tradition as a basis for nationalism.


Software Design for Flexibility by Chris Hanson, Gerald Sussman

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, connected car, domain-specific language, Donald Knuth, en.wikipedia.org, functional programming, Guido van Rossum, higher-order functions, interchangeable parts, loose coupling, Magellanic Cloud, phenotype, premature optimization, Richard Stallman, stem cell, the scientific method, Turing machine, type inference

We don't know the answers to these questions, but if it is possible, we want to be able to capture the methods by a kind of perturbational program, built as an overlay on the base program. Dependencies mitigate inconsistency Dependency annotations on data give us a powerful tool for organizing human-like computations. For example, all humans harbor mutually inconsistent beliefs: an intelligent person may be committed to the scientific method yet have a strong attachment to some superstitious or ritual practices; a person may have a strong belief in the sanctity of all human life, yet also believe that capital punishment is sometimes justified. If we were really logicians this kind of inconsistency would be fatal: if we really were to simultaneously believe both propositions P and NOT P, then we would have to believe all propositions!


pages: 473 words: 121,895

Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life by Emily Nagoski Ph.d.

cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, delayed gratification, meta-analysis, nocebo, placebo effect, Skype, Snapchat, spaced repetition, sugar pill, the scientific method, twin studies

And there are deep historical realities behind that feeling; somewhere in the three hundred years between figuring out that female orgasm isn’t necessary for conception and figuring out female orgasm isn’t an evolutionary adaptation, scientists began saying things about how female orgasm and the clitoris were “of no utility.”18 Vestigial, like the appendix. So if the phrase “not an adaptation” sounds to you like “not important,” well . . . yeah. That could easily be what science used to think. What can I say? Science is made of people, and people can be stupid. Fortunately, the scientific method is specifically designed to help us overcome our stupid! And so science is moving forward, and the rest of us should move with it. In the twenty-first century, only some kind of woman-hating asshat would think that just because it doesn’t help make babies, women’s orgasm isn’t important. Lloyd, only half kidding, suggests we call the byproduct hypothesis the “fantastic bonus” account of women’s orgasm.


pages: 478 words: 142,608

The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins

Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, Brownian motion, cosmological principle, David Attenborough, Desert Island Discs, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, gravity well, Gregor Mendel, invisible hand, John von Neumann, Jon Ronson, luminiferous ether, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Murray Gell-Mann, Necker cube, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, placebo effect, planetary scale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, unbiased observer

On page after page as I read McGrath, I found myself scribbling ‘teapot’ in the margin. Again invoking T. H. Huxley, McGrath says, ‘Fed up with both theists and atheists making hopelessly dogmatic statements on the basis of inadequate empirical evidence, Huxley declared that the God question could not be settled on the basis of the scientific method.’ McGrath goes on to quote Stephen Jay Gould in similar vein: ‘To say it for all my colleagues and for the umpteenth millionth time (from college bull sessions to learned treatises): science simply cannot (by its legitimate methods) adjudicate the issue of God’s possible superintendence of nature.


pages: 411 words: 140,110

Endurance: A Year in Space, a Lifetime of Discovery by Scott Kelly, Margaret Lazarus Dean

Apollo 11, clean water, dark matter, game design, inventory management, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, Skype, space junk, the scientific method, traumatic brain injury, twin studies, Virgin Galactic, Y2K

It’s true that I’m not a scientist and that research was never my main motivation for going to space. But even if the science wasn’t what drove me to become an astronaut, I have a profound respect for the pursuit of scientific knowledge and I take my part in that seriously. After all, I would argue, testing that sample from the furnace was an example of using the scientific method to gain knowledge. Another uniquely Russian spaceflight practice was the creation of custom-molded seat liners for each crew member. The first time I served as a backup crew member, I went to Zvezda, the company that makes the Soyuz seats and Sokol suits, as well as the spacesuits the cosmonauts wear on spacewalks and ejection seats for Russian military aircraft.


pages: 476 words: 134,735

The Unpersuadables: Adventures With the Enemies of Science by Will Storr

Albert Einstein, Atul Gawande, battle of ideas, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bread and circuses, British Empire, call centre, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Credit Default Swap, David Attenborough, David Brooks, death of newspapers, full employment, George Santayana, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jon Ronson, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, Simon Singh, Stanford prison experiment, Steven Pinker, sugar pill, the scientific method, theory of mind, twin studies

When Lord Monckton’s audience, with their right wing brains, heard him talk of climate conspiracy, he realised that they always knew instinctively, ‘that something was going on in this climate story that they didn’t like the smell of. They just couldn’t quite work out what it was …’ Stories work against truth. They operate with the machinery of prejudice and distortion. Their purpose is not fact but propaganda. The scientific method is the tool that humans have developed to break the dominion of the narrative. It has been designed specifically to dissolve anecdote, to strip out emotion and to leave only unpolluted data. It is a new kind of language, a modern sorcery, and it has gifted our species incredible powers. We can eradicate plagues, extend our lives by decades, build rockets and fly through space.


pages: 444 words: 128,592

When Nietzsche Wept: A Novel of Obsession by Irvin D. Yalom

always be closing, Isaac Newton, Murano, Venice glass, the scientific method

Nietzsche, apparently realizing he had to develop some of his other pieces, turned his attention back to the center of the board. “I have been called many things—philosopher, psychologist, pagan, agitator, antichrist. I have even been called some unflattering things. But I prefer to call myself a scientist, because the cornerstone of my philosophic method, as of the scientific method, is disbelief. I always maintain the most rigorous possible skepticism, and I am skeptical now. I cannot accept your recommendation for psychic exploration on the basis of medical authority.” “But, Professor Nietzsche, we are entirely in agreement. The only authority to be followed is reason, and my recommendation is supported by reason.


pages: 624 words: 127,987

The Personal MBA: A World-Class Business Education in a Single Volume by Josh Kaufman

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Atul Gawande, Black Swan, Blue Ocean Strategy, business cycle, business process, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Heinemeier Hansson, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Dean Kamen, delayed gratification, discounted cash flows, Donald Knuth, double entry bookkeeping, Douglas Hofstadter, Dunning–Kruger effect, en.wikipedia.org, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Santayana, Gödel, Escher, Bach, high net worth, hindsight bias, index card, inventory management, iterative process, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, loose coupling, loss aversion, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, Network effects, Parkinson's law, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, place-making, premature optimization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, scientific management, side project, statistical model, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, systems thinking, telemarketer, the scientific method, time value of money, Toyota Production System, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, Y Combinator, Yogi Berra

I’ve Tested many different approaches, Testing many different variables. This is what works best for me, so I’ve made it a Habit. Will this be my method forever? I doubt it—I’ll eventually find other methods that work even better. My Experimentation never stops. Testing is the act of trying something new—a way of applying the scientific method and the Iteration Cycle to your own life. The most happy and productive people I know all have something in common: they’re always trying new things to see what works. You can’t make positive discoveries that make your life better if you never try anything new. Testing doesn’t have to be complicated.


pages: 224 words: 91,918

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe

Asilomar, Bonfire of the Vanities, Buckminster Fuller, edge city, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, Menlo Park, Ronald Reagan, stakhanovite, Stewart Brand, strikebreaker, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen

This was a year after he started working with Timothy Leary. She had met Alpert a couple of years before and he had been 100 percent the serious young clinical psychologist—legions of rats and cats in cages with their brainstems, corpora callosa and optic chiasmas sliced, spliced, diced, iced in the name of the Scientific Method. Now Alpert was sitting on the floor in Perry Lane in the old boho Lotus hunker-down and exegeting very seriously about a baby crawling blindly about the room. Blindly? What do you mean, blindly? That baby is a very sentient creature . .. That baby sees the world with a completeness that you and I will never know again.


pages: 532 words: 139,706

Googled: The End of the World as We Know It by Ken Auletta

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, AltaVista, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Ben Horowitz, bioinformatics, Burning Man, carbon footprint, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, death of newspapers, digital rights, disintermediation, don't be evil, facts on the ground, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Google Earth, hypertext link, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet Archive, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, Peter Thiel, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, semantic web, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social graph, spectrum auction, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, Susan Wojcicki, systems thinking, telemarketer, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tipper Gore, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, X Prize, yield management, zero-sum game

The title of the report, “Google Version 2.0: The Calculating Predator,” telegraphs Arnold’s stark conclusion:Analyzing “the Google” in a deliberate and focused way, we find that while Google may have started out to “do no evil,” it has, to some, morphed from a friendly search engine into something more ominous. Googzilla, fueled by technical prowess, is now on the move. Where is it moving? The gruff Arnold, who responded to a phone call but refused to speak on the record to anyone who was not paying him, in his book often drops the scientific method in favor of a more fevered tone. Conjuring a monster, he repeatedly refers to the company as “Googzilla,” and writes that “Google stalks a market ... then strikes quickly and in a cold-blooded way.” Behind Google’s free food and volleyball games he sniffs a public relations scheme to “misdirect attention.


pages: 436 words: 140,256

The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee by Jared Diamond

agricultural Revolution, assortative mating, Atahualpa, Boeing 747, Columbian Exchange, correlation coefficient, double helix, Drosophila, Easter island, European colonialism, Great Leap Forward, invention of gunpowder, invention of the wheel, invention of writing, language acquisition, longitudinal study, out of africa, phenotype, planned obsolescence, Scientific racism, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, the long tail, the scientific method, trade route

The strategies include wooing unmated females for 'divorce insurance', as long as one feels unsure of one's wife's fidelity; guarding one's fertile spouse; feeding her copiously and copulating with her often, to induce her to remain faithful in one's absence; and coveting one's neighbour's spouse at a time when she is fertile and one's own spouse is no longer fertile. However, not even these applications of the scientific method in all its power sufficed to clarify what, if anything, female birds gain from EMS. One possible answer is that female herons weighing desertion of their mates may use EMS to shop around for a new mate. Another is that some unmated female gulls in colonies with a deficit of males may get fertilized by PMS, and then try to rear the chicks with the help of another, similar female.


pages: 542 words: 132,010

The Science of Fear: How the Culture of Fear Manipulates Your Brain by Daniel Gardner

Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, Doomsday Clock, feminist movement, haute couture, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), lateral thinking, Linda problem, mandatory minimum, medical residency, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, nuclear winter, Oklahoma City bombing, placebo effect, precautionary principle, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, the long tail, the scientific method, Timothy McVeigh, Tunguska event, uranium enrichment, Y2K, young professional

The competing demands of being accurate and being heard can be particularly hard on scientists. Stephen Schneider—a Stanford climatologist and an early proponent of the hypothesis that human activity was changing climate—spoke about this with admirable clarity in an interview with Discover magazine. “On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but—which means that we must include all the doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands, and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings, as well. And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of disastrous climate change.


pages: 441 words: 136,954

That Used to Be Us by Thomas L. Friedman, Michael Mandelbaum

addicted to oil, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Andy Kessler, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, centre right, Climatic Research Unit, cloud computing, collective bargaining, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, drop ship, energy security, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, full employment, Google Earth, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), job automation, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Lean Startup, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, mass immigration, more computing power than Apollo, Network effects, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, oil shock, PalmPilot, pension reform, precautionary principle, proprietary trading, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, the long tail, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, University of East Anglia, vertical integration, WikiLeaks

And I said, ‘Well, we probably disagree on that, but if you like I could tell you what my views are and why I believe in it.’ And he said, ‘No, I’m happy with my opinions.’ Great guy, salt of the earth, but just not interested.” Skepticism of expert opinion is always appropriate: It is in fact at the heart of the scientific method. Indeed, a measure of skepticism about all opinions, especially one’s own, is healthy. But in the ever more complicated world we are living in, the professional judgments of experts are, in the end, indispensable. The details of technical and scientific fields lie beyond the easy comprehension of almost all nonspecialists.


How I Became a Quant: Insights From 25 of Wall Street's Elite by Richard R. Lindsey, Barry Schachter

Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andrew Wiles, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Black-Scholes formula, Bob Litterman, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, business process, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized markets, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, diversification, Donald Knuth, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, full employment, George Akerlof, global macro, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, implied volatility, index fund, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Ivan Sutherland, John Bogle, John von Neumann, junk bonds, linear programming, Loma Prieta earthquake, Long Term Capital Management, machine readable, margin call, market friction, market microstructure, martingale, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Myron Scholes, Nick Leeson, P = NP, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, performance metric, prediction markets, profit maximization, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, six sigma, sorting algorithm, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stem cell, Steven Levy, stochastic process, subscription business, systematic trading, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, transfer pricing, value at risk, volatility smile, Wiener process, yield curve, young professional

My career in finance has concentrated on investing. The art of investing is evolving into the science of investing, and I have been fortunate to participate in some of the revolutionary changes that have underpinned that evolution. Quantitatively trained finance academics, and scientists switching into finance have brought the power of the scientific method to bear on investing. Analysis, process, and structure are replacing assertions, hunches, and whim. Personal investment insights are still centrally important. But managers increasingly capture and apply those insights systematically. I’d like to describe some of these some of these intellectual developments in the context of my own career path from academic physics at Princeton, Harvard, and Berkeley to the practice of quantitative finance at BARRA and Barclays Global Investors.


The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good by William Easterly

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, clean water, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Edward Glaeser, end world poverty, European colonialism, failed state, farmers can use mobile phones to check market prices, George Akerlof, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, intentional community, invisible hand, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, land tenure, Live Aid, microcredit, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, publication bias, purchasing power parity, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, structural adjustment programs, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, TSMC, War on Poverty, Xiaogang Anhui farmers

Then hold the aid agencies accountable for their results by having truly independent evaluation of their efforts. Perhaps the aid agencies should each set aside a portion of their budgets (such as the part now wasted on self-evaluation) to contribute to an international independent evaluation group made up of staff trained in the scientific method from the rich and poor countries, who will evaluate random samples of each aid agency’s efforts. Evaluation will involve randomized controlled trials where feasible, less pure statistical analysis if not, and will at least be truly independent, even when randomized trials and statistical analysis are not feasible.


pages: 517 words: 139,824

The Difference Engine by William Gibson, Bruce Sterling

card file, Charles Babbage, clockwatching, Fellow of the Royal Society, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, spinning jenny, the scientific method

"Lord Byron can't be dead!" Brian burst out. "We're standing in stinking mud, believing a stinking lie!" "Quiet!" Mallory commanded. "We'll simply have to suspend any judgment on this matter until we have firm evidence!" "Ned's right," nodded Tom. "The Prime Minister would have wanted it that way! That's the scientific method. That was what Lord Byron always taught us . . . " A thick, tarred rope, its end knotted in a fat noose, came snaking down the wall. The anarchist lieutenant -- the dainty man with the paisley kerchiefs -- posed one bent leg atop the wall, with his elbow on his knee and his chin in his hand.


pages: 588 words: 131,025

The Patient Will See You Now: The Future of Medicine Is in Your Hands by Eric Topol

23andMe, 3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Anne Wojcicki, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, Big Tech, bioinformatics, call centre, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, connected car, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, digital divide, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Firefox, gamification, global village, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, job automation, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, lifelogging, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, microbiome, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, phenotype, placebo effect, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, Snapchat, social graph, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traumatic brain injury, Turing test, Uber for X, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, X Prize

template=printpicart. 8. A. Pandey, K. Abdullah, and M. H. Drazner, “Impact of Vice President Cheney on Public Interest in Left Ventricular Assist Devices and Heart Transplantation,” American Journal of Cardiology 113 (2014): 1529–1531. 9. C. Anderson, “The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete,” Wired, June 23, 2008, http://archive.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/16-07/pb_theory. 10. D. Butler, “Web Data Predict Flu,” Nature 456 (2008): 287–288. 11. S. Cook et al., “Assessing Google Flu Trends Performance in the United States During the 2009 Influenza Virus A (H1N1) Pandemic,” PLoS One 6, no. 8 (2011): e23610. 12.


pages: 409 words: 129,423

Mapping Mars: Science, Imagination and the Birth of a World by Oliver Morton

Apollo 11, Charles Babbage, classic study, Colonization of Mars, computer age, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, Kim Stanley Robinson, Mars Rover, Mars Society, Menlo Park, Mercator projection, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, planetary scale, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, sexual politics, the scientific method, trade route, undersea cable, V2 rocket, Works Progress Administration

In his memoir of the Grand Canyon, the Survey’s first publication, he wrote in self-justification: I have in many places departed from the severe ascetic style which has become conventional in scientific monographs. Perhaps an apology is called for. Under ordinary circumstances the ascetic discipline is necessary. Give the imagination an inch and it is apt to take an ell, and the fundamental requirement of the scientific method—accuracy of statement—is imperiled. But in the Grand Canyon district there is no such danger. The stimulants which are demoralizing elsewhere are necessary here to exalt the mind sufficiently to comprehend the sublimity of the subjects. Their sublimity has in fact been hitherto underrated.


pages: 515 words: 143,055

The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads by Tim Wu

1960s counterculture, Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bob Geldof, borderless world, Brownian motion, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, colonial rule, content marketing, cotton gin, data science, do well by doing good, East Village, future of journalism, George Gilder, Golden age of television, Golden Gate Park, Googley, Gordon Gekko, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, informal economy, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Live Aid, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, mirror neurons, Nate Silver, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, Pepsi Challenge, placebo effect, Plato's cave, post scarcity, race to the bottom, road to serfdom, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, slashdot, Snapchat, Snow Crash, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, the built environment, The Chicago School, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Tim Cook: Apple, Torches of Freedom, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, Virgin Galactic, Wayback Machine, white flight, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

CHAPTER 6 NOT WITH A BANG BUT WITH A WHIMPER In 1926, Stuart Chase and Frederick Schlink met in a Greenwich Village speakeasy and over the conversation found that they agreed about many things. Chase was an accountant and former investigator at the Federal Trade Commission; Schlink, a standards engineer, had worked in the National Laboratories. Although following markedly different professions, both men were near zealots for the scientific method and its power to expose truths that might be contrary to popular opinion. They also shared, above all, an implacable contempt for the advertising industry, and what they regarded as the massive fraud it was perpetrating on the American public.1 The two would later use the following parable to capture their view of the inherent tension between truth and advertising: Two men are discussing the merits of a famous brand of oil.


pages: 415 words: 136,343

A World on the Wing: The Global Odyssey of Migratory Birds by Scott Weidensaul

Anthropocene, assortative mating, coronavirus, COVID-19, Elon Musk, Google Earth, jitney, long peace, low earth orbit, meta-analysis, microbiome, microcredit, off grid, phenotype, quantum entanglement, SpaceX Starlink, the scientific method

“They always say, ‘We used to think, but now we know.’ ” If I remember correctly, she was ticked off over some flip-flopping research about diet and health, maybe the endless eggs-are-good/eggs-are-bad debate, but I have to admit, she had a point. Science is a process, one where ideas are proposed, tested, and discarded if new evidence demands it. Any good researcher (if they’re being true to the scientific method) ought to say, “We used to think, but now we think.” Of course, human nature doesn’t work that way. Even scientists tend to look for certainty, and often put their trust in the latest, sexiest research to be published, tacitly assuming it’s the final word on a subject. In the past four decades, the field of migratory bird conservation has experienced several we-used-to-think epiphanies.


pages: 524 words: 130,909

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power by Max Chafkin

3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, anti-communist, bank run, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Blitzscaling, Boeing 747, borderless world, Cambridge Analytica, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, David Brooks, David Graeber, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Extropian, facts on the ground, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Frank Gehry, Gavin Belson, global macro, Gordon Gekko, Greyball, growth hacking, guest worker program, Hacker News, Haight Ashbury, helicopter parent, hockey-stick growth, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, life extension, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, moral panic, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, operational security, PalmPilot, Paris climate accords, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, Peter Gregory, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, randomized controlled trial, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, social distancing, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, techlash, technology bubble, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the new new thing, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vitalik Buterin, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Y2K, yellow journalism, Zenefits

They had their own language—many identified as “rationalists”—and their own literary canon. It included Tolkien and Rand, of course, along with arcane texts that venerated technology, among them Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, a 600,000-word fan fiction epic that adapted J. K. Rowling’s wizard story by imagining that Harry incorporates the scientific method into his magic. Another favorite: The Last Ringbearer, which was part of the ever-growing corpus of Lord of the Rings fan fiction, and which seemed apt for the founder of Palantir. In the book, which was first published in Russia in 1999 and then translated into English on the web in 2010, Tolkien’s good guys—Gandalf and the elves—are warmongers who try to destroy Mordor because its peaceful progress threatens their feudal rule.


pages: 453 words: 132,400

Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Bonfire of the Vanities, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, double helix, fear of failure, Gregor Mendel, Herbert Marcuse, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, longitudinal study, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, Necker cube, pattern recognition, place-making, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Vilfredo Pareto

On that level, amateur scholarship can hold its own, and can be even more effective than its professional counterpart. But the moment that amateurs lose sight of this goal, and use knowledge mainly to bolster their egos or to achieve a material advantage, then they become caricatures of the scholar. Without training in the discipline of skepticism and reciprocal criticism that underlies the scientific method, laypersons who venture into the fields of knowledge with prejudiced goals can become more ruthless, more egregiously unconcerned with truth, than even the most corrupt scholar. THE CHALLENGE OF LIFELONG LEARNING The aim of this chapter has been to review the ways in which mental activity can produce enjoyment.


pages: 533 words: 145,887

Schismatrix Plus by Bruce Sterling

back-to-the-land, complexity theory, Future Shock, gravity well, heat death of the universe, industrial robot, informal economy, life extension, plutocrats, the long tail, the map is not the territory, the scientific method, time dilation

The wrinkles of her face were very slightly wrong, not matching the muscles beneath the skin. “You’re young,” he said. “You only look old.” “Then we share one fraud. For you, that’s only one of many.” “Ross told me you were dependable,” he said. “Why risk your situation by annoying me?” “We want the truth.” He stared. “How ambitious. Try the scientific method. And in the meantime, let’s talk sense.” The young woman smoothed her medical tunic with wrinkled hands. “Pretend I’m a theatre audience, Dr. Mavrides. Tell me about your ideology.” “I don’t have one.” “What about the Investor Peace? All those Détentiste plays? Did you think you would heal the Schism with this Investor fraud?”


pages: 636 words: 140,406

The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money by Bryan Caplan

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, assortative mating, behavioural economics, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, deliberate practice, deskilling, disruptive innovation, do what you love, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, experimental subject, fear of failure, Flynn Effect, future of work, George Akerlof, ghettoisation, hive mind, job satisfaction, Kenneth Arrow, Khan Academy, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market bubble, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Peter Thiel, price discrimination, profit maximization, publication bias, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, school choice, selection bias, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Steven Pinker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, trickle-down economics, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, yield curve, zero-sum game

Totally ignoring the need for comparison groups and control of third variables, subjects responded to the “diet” example with statements such as “It can’t hurt to eat well.”51 The point is not merely that college students are bad at reasoning about everyday events. The point is that college students are bad at reasoning about everyday events despite years of coursework in science and math. Believers in “learning how to learn” should expect students who study science to absorb the scientific method, then habitually use that fruitful method to analyze the world. This scarcely occurs. By and large, college science teaches students what to think about topics on the syllabus, not how to think about the world. Counterexamples do exist, but compared to teachers’ high hopes, effects are modest, narrow, and often only in one direction.


pages: 582 words: 160,693

The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State by James Dale Davidson, William Rees-Mogg

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, borderless world, British Empire, California gold rush, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, Columbine, compound rate of return, creative destruction, Danny Hillis, debt deflation, ending welfare as we know it, epigenetics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, feminist movement, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Gilder, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information retrieval, Isaac Newton, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Macrae, offshore financial centre, Parkinson's law, pattern recognition, phenotype, price mechanism, profit maximization, rent-seeking, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Sam Peltzman, school vouchers, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, spice trade, statistical model, telepresence, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transaction costs, Turing machine, union organizing, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto

Thus all things raise the thoughts to the eternal..."32 A symbolic mode of thinking not only complemented a hierarchic structure of society; it also suited illiteracy. Ideas conveyed by symbols in wood-cuts were accessible to an illiterate population. By contrast, the advent of printing in the modern period led to the development of causal connections, employing the scientific method, for a literate population. A PARALLEL FOR TODAY Medieval society, seemingly so stable and secure in its beliefs in the middle of the fifteenth century, was rapidly transformed. Its predominant institution, the Church, saw its monopoly challenged and shattered. Authority that had been unquestioned for centuries was suddenly in dispute.


pages: 525 words: 142,027

CIOs at Work by Ed Yourdon

8-hour work day, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, business intelligence, business process, call centre, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, distributed generation, Donald Knuth, fail fast, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, Googley, Grace Hopper, information security, Infrastructure as a Service, Innovator's Dilemma, inventory management, Julian Assange, knowledge worker, Mark Zuckerberg, Multics, Nicholas Carr, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), rolodex, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, software as a service, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, the new new thing, the scientific method, WikiLeaks, Y2K, Zipcar

And then, about five years later, he went back to Columbia to earn a bachelor’s degree in physics and then on to Toronto to get a master’s as well. I envy the broad background he got along the way. Rubinow: And I respect that as well. People come up and say to me, clearly you don’t use this chemistry you studied. On the contrary, I developed disciplined problem solving based on the scientific method. It applies to the sciences, but is also applies to so many different things in my job and so, no, it is useful every day. Yourdon: Yes, scientific method problems solving. Rubinow: And you know the processes—the logic, philosophies, analytics—are valuable. Yourdon: Let me turn that around and ask you, is there one common piece of advice for people who want a career path to the CIO?


pages: 547 words: 148,732

How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence by Michael Pollan

1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Anton Chekhov, Burning Man, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Day of the Dead, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, Golden Gate Park, Google Earth, Haight Ashbury, Howard Rheingold, Internet Archive, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Marshall McLuhan, Mason jar, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, microdosing, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Mother of all demos, off-the-grid, overview effect, placebo effect, radical decentralization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, satellite internet, scientific mainstream, scientific worldview, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, sugar pill, TED Talk, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Whole Earth Catalog

(This aspiration seems eventually to infect everyone who works with psychedelics, touching scientists, too, including ones as different in temperament as Timothy Leary and Roland Griffiths.) But psychological research proceeds person by person and experiment by experiment; there is no real-world model for using a drug to change all of society as Hubbard and Huxley determined to do, with the result that the scientific method began to feel to them, as it later would to Leary, like a straitjacket. In the wake of his first LSD experience, Huxley wrote to Osmond suggesting that “who, having once come to the realization of the primordial fact of unity in love, would ever want to return to experimentation on the psychic level?


pages: 517 words: 147,591

Small Wars, Big Data: The Information Revolution in Modern Conflict by Eli Berman, Joseph H. Felter, Jacob N. Shapiro, Vestal Mcintyre

basic income, call centre, centre right, classic study, clean water, confounding variable, crowdsourcing, data science, demand response, drone strike, experimental economics, failed state, George Akerlof, Google Earth, guns versus butter model, HESCO bastion, income inequality, income per capita, information asymmetry, Internet of things, iterative process, land reform, mandatory minimum, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, natural language processing, operational security, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, statistical model, the scientific method, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, unemployed young men, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey

Second, when refuting evidence arrives—from our research or that of others—the inferential effects are readily apparent: sections either emerge polished or they get removed completely. Our Book: The Incremental Accumulation of Small Facts While the setting is more exotic, the micro-empirical approach we’ve sketched implements the scientific method that most people learn in high school. In our setting rather than drawing on a large body of prior scientific research, you build a theory based on subject-matter knowledge and repeated interaction with experts and practitioners. Sometimes you lay this theory out through careful verbal elaboration, and at other times you use a game theoretic model to make sure you’re being precise enough to avoid mistakes and misunderstandings.


pages: 744 words: 142,748

Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell by Phil Lapsley

air freight, Apple II, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bob Noyce, card file, classic study, cuban missile crisis, dumpster diving, Garrett Hardin, Hush-A-Phone, index card, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, John Markoff, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, popular electronics, Richard Feynman, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, The Home Computer Revolution, the new new thing, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, undersea cable, urban renewal, wikimedia commons

Then he’d try it out. He’d perform an experiment. “Had that not worked I would have either had to make another theory or see why that wouldn’t work,” he says. Not simply trial and error but guided trial and error. Although Jojo didn’t know it at the time, the adults had a name for this. They called it the scientific method. Years later, Nobel Prize–winning physicist Richard Feynman would write, “The principle of science, the definition, almost, is the following: the test of all knowledge is experiment.” For Joe the telephone was much more than just an intellectual playground. It was a warm electronic bosom, a source of comfort.


Guns, germs, and steel: the fates of human societies by Jared M. Diamond

affirmative action, Atahualpa, British Empire, California gold rush, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, discovery of the americas, Easter island, European colonialism, founder crops, Francisco Pizarro, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, invention of movable type, invention of the wheel, invention of writing, James Watt: steam engine, Maui Hawaii, QWERTY keyboard, the scientific method, trade route

In physics the chief method for gaining knowledge is the laboratory experiment, by which one manipulates the parameter whose effect is in question, executes parallel control experiments with that parameter held constant, holds other parameters constant throughout, replicates both the experimental manipulation and the control experiment, and obtains quan- titative data. This strategy, which also works well in chemistry and molec- ular biology, is so identified with science in the minds of many people that experimentation is often held to be the essence of the scientific method. But laboratory experimentation can obviously play little or no role in many of the historical sciences. One cannot interrupt galaxy formation, start and stop hurricanes and ice ages, experimentally exterminate grizzly bears in a few national parks, or rerun the course of dinosaur evolution.


pages: 543 words: 153,550

Model Thinker: What You Need to Know to Make Data Work for You by Scott E. Page

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic trading, Alvin Roth, assortative mating, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Checklist Manifesto, computer age, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, data science, deep learning, deliberate practice, discrete time, distributed ledger, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, Everything should be made as simple as possible, experimental economics, first-price auction, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Higgs boson, High speed trading, impulse control, income inequality, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, meta-analysis, money market fund, multi-armed bandit, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, Network effects, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, p-value, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, phenotype, Phillips curve, power law, pre–internet, prisoner's dilemma, race to the bottom, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Robert Solow, school choice, scientific management, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, selection bias, six sigma, social graph, spectrum auction, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Supply of New York City Cabdrivers, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Great Moderation, the long tail, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the rule of 72, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, urban sprawl, value at risk, web application, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis. New York: Little, Brown. Alvaredo, Facundo, Anthony B. Atkinson, Thomas Piketty, and Emmanuel Saez. 2013. “The World Top Incomes Database.” https://www.inet.ox.ac.uk/projects/view/149. Anderson, Chris. 2008a. “The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete.” Wired 16, no. 7. Anderson, Chris. 2008b. The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More. New York: Hachette. Anderson, Phillip. 1972. “More Is Different.” Science 177, no. 4047: 393–396. Arrow, Kenneth. 1963. Social Choice and Individual Values. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.


pages: 665 words: 146,542

Money: 5,000 Years of Debt and Power by Michel Aglietta

accelerated depreciation, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, cashless society, central bank independence, circular economy, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, David Graeber, debt deflation, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, double entry bookkeeping, energy transition, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, German hyperinflation, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, land bank, liquidity trap, low interest rates, margin call, means of production, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, Northern Rock, oil shock, planetary scale, plutocrats, precautionary principle, price stability, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, secular stagnation, seigniorage, shareholder value, special drawing rights, special economic zone, stochastic process, Suez crisis 1956, the payments system, the scientific method, tontine, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, Washington Consensus

The relationship of social belonging known as value was institutionally established.2 Nowhere did it come from previously constituted markets. However, it did allow for markets to flourish, thus conforming to the monetary theory of value. The private developed in the interstices of the public, on the basis of the public system of valorisation. Contrary to the assumptions of many economists ignorant of history – and thus of the scientific method in the social sciences – it was not the public realm, of which money was a part, that took form amid the incompleteness of market relations. The first known units of account were the shekel in Mesopotamia and the shat in Egypt. These units of account were present in Mesopotamia as early as 3000 BC, on tablets covered in inscriptions allowing for accounting.


The Hero With a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell

affirmative action, Columbine, game design, Lao Tzu, Maui Hawaii, music of the spheres, place-making, the scientific method, trade route

For Him, by Him, the world was made. "O Mohammed," God said, "hadst thou not been, I would not have created the sky." • 3 • The Hero Today All of which is far indeed from the contemporary view; for the democratic ideal of the self-determining individual, the invention of the power-driven machine, and the development of the scientific method of research, have so transformed human life that the long-inherited, timeless universe of symbols has collapsed. In the fateful, epoch-announcing words of Nietzsche's Zarathustra: "Dead are all the gods.'" One knows the tale; it has been told a thousand ways. It is the hero-cycle of the modern age, the wonder-story of mankind's coming to maturity.


pages: 668 words: 159,523

Coffeeland: One Man's Dark Empire and the Making of Our Favorite Drug by Augustine Sedgewick

affirmative action, Alfred Russel Wallace, British Empire, business cycle, California gold rush, classic study, collective bargaining, Day of the Dead, European colonialism, export processing zone, family office, Fellow of the Royal Society, Food sovereignty, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Honoré de Balzac, imperial preference, Joan Didion, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, land reform, land tenure, Louis Pasteur, mass immigration, Monroe Doctrine, Philip Mirowski, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, scientific management, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trade route, vertical integration, wage slave, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

[that] supports . . . the appropriate powers of the system, whips up the flagging energies, enhances the endurance”—though it was “in no sense a food.”36 Prescott’s accomplishment was to broaden the “viewpoint” on coffee until what had been negatives—especially coffee’s dubious relation to food, calories, and energy—began to look like positives. Central to Prescott’s insight was the work of H. L. Hollingworth, a professor at Columbia Teachers College, who in 1911 had led the way in remaking the scientific method in the service of American business. The business was Coca-Cola, which had been sued by Harvey Washington Wiley, head of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Chemistry and the chief author of the Pure Food and Drug Act. Wiley had no problem with coffee—in fact he promoted it as “America’s National Beverage”—but he thought parents would be outraged if they knew that their children were consuming caffeine when they drank a bottle of Coca-Cola.


Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To by David A. Sinclair, Matthew D. Laplante

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Atul Gawande, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biofilm, Biosphere 2, blockchain, British Empire, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, creative destruction, CRISPR, dark matter, dematerialisation, discovery of DNA, double helix, Drosophila, Easter island, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, global pandemic, Grace Hopper, helicopter parent, income inequality, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, labor-force participation, life extension, Louis Pasteur, McMansion, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, microbiome, mouse model, mutually assured destruction, Paul Samuelson, personalized medicine, phenotype, Philippa Foot, placebo effect, plutocrats, power law, quantum entanglement, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, seminal paper, Skype, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Tim Cook: Apple, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, union organizing, universal basic income, WeWork, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

When chimps use sticks to probe termite nests, birds drop rocks on mollusks to break their shells, or monkeys bathe in warm volcanic pools in Japan, it’s all natural. Humans just happen to be a species that excels at acquiring and passing on learned skills. In the past two hundred years, we have invented and utilized a process called the scientific method, which has accelerated the advancement of learning. In this way of thinking, then, culture and technology are both “natural.” Innovations that permit us to feed more people, to reduce disease, and, yes, to extend our healthy lives are natural. Cars and planes. Laptop computers and mobile phones.


Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health by Laurie Garrett

accounting loophole / creative accounting, airport security, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, biofilm, clean water, collective bargaining, contact tracing, desegregation, discovery of DNA, discovery of penicillin, disinformation, Drosophila, employer provided health coverage, Fall of the Berlin Wall, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, Gregor Mendel, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, Induced demand, John Snow's cholera map, Jones Act, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, means of production, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mouse model, Nelson Mandela, new economy, nuclear winter, Oklahoma City bombing, phenotype, profit motive, Project Plowshare, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, stem cell, the scientific method, urban decay, urban renewal, War on Poverty, working poor, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism

She worked, however, not in Russia but in the United States and won’t return anytime soon for anything more than a visit, she said. She was Russia’s loss, and America’s gain. “The concept that you need data to determine the efficiencies and efficacies of your practices—it’s not a concept that’s in use. Medical school training does not include the scientific method: hypothesis, study, data-driven solution. You never see denominators in reports…. Everything was a ‘science’ in the Soviet view—history was a science, politics was a science, philosophy was a science. Any academician can be called a scientist. And the stuff that gets published is horrifying!”

… If you allow our death-fighters—we can assure you they are competent—the money to wipe out such and such and such deaths that cost us billions to maintain, within a generation there will no longer be this drain upon the wealth of our nation.140 IV There is no reason to doubt, of course, the ability of the scientific method to solve each of the specific problems of disease by discovering causes and remedial procedures. Whether concerned with particular dangers to be overcome or with specific requirements to be satisfied, all the separate problems of human health can and will eventually find their solution. But solving problems of disease is not the same thing as creating health and happiness.


pages: 558 words: 168,179

Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right by Jane Mayer

Adam Curtis, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Bakken shale, bank run, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, collective bargaining, company town, corporate raider, crony capitalism, David Brooks, desegregation, disinformation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, energy security, estate planning, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, George Gilder, high-speed rail, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, job automation, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, More Guns, Less Crime, multilevel marketing, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, plutocrats, Powell Memorandum, Ralph Nader, Renaissance Technologies, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, Solyndra, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, the scientific method, University of East Anglia, Unsafe at Any Speed, War on Poverty, working poor

To add credibility to their side, the tobacco companies funded a network of official-sounding institutes and smokers’ rights groups. This strategy soon characterized the global warming denial movement, too. There was in fact some uncertainty about global warming, as there is about virtually every scientific hypothesis. Probability, rather than absolute certainty, is the nature of the scientific method. But as Dr. James Baker, former head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said in 2005, “There’s a better scientific consensus on this than on any issue I know—except maybe Newton’s second law of [thermo]dynamics.” Nonetheless, in 1998, the American Petroleum Institute, along with several top oil industry executives and conservative think tank officials, colluded on a secret plan to spend $2 million to confuse the press and the public about this growing scientific consensus.


pages: 585 words: 165,304

Trust: The Social Virtue and the Creation of Prosperity by Francis Fukuyama

Alvin Toffler, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, classic study, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, double entry bookkeeping, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, hiring and firing, industrial robot, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kanban, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, liberal capitalism, liberation theology, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, mittelstand, price mechanism, profit maximization, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, transfer pricing, traveling salesman, union organizing, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois

The work of Joseph Needham and others has shown that the Chinese level of technology in the year 1500 was higher than that prevailing in Europe.4 What China did not have, however, and what Europe subsequently developed, was a scientific method that permitted the progressive conquest of nature through empirical observation and experiment. The scientific method itself was made possible by a cast of mind that sought to understand higher-level causality through abstract reasoning about underlying physical principles, something alien to the polytheistic religious cultures of Asia.5 It is understandable that the Chinese societies that were the first to industrialize and prosper were those that fell under the control or influence of Western powers like Britain or the United States, including Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan.


pages: 559 words: 169,094

The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America by George Packer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bank run, Bear Stearns, big-box store, citizen journalism, clean tech, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, company town, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, DeepMind, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, East Village, El Camino Real, electricity market, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, food desert, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, intentional community, Jane Jacobs, Larry Ellison, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, Neil Kinnock, new economy, New Journalism, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, oil shock, PalmPilot, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, peak oil, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, public intellectual, Richard Florida, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, smart grid, Snow Crash, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, too big to fail, union organizing, uptick rule, urban planning, vertical integration, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, white flight, white picket fence, zero-sum game

There was Eliezer Yudkowsky, an artificial-intelligence researcher who had cofounded the Singularity Institute—an autodidact who never went past eighth grade, he was the author of a thousand-page online fanfic called Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, which recast the original story in an attempt to explain Harry’s wizardry through the scientific method. And there was Patri Friedman, the founder of the Seasteading Institute. An elfin man with cropped black hair and a thin line of beard, he was dressed in the eccentrically antic manner of Raskolnikov. He lived in Mountain View in an “intentional community” as a free-love libertarian, about which he regularly blogged and tweeted: “Polyamory/competitive govt parallel: more choice/competition yields more challenge, change, growth.


pages: 564 words: 163,106

The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine by M. D. James le Fanu M. D.

Barry Marshall: ulcers, clean water, cuban missile crisis, discovery of penicillin, double helix, experimental subject, Gary Taubes, Helicobacter pylori, Isaac Newton, lateral thinking, meta-analysis, rising living standards, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), stem cell, tacit knowledge, telerobotics, The Design of Experiments, the scientific method, V2 rocket

James Le Fanu’s massive book, bulging with juicy medical history and anecdotes, will set your heart palpitating and your blood pressure rising from the start. It is an absolute must-read for all people interested in medical matters, and particularly for those (like me) whom Le Fanu dubs The Worried Well, i.e. the ones who are “well” but “worried” we might not be . . . By reading Le Fanu’s book we will be made aware of the thrilling power of the scientific method and the manner in which it pushes the boundaries of knowledge, to thank our lucky stars for the leaps forward in medicine and to acknowledge the enormous limitations imposed by the inscrutable mysteries of biology’ VAL HENNESSY in the Daily Mail ‘Recently writing a history of medicine from the Stone Age to New Age, I deeply regretted that there was no up-to-the-minute account of modern medicine which I could pillage.


pages: 544 words: 168,076

Red Plenty by Francis Spufford

Adam Curtis, affirmative action, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, asset allocation, Buckminster Fuller, clean water, cognitive dissonance, computer age, double helix, Fellow of the Royal Society, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kitchen Debate, linear programming, lost cosmonauts, market clearing, MITM: man-in-the-middle, New Journalism, oil shock, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, profit motive, RAND corporation, scientific management, Simon Kuznets, the scientific method

You had to be unignorably brilliant, now, as a Jew, to be promoted as far as your ordinarily diligent and distinguished ethnically Russian colleagues – which left behind it the peculiar sting of a prize confiscated after it had once been given, of an acceptance turning conditional when you’d believed it was permanent. Gradually, something unexpected was begining to happen. These frustrations, small and large, had started to draw the scientists’ attention to a difference between the kind of educated they were, and the kind the vydvizhentsy engineers running the Party were. The scientific method itself taught lessons, and so, in fact, did reading all that compulsory Tolstoy. When they reflected on the idiocy of anti-Semitism in the country that defeated Nazi Germany, when they heard of Khrushchev’s red-faced rage over the Academy rejecting one of Lysenko’s stooges, they started to suspect that truth and power might not be so united; that what was enthroned in Russia, after all, might be stupidity.


pages: 742 words: 166,595

The Barbell Prescription: Strength Training for Life After 40 by Jonathon Sullivan, Andy Baker

An Inconvenient Truth, complexity theory, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental subject, Gary Taubes, indoor plumbing, junk bonds, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, moral panic, phenotype, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), the scientific method, Y Combinator

Always return to the idea that strength programming is an evolution. This means that progress is generally sustained through “tweaks” and gradual modifications rather than completely overhauling your entire program every six weeks. Treat your training like a science experiment. The introduction of too many variables at once violates the basic structure of the scientific method. Learn all of the methods and protocols and then apply them one at a time at the appropriate moments in your progression. This is the only way to find out what works for you and what does not. While the basic principles of programming are pretty much the same for everyone, each person’s progression will chart a unique course.


pages: 581 words: 162,518

We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights by Adam Winkler

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate personhood, corporate social responsibility, desegregation, Donald Trump, financial innovation, Ford Model T, glass ceiling, income inequality, invisible hand, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, obamacare, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, Powell Memorandum, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, shareholder value, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, the scientific method, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, yellow journalism

Offered at a face value of 12 pounds, 10 shillings, the shares attracted more than 700 “adventurers,” as they were then called. Anything but persecuted dissenters, the stockholders included 96 knights, 21 lords, and numerous doctors, ministers, lawyers, and merchants. Sir Francis Bacon, the philosopher who popularized the scientific method, held shares, as did eventually Sir Thomas Hobbes, the father of modern political philosophy. A bit like the similarly named venture capitalists of the future, these investors were willing to gamble on a highly risky startup.7 The largest stockholder was Sir Thomas West, an English nobleman whose lineage could be traced back to a signer of the Magna Carta, adopted in 1215 as England’s first constitution limiting the power of the Crown.


pages: 756 words: 167,393

The Tylenol Mafia by Scott Bartz

AOL-Time Warner, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, independent contractor, intangible asset, inventory management, Just-in-time delivery, life extension, Oklahoma City bombing, Ronald Reagan, Ted Kaczynski, the scientific method, too big to fail

That was probably the worst deal a suspect in a high-profile murder case could ever make. Polygraphs, because they fail to conform to the Frye doctrine, were inadmissible in a court of law in 1982. The Frye doctrine states that in determining whether to admit scientific expert evidence, the court must examine whether the scientific method has attained “general acceptance” within the relevant scientific community. Polygraphy is widely rejected by the scientific community, which classifies it as “junk science.” According to polygraph expert, Michael Lawrence Langan, M.D., the accuracy of polygraphic lie detection is slightly above that of chance.


pages: 571 words: 162,958

Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology by James Patrick Kelly, John Kessel

back-to-the-land, Columbine, dark matter, Extropian, Firefox, flag carrier, Future Shock, gravity well, haute couture, Internet Archive, Kim Stanley Robinson, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, pattern recognition, phenotype, post-industrial society, price stability, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Stephen Hawking, technological singularity, telepresence, the scientific method, Turing test, urban renewal, Vernor Vinge, wage slave, Y2K, zero day

Sterling to Kessel, 4 September 1993: “The reason that your alienation is your strength — and I agree that it is — is that alienation is just a phase-shift away from transcendence. That the crippling inability to believe anything is just a phase-shift away from the admirably cosmopolitan determination not to believe anything. That bleak cosmic futility is the flipside of the freedom and power of the scientific method, the sense that you’re standing on your own ontological feet and can walk without crutches now. All these supposed oppositions are really only ambiguities. And the alienation that causes you to retreat to the firm but lonely citadel of your own personality is one small phase-change away from a wild charge outside the fortress to amaze and scatter the besiegers and loot their baggage train.


pages: 606 words: 157,120

To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism by Evgeny Morozov

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, Automated Insights, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, citizen journalism, classic study, cloud computing, cognitive bias, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, Dava Sobel, digital divide, disintermediation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, future of journalism, game design, gamification, Gary Taubes, Google Glasses, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, income inequality, invention of the printing press, Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, lifelogging, lolcat, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, moral panic, Narrative Science, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, packet switching, PageRank, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, pets.com, placebo effect, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, smart meter, social graph, social web, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yochai Benkler

If it doesn’t, we’ll try something else,” says Eric Schmidt in an effort to bolster the legitimacy of Google’s products—who would be crazy enough to oppose the march of science and suggest that perhaps some of those products need to be modified?—and present Google’s curiosity and ability to try things as just an extension of the scientific method. But science, of course, does have a moral code, which would be apparent to anyone who’s ever tried to conduct experiments involving humans. Many such experiments would need to be approved by various human subject panels and institutional research boards. Scientists don’t just spontaneously “try things”; they are forced to think through the social and political consequences of their work, often well before entering the lab.


Alpha Trader by Brent Donnelly

Abraham Wald, algorithmic trading, Asian financial crisis, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, backtesting, barriers to entry, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Boeing 747, buy low sell high, Checklist Manifesto, commodity trading advisor, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, deep learning, diversification, Edward Thorp, Elliott wave, Elon Musk, endowment effect, eurozone crisis, fail fast, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, full employment, global macro, global pandemic, Gordon Gekko, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, high net worth, hindsight bias, implied volatility, impulse control, Inbox Zero, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, iterative process, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, law of one price, loss aversion, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market microstructure, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, McMansion, Monty Hall problem, Network effects, nowcasting, PalmPilot, paper trading, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, prediction markets, price anchoring, price discovery process, price stability, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, secular stagnation, Sharpe ratio, short selling, side project, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, survivorship bias, tail risk, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, time dilation, too big to fail, transaction costs, value at risk, very high income, yield curve, you are the product, zero-sum game

., maybe that is the window when gold producers sell? If you can logically explain why a pattern works, it is much more likely to be non-random and persistent. 3. Analyze the data. 4. Accept or dismiss the pattern. Anyone who took a science class as a kid should recognize this as a shortform version of the scientific method. Most patterns you analyze will be worthless. You will dismiss them and move on. On the other hand, the few patterns you find that are non-random can be incredibly valuable to your future trading. Every time you notice a pattern, reduce it to something you can test and then get to work. You don’t need sophisticated quantitative skills to do basic backtesting of simple theories.


pages: 700 words: 160,604

The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race by Walter Isaacson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anne Wojcicki, Apollo 13, Apple II, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, Bernie Sanders, Colonization of Mars, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Dean Kamen, discovery of DNA, discovery of penicillin, double helix, Edward Jenner, Gregor Mendel, Hacker News, Henri Poincaré, iterative process, Joan Didion, linear model of innovation, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, mouse model, Nick Bostrom, public intellectual, Recombinant DNA, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, synthetic biology, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, wikimedia commons

At the height of the coronavirus crisis, Doudna was asked to write a piece for The Economist on the social transformations being wrought. “Like many other aspects of life these days, science and its practice seem to be undergoing rapid and perhaps permanent changes,” she wrote. “This will be for the better.”2 The public, she predicted, will have more understanding of biology and the scientific method. Elected officials will better appreciate the value of funding basic science. And there will be enduring changes in how scientists collaborate, compete, and communicate. Before the pandemic, communication and collaboration between academic researchers had become constrained. Universities created large legal teams dedicated to staking a claim to each new discovery, no matter how small, and guarding against any sharing of information that might jeopardize a patent application.


pages: 743 words: 189,512

The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet by Nina Teicholz

Albert Einstein, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, Gary Taubes, Indoor air pollution, meta-analysis, phenotype, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, Robert Gordon, selection bias, TED Talk, the scientific method, Upton Sinclair

A large number of psychological studies have shown that people respond to scientific or technical evidence in ways that justify their preexisting beliefs. “Selection bias,” as it’s called, is the danger of becoming overly attached to one’s own hypothesis or belief system. Resisting these “idols of the mind,” as the great seventeenth-century theorist Francis Bacon dubbed them, is exactly what the scientific method tries to do. A scientist must always try to disprove his or her own hypothesis. Or, as one of the great science philosophers of the twentieth century, Karl Popper, described, “The method of science is the method of bold conjectures and ingenious and severe attempts to refute them.”V In seeing how these early studies from Roseto, Pennsylvania to North Dakota were overlooked or dismissed out of hand, it’s hard, as a student of the history of the diet-heart hypothesis, not to conclude that selection bias has consistently been practiced for decades.


pages: 662 words: 180,546

Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown by Philip Mirowski

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Adam Curtis, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, blue-collar work, bond market vigilante , bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, capital controls, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, constrained optimization, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, dark matter, David Brooks, David Graeber, debt deflation, deindustrialization, democratizing finance, disinformation, do-ocracy, Edward Glaeser, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, income inequality, incomplete markets, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, l'esprit de l'escalier, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, loose coupling, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market design, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, Nash equilibrium, night-watchman state, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, precariat, prediction markets, price mechanism, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, random walk, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, school choice, sealed-bid auction, search costs, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, Steven Levy, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Myth of the Rational Market, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, working poor

So much for the bracing regimen of a background in the natural sciences. If anything, responses to disparagements of the contemporary profession that tended to pontificate upon the nature of “science” were even more baffling than the original calls for deliverance through natural science in the first place. Economists were poorly placed to lecture others on the scientific method; although they trafficked in mathematical models, statistics, and even “experimentation,” their practices and standards barely resembled those found in physics or biology or astronomy. Fundamental constants or structural invariants were notable by their absence. Indeed, one would be hard pressed to find an experimental refutation of any orthodox neoclassical proposition in the last four decades, so appeals to Karl Popper were more ceremonial than substantial.


pages: 634 words: 185,116

From eternity to here: the quest for the ultimate theory of time by Sean M. Carroll

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Brownian motion, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Columbine, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, dark matter, dematerialisation, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Lao Tzu, Laplace demon, Large Hadron Collider, lone genius, low earth orbit, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, pets.com, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Schrödinger's Cat, Slavoj Žižek, Stephen Hawking, stochastic process, synthetic biology, the scientific method, time dilation, wikimedia commons

Under such circumstances, among the things that randomly fluctuated into existence are all of the pieces of information we traditionally use to justify our understanding of the laws of physics, or for that matter all of the mental states (or written-down arguments) we traditionally use to justify mathematics and logic and the scientific method. Such assumptions, in other words, give us absolutely no reason to believe we have justified anything, including those assumptions themselves. David Albert has referred to such a conundrum as cognitive instability—the condition we face when a set of assumptions undermines the reasons we might have used to justify those very assumptions.147 It is a kind of helplessness that can’t be escaped without reaching beyond the present moment.


pages: 834 words: 180,700

The Architecture of Open Source Applications by Amy Brown, Greg Wilson

8-hour work day, anti-pattern, bioinformatics, business logic, c2.com, cloud computing, cognitive load, collaborative editing, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, continuous integration, Conway's law, create, read, update, delete, David Heinemeier Hansson, Debian, domain-specific language, Donald Knuth, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, finite state, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, friendly fire, functional programming, Guido van Rossum, Ken Thompson, linked data, load shedding, locality of reference, loose coupling, Mars Rover, MITM: man-in-the-middle, MVC pattern, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peer-to-peer, Perl 6, premature optimization, recommendation engine, revision control, Ruby on Rails, side project, Skype, slashdot, social web, speech recognition, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, web application, WebSocket

In addition, we provide a preference that allows a user to delay the persistence of any upgrade until the workflow is modified or executed; if a user just views that version, there is no need to persist the upgrade. 23.4.6. Sharing and Publishing Provenance-Rich Results While reproducibility is the cornerstone of the scientific method, current publications that describe computational experiments often fail to provide enough information to enable the results to be repeated or generalized. Recently, there has been a renewed interest in the publication of reproducible results. A major roadblock to the more widespread adoption of this practice is the fact that it is hard to create a bundle that includes all of the components (e.g., data, code, parameter settings) needed to reproduce a result as well as verify that result.


pages: 611 words: 186,716

The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson

British Empire, clean water, dark matter, defense in depth, digital map, edge city, Just-in-time delivery, low earth orbit, Mason jar, Neal Stephenson, pattern recognition, pneumatic tube, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Socratic dialogue, South China Sea, the scientific method, Turing machine, wage slave

"Information technology has freed cultures from the necessity of owning particular bits of land in order to propagate; now we can live anywhere. The Common Economic Protocol specifies how this is to be arranged. "Some cultures are prosperous; some are not. Some value rational discourse and the scientific method; some do not. Some encourage freedom of expression, and some discourage it. The only thing they have in common is that if they do not propagate, they will be swallowed up by others. All they have built up will be torn down; all they have accomplished will be forgotten; all they have learned and written will be scattered to the wind.


pages: 607 words: 185,487

Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed by James C. Scott

agricultural Revolution, Boeing 747, business cycle, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, commoditize, company town, deskilling, facts on the ground, germ theory of disease, Great Leap Forward, informal economy, invention of writing, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, post-Fordism, Potemkin village, price mechanism, profit maximization, Recombinant DNA, road to serfdom, scientific management, Silicon Valley, stochastic process, Suez canal 1869, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, vertical integration, working poor

A polycropping trial of twenty or more years, as Stephen Marglin has suggested, might well reach conclusions that are quite different from those derived from a trial that lasts a season or two.88 It is not at all implausible that the process of open pollination and selection by farmers, as opposed to hybridization, might have developed cultivars roughly equal in yield to the best hybrids and superior to them in many other respects, including profitability. 89 The paper profits of scientific, monocropped forests, we now realize, were achieved at considerable cost to the long-term health and productivity of the forest. One would have supposed that since most farms are family enterprises, there would have been more studies of cropping and firm economics that took as their analytical unit of time the entire family cycle of one generation.90 Nothing in the logic of the scientific method itself seems to require that a short-run perspective prevail; rather, such a perspective seems to be a response to institutional and perhaps commercial pressures. On the other hand, the need to isolate a few variables while assuming everything else constant and the bracketing of interaction effects that lie outside the experimental model are very definitely inscribed in scientific method.


pages: 704 words: 182,312

This Is Service Design Doing: Applying Service Design Thinking in the Real World: A Practitioners' Handbook by Marc Stickdorn, Markus Edgar Hormess, Adam Lawrence, Jakob Schneider

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, business cycle, business process, call centre, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, data science, different worldview, Eyjafjallajökull, fail fast, glass ceiling, Internet of things, iterative process, Kanban, Lean Startup, M-Pesa, minimum viable product, mobile money, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, RFID, scientific management, side project, Silicon Valley, software as a service, stealth mode startup, sustainable-tourism, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, the built environment, the scientific method, urban planning, work culture

One way to address this is to embrace their ideas, but then – as soon as possible – adapt your plan to push them into a prototype and test them with real users. The stakeholders then see their concepts fail with their own eyes (or succeed, but then it was you and your team that needed that validation). 64 Build-measure-learn cycles can be traced back at least as far as Galileo and the dawn of the scientific method, with incarnations like the Deming cycle from the 1950s or the more recent Lean Startup. See Moen, R. (2009). “Foundation and History of the PDSA Cycle,” Ries, E. (2011) and The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses. Crown Books. 65 The points here are presented from a service design perspective.


pages: 659 words: 190,874

Deep Nutrition: Why Your Genes Need Traditional Food by Catherine Shanahan M. D.

Albert Einstein, autism spectrum disorder, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, disinformation, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, Firefox, Gary Taubes, haute cuisine, impulse control, longitudinal study, Mahatma Gandhi, Mason jar, meta-analysis, microbiome, mirror neurons, moral panic, mouse model, pattern recognition, phenotype, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Simon Singh, smart cities, stem cell, the scientific method, traumatic brain injury, twin studies, upwardly mobile, wikimedia commons

To the Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation for making the extensive works of Weston A. Price and Dr. Francis Pottenger publicly available. To my brother Dan Shanahan for cartoons. To Mark Sisson and Brad Kearns for fostering a vibrant and thoughtful community. And to all the scientists and researchers who still believe in the scientific method. Resources CARB COUNTING TOOL: SIMPLY COUNTING CARBS Milk Group 10 ounces of milk 1 cup of soy milk 10 ounces of buttermilk 16 ounces of plain whole milk yogurt Carbs in Yogurt Flavored yogurt contains added sugars, averaging 35 grams per cup. Plain yogurt will contain fewer net carbs than what is listed here if it tastes very sour, indicating bacteria have fermented the sugar, and in so doing created more nutrition for you.


pages: 686 words: 201,972

Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol by Iain Gately

barriers to entry, British Empire, California gold rush, corporate raider, Day of the Dead, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Fellow of the Royal Society, gentleman farmer, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Haight Ashbury, Hernando de Soto, imperial preference, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Jones Act, Louis Pasteur, megacity, music of the spheres, Norman Mailer, Peace of Westphalia, post-work, refrigerator car, Ronald Reagan, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, strikebreaker, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, V2 rocket, vertical integration, working poor

Alexander (356-323 BC), known to history as the Great, conqueror of most of the world known to antiquity, took after Philip in his fondness for wine. Indeed, his drinking habits, and their contribution to his early death, were the subject of scrutiny and controversy for centuries after the event. Alexander’s tutor was the philosopher Aristotle, who is recognized as the founding father of the scientific method, and who produced a treatise on the nature of alcohol and its place in society. Unfortunately only a few fragments of this work survive to tell us what Aristotle thought of drink. These show that he came tantalizingly close to discovering distillation, although he succeeded only in turning wine into flavored water, rather than spirits: “If the wine be moderately boiled, then when it is drunk, it is less apt to intoxicate; for as some of its power has been boiled away, it has become weaker.”


pages: 717 words: 196,908

The Idea of Decline in Western History by Arthur Herman

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, bread and circuses, British Empire, David Attenborough, Dr. Strangelove, European colonialism, Future Shock, George Santayana, ghettoisation, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Herbert Marcuse, hiring and firing, Joan Didion, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Murray Bookchin, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, plutocrats, post scarcity, profit motive, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois

It becomes a trap that, like Max Weber’s iron cage, man’s own rational nature has built for him.23 The Enlightenment brought this self-destructive Western culture of control up to its modern tempo. It gave the West’s new dominant class, the bourgeoisie, a rationale or “myth” for the self-conscious pursuit of power, called the scientific method.24 Everything is reduced to “equivalence,” number, and system. It produces modern social science’s emphasis on facts and empirical research, and liberal democracy’s quantitative principle of one man—one vote. Underneath them all, however, is instrumental reason’s dream of absolute power over the Other.


pages: 786 words: 195,810

NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity by Steve Silberman

Albert Einstein, animal electricity, Apollo 11, Asperger Syndrome, assortative mating, autism spectrum disorder, Bletchley Park, crowdsourcing, Douglas Engelbart, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental subject, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, hydroponic farming, hypertext link, IBM and the Holocaust, index card, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, Kickstarter, language acquisition, Larry Wall, megacity, meta-analysis, Mother of all demos, Neil Armstrong, neurotypical, New Journalism, pattern recognition, placebo effect, scientific mainstream, side project, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skype, slashdot, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, sugar pill, the scientific method, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, union organizing, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

His tireless explorations ranged across an entire university’s worth of disciplines, encompassing chemistry, math, physics, astronomy, metallurgy, meteorology, pharmacy, and a few fields that he pioneered on his own. In an age when data-mining the Lord’s creation was not yet regarded as a legitimate profession but more like an enlightened hobby, he defined the scope, conduct, and ambition of the scientific method for centuries to come. The first surviving account of his work in the lab, a sheaf of papers dated 1764, details his study of arsenic and its metamorphosis into an off-white powder called “arsenical salt,” now known as potassium arsenate. Like most of his peers, Cavendish mistakenly believed that the hidden agent of this transformation was phlogiston, an element akin to fire.


pages: 685 words: 203,949

The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload by Daniel J. Levitin

Abraham Maslow, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anton Chekhov, autism spectrum disorder, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, big-box store, business process, call centre, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive load, complexity theory, computer vision, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Eratosthenes, Exxon Valdez, framing effect, friendly fire, fundamental attribution error, Golden Gate Park, Google Glasses, GPS: selective availability, haute cuisine, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, human-factors engineering, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, impulse control, index card, indoor plumbing, information retrieval, information security, invention of writing, iterative process, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, language acquisition, Lewis Mumford, life extension, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, more computing power than Apollo, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, optical character recognition, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, phenotype, placebo effect, pre–internet, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, shared worldview, Sheryl Sandberg, Skype, Snapchat, social intelligence, statistical model, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, traumatic brain injury, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, ultimatum game, Wayback Machine, zero-sum game

This is what happened to Steve Jobs—he rejected surgery to follow an alternative regime of acupuncture, dietary supplements, and juices that he later realized didn’t work and that delayed the conventional treatment that experts say would probably have prolonged his life. Thousands of people die in the United States every year from diseases that were preventable or curable with “Western medicine.” The scientific method has brought civilization further in the last two hundred years than all other methods over the previous ten thousand years. Medical researchers understand that patients’ lives are at stake in their experiments—often, even before a clinical trial is completed, scientists will see a clear benefit and call off the trial early in order to make the medicine available sooner rather than make patients wait, some of whom are so sick that waiting is not an option.


Statistics in a Nutshell by Sarah Boslaugh

Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Bayesian statistics, business climate, computer age, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, experimental subject, Florence Nightingale: pie chart, income per capita, iterative process, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, linear programming, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, p-value, pattern recognition, placebo effect, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, publication bias, purchasing power parity, randomized controlled trial, selection bias, six sigma, sparse data, statistical model, systematic bias, The Design of Experiments, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Two Sigma, Vilfredo Pareto

Given that a p = 0.05 result represents a 1 in 20 chance of making a Type I error, and because thousands of studies are published each year in the scientific literature alone, many “facts” must surely be open to question. This is when independent repeatability and reliability are critical to the integrity of the scientific method. The relationship between the population of interest and the sample obtained must be clearly understood. It’s not acceptable to make inferences about the entire human population based on a sample of highly educated, healthy, middle-class college students from one college. Hypotheses must relate to the effect of specific independent (predictor) variables on dependent (outcome) variables.


pages: 691 words: 203,236

Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities by Eric Kaufmann

4chan, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-communist, anti-globalists, augmented reality, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, centre right, Chelsea Manning, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Brooks, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, immigration reform, imperial preference, income inequality, it's over 9,000, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, liberal capitalism, longitudinal study, Lyft, mass immigration, meta-analysis, microaggression, moral panic, Nate Silver, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, open borders, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, phenotype, postnationalism / post nation state, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, the built environment, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, transcontinental railway, twin studies, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, white flight, working-age population, World Values Survey, young professional

This elevates the laudable goal of formulating policies to reduce racial inequality into what Scott Atran, an anthropologist, terms a ‘sacred value.’53 Within a community of believers, sacred beliefs such as ‘Jesus died for our sins on the cross’ or ‘Western society is racist’ are not open to question. They are deemed to lie beyond what may be legitimately exposed to the scientific method or empirical falsification. McWhorter writes that this religion comes complete with a high priesthood, in the form of revered authors such as Ta-Nehisi Coates, to which genuflection rather than criticism is due. Coates’s analysis is not really up for dissection and discussion, but is a call whose appropriate response is ‘Amen’.


pages: 685 words: 203,431

The Story of Philosophy by Will Durant

George Santayana, Gregor Mendel, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, long peace, mass immigration, means of production, MITM: man-in-the-middle, music of the spheres, Plato's cave, plutocrats, science of happiness, Socratic dialogue, the market place, the scientific method

Now “if a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin in doubts he shall end in certainties” (alas, it is not quite inevitable). Here is a note common in the youth of modern philosophy, part of its declaration of independence; Descartes too would presently talk of the necessity of “methodic doubt” as the cobweb-clearing pre-requisite of honest thought. Bacon proceeds to give an admirable description of the scientific method of inquiry. “There remains simple experience; which, if taken as it comes, is called accident” (“empirical”), “if sought for, experiment . . . . The true method of experience first lights the candle” (hypothesis), “and then by means of the candle shows the way” (arranges and delimits the experiment); “commencing as it does with experience duly ordered and digested, not bungling nor erratic, and from it educing axioms, and from established axioms again new experiments.”92 (We have here—as again in a later passage93 which speaks of the results of initial experiments as a “first vintage” to guide further research—an explicit, though perhaps inadequate, recognition of that need for hypothesis, experiment and deduction which some of Bacon’s critics suppose him to have entirely overlooked.)


Understanding Power by Noam Chomsky

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Burning Man, business climate, business cycle, cognitive dissonance, continuous integration, Corn Laws, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, disinformation, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, gentrification, global reserve currency, guns versus butter model, Howard Zinn, junk bonds, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, mortgage tax deduction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Paul Samuelson, Ralph Nader, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school choice, Strategic Defense Initiative, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, systems thinking, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing, wage slave, women in the workforce

They in fact said in their publications things like, “We have about five or six years to save the private enterprise system.” 74 Well, one thing they did was to launch a huge propaganda program in the United States, aimed at reversing these attitudes. 75 It was actually called at the time part of “the everlasting battle for the minds of men,” who have to be “indoctrinated in the capitalist story”; that’s a standard straight quote from the P.R. literature. 76 So in the early 1950s, the Advertising Council [an organization begun during World War II and funded by the business community to assist the government with propaganda services at home] was spending huge amounts of money to propagandize for what they called “the American way.” 77 The public relations budget for the National Association of Manufacturers I think went up by about a factor of twenty. 78 About a third of the textbooks in schools were simply provided by business. 79 They had 20 million people a week watching propaganda films about worker-management unity, after the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 allowed propaganda to be shown to basically captive audiences in companies. 80 They continued on with the “scientific methods of strikebreaking” that had been developed in the late 1930s: devoting huge resources into propaganda instead of goon-squads and breaking knees. 81 And it was all tied up with the “anti-Communist” crusade at the time—that’s the true meaning of what’s referred to as “McCarthyism,” which started well before Joseph McCarthy got involved and was really launched by business and liberal members of the Democratic Party and so on. 82 It was a way of using fear and jingoism to try to undermine labor rights and functioning democracy.


pages: 746 words: 221,583

The Children of the Sky by Vernor Vinge

air gap, combinatorial explosion, epigenetics, indoor plumbing, megacity, MITM: man-in-the-middle, power law, random walk, risk tolerance, technological singularity, the scientific method, Vernor Vinge

Flenser’s castle had been a fearsome place, a legend across the continent. Flenser—the unreformed Flenser—had had extraordinary plans for the Tinish race. Before the humans arrived, this world had not even discovered gunpowder, and the printing press was the big new thing. From that, Flenser had been busy building both a totalitarian state and something like the scientific method. There were rumors that his monster packs still lurked in the Old Castle. Ravna knew that wasn’t true, though Flenser-Tyrathect still did have his supporters, spies who shadowed Woodcarver’s own secret agents. The sun was sliding into the north, the shadows now extending all the way across the street.


pages: 927 words: 216,549

Empire of Guns by Priya Satia

banking crisis, British Empire, business intelligence, Corn Laws, cotton gin, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, hiring and firing, independent contractor, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, Khyber Pass, Lewis Mumford, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, rent-seeking, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, spinning jenny, technological determinism, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transatlantic slave trade, zero-sum game

Founded in the fifteenth century, it was loosely administered, embracing private gun foundries and publicly supported armories and administrative offices at the Tower, gun wharves at Woolwich and elsewhere, and research-and-development facilities at the Minories and at Vauxhall, in Lambeth. It had old ties with British science. At the end of the sixteenth century, the master of the Ordnance Office was the Earl of Essex, friend and patron of Francis Bacon, the English philosopher typically hailed as the father of empiricism and the scientific method. Bacon would have been familiar with the office’s complex of manufacturing and innovation. Its facilities, with their mechanicians and workmen—jobs that often passed within families to succeeding generations—provided stable niches for unobtrusive experimental projects that might someday produce a militarily useful gadget.


Seeking SRE: Conversations About Running Production Systems at Scale by David N. Blank-Edelman

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, backpropagation, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, bounce rate, business continuity plan, business logic, business process, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, commoditize, continuous integration, Conway's law, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data science, database schema, Debian, deep learning, DeepMind, defense in depth, DevOps, digital rights, domain-specific language, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, exponential backoff, fail fast, fallacies of distributed computing, fault tolerance, fear of failure, friendly fire, game design, Grace Hopper, imposter syndrome, information retrieval, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, invisible hand, iterative process, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, Kubernetes, loose coupling, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Maslow's hierarchy, microaggression, microservices, minimum viable product, MVC pattern, performance metric, platform as a service, pull request, RAND corporation, remote working, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, scientific management, search engine result page, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, single page application, Snapchat, software as a service, software is eating the world, source of truth, systems thinking, the long tail, the scientific method, Toyota Production System, traumatic brain injury, value engineering, vertical integration, web application, WebSocket, zero day

Get the organization into an iterative rhythm of forming hypotheses (e.g, “If we could stop/start x, it would reduce/increase y by z amount”), testing alternatives (e.g., process, tooling, or org changes), and evaluating the result. If the result moves you toward the target condition, implement whatever was tested and continue with other experiments. If you see the Scientific Method in this, you are correct. Repeat the experimentation until you’ve reached the next target condition. During step 4 of this process, be sure you revisit step 2 often to make sure everyone still grasps the current condition. Also, make sure that you are reviewing the specification of the next target condition often to ensure that everyone stays aligned.


pages: 669 words: 226,737

The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics by Christopher Lasch

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, company town, complexity theory, delayed gratification, desegregation, disinformation, equal pay for equal work, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Future Shock, gentrification, George Santayana, ghettoisation, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, informal economy, invisible hand, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, liberation theology, mass immigration, means of production, military-industrial complex, Norman Mailer, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, planned obsolescence, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school vouchers, scientific management, scientific worldview, sexual politics, the market place, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, urban renewal, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, War on Poverty, work culture , young professional

"Contending factions in a social struggle require morale," as he put it in Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932); "and morale is created by the right dogmas, symbols and emotionally potent oversimplifications." Industrial workers would never win "freedom" if they followed liberals' advice to rely on "intelligence" alone. Nor would Negroes achieve justice in this manner. Liberals like Dewey mistakenly put their faith in moral suasion, education, and the scientific method. They imagined that "with a little more time, a little more adequate moral and social pedagogy and a generally higher development of human intelligence, our social problems will approach solution." But science could not provide the nerve and will that enabled "disinherited groups" to resist injustice.


pages: 828 words: 232,188

Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy by Francis Fukuyama

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Atahualpa, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, British Empire, centre right, classic study, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, crony capitalism, Day of the Dead, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Snowden, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, household responsibility system, income inequality, information asymmetry, invention of the printing press, iterative process, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labour management system, land reform, land tenure, life extension, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, means of production, Menlo Park, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, new economy, open economy, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, Port of Oakland, post-industrial society, post-materialism, price discrimination, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, stem cell, subprime mortgage crisis, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vilfredo Pareto, women in the workforce, work culture , World Values Survey, zero-sum game

This expansion, in turn, was driven by a host of political and institutional factors: the establishment of secure property rights, the rise of modern states, the invention of double-entry bookkeeping and the modern corporation, and new technologies of communications and transportation. The Industrial Revolution in turn rested on the systematic application of the scientific method and its incorporation into an institutional structure of universities and research organizations, which could then be translated into technological innovations.4 FIGURE 2. Real Income per Person in England, 1200–2000 SOURCE: Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms The sudden shift to a higher level of growth had a huge effect on societies via an expanding division of labor.


pages: 846 words: 232,630

Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life by Daniel C. Dennett

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, assortative mating, buy low sell high, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, classic study, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, Danny Hillis, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Drosophila, finite state, Garrett Hardin, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, heat death of the universe, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John von Neumann, junk bonds, language acquisition, Murray Gell-Mann, New Journalism, non-fiction novel, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, QWERTY keyboard, random walk, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Schrödinger's Cat, selection bias, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine, Turing test

One reader of an early draft of this chapter complained at this point, saying that by treating the hypothesis of God as just one more scientific hypothesis, to be evaluated by the standards of science in particular and rational thought in general, Dawkins and I are ignoring the very widespread claim by believers in God that their faith is quite beyond reason, not a matter to which such mundane methods of testing applies. It is not just unsympathetic, he claimed, but strictly unwarranted for me simply to assume that the scientific method continues to apply with full force in this domain of faith. {154} Very well, let's consider the objection. I doubt that the defender of religion will find it attractive, once we explore it carefully. The philosopher Ronald de Sousa once memorably described philosophical theology as "intellectual tennis without a net," and I readily allow that I have indeed been assuming without comment or question up to now that the net of rational judgment was up.


pages: 788 words: 223,004

Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts by Jill Abramson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alexander Shulgin, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Lindbergh, Charlie Hebdo massacre, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, commoditize, content marketing, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, death of newspapers, digital twin, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, East Village, Edward Snowden, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, future of journalism, glass ceiling, Google Glasses, haute couture, hive mind, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Khyber Pass, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, Paris climate accords, performance metric, Peter Thiel, phenotype, pre–internet, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, social contagion, social intelligence, social web, SoftBank, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, telemarketer, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, vertical integration, WeWork, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yochai Benkler, you are the product

Importance now lagged behind popularity. Until Chartbeat the news media world had largely insulated itself from the changes it feared might be based on cold, hard numbers. Haile saw an opportunity to create a company that would challenge journalists’ narrow-minded but deep-seated view that the scientific method had no place in the newsroom. To the contrary, he posited, there were data out there (if they could be winnowed properly) that stood to utterly overhaul the editorial process—for the better—so that the inevitably scattershot enterprise of covering the news of the world without knowing who was following it could become more efficient.


pages: 798 words: 240,182

The Transhumanist Reader by Max More, Natasha Vita-More

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, brain emulation, Buckminster Fuller, cellular automata, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, combinatorial explosion, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, cosmological principle, data acquisition, discovery of DNA, Douglas Engelbart, Drosophila, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, experimental subject, Extropian, fault tolerance, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, friendly AI, Future Shock, game design, germ theory of disease, Hans Moravec, hypertext link, impulse control, index fund, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, Louis Pasteur, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Pepto Bismol, phenotype, positional goods, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, presumed consent, Project Xanadu, public intellectual, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, RFID, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, silicon-based life, Singularitarianism, social intelligence, stem cell, stochastic process, superintelligent machines, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological determinism, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, telepresence, telepresence robot, telerobotics, the built environment, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, Upton Sinclair, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, VTOL, Whole Earth Review, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Kass dodges this by describing those cases in which our attitudes have not changed as “crucial” – but he conspicuously omits any discussion of what makes these cases crucial, leaving as his only criterion the circular observation that they have not changed. If our moral instinct is self-defining, how can it change? I think the answer is clear, though perhaps surprising: we apply the scientific method to it. Our non-acceptance of homosexuality was progressively seen to be inconsistent with other, even more deeply held, aspects of our sense of right and wrong, such as the right to do what one likes that does not harm others; this bears a rather clear similarity to the emergence of relativity and the quantum theory from the increasingly awkward internal inconsistency of classical physics with respect to (for example) whether light is made of waves or particles.


pages: 829 words: 229,566

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate by Naomi Klein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, big-box store, bilateral investment treaty, Blockadia, Boeing 747, British Empire, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, Climategate, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, crony capitalism, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, different worldview, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, equal pay for equal work, extractivism, Exxon Valdez, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, financial deregulation, food miles, Food sovereignty, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, green transition, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, ice-free Arctic, immigration reform, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jones Act, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, land bank, light touch regulation, man camp, managed futures, market fundamentalism, Medieval Warm Period, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nixon shock, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, patent troll, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, post-oil, precautionary principle, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rana Plaza, remunicipalization, renewable energy transition, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, scientific management, smart grid, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, structural adjustment programs, Ted Kaczynski, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wages for housework, walkable city, Washington Consensus, Wayback Machine, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

As conference speaker Larry Bell succinctly puts it in his book Climate of Corruption, climate change “has little to do with the state of the environment and much to do with shackling capitalism and transforming the American way of life in the interests of global wealth redistribution.”7 Yes, there is a pretense that the delegates’ rejection of climate science is rooted in serious disagreement about the data. And the organizers go to some lengths to mimic credible scientific conferences, calling the gathering “Restoring the Scientific Method” and even choosing a name, the International Conference on Climate Change, that produces an organizational acronym, ICCC, just one letter off from that of the world’s leading authority on climate change, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a collaboration of thousands of scientists and 195 governments.


pages: 827 words: 239,762

The Golden Passport: Harvard Business School, the Limits of Capitalism, and the Moral Failure of the MBA Elite by Duff McDonald

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, deskilling, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, eat what you kill, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, impact investing, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, market fundamentalism, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, new economy, obamacare, oil shock, pattern recognition, performance metric, Pershing Square Capital Management, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, pushing on a string, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, random walk, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, survivorship bias, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, urban renewal, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

Their professors and MBAs look on firms, as do their all-powerful CEOs, as money mills that funnel money to top managers, stockholders, and other investors, and they have fashioned the management control and reporting instruments, accordingly, even if . . . that toolkit leads to underperformance and perhaps to the eventual extinction of the firm, primarily at the expense of non-management employees and workers.”13 “To their credit, HBS never fully bought into the scientific method that emerged in the 1960s at places like Carnegie Mellon,” says Locke, echoing Spender. “They always had this case method. But HBS didn’t try to do anything about what I call the institutionalization of managerialism. Why? Because that was where it got institutionalized, the whole idea of creating a class of people to run the world.


pages: 782 words: 245,875

The Power Makers by Maury Klein

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, animal electricity, Augustin-Louis Cauchy, book value, British Empire, business climate, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, industrial research laboratory, invention of radio, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Louis Pasteur, luminiferous ether, margin call, Menlo Park, price stability, railway mania, Right to Buy, the scientific method, trade route, transcontinental railway, working poor

Apart from their immediate significance, these laws of inverse squares marked the beginning of quantitative work in electricity and magnetism. Coulomb did not take the next step of speculating that the two forces might in fact be one and the same; that insight would not appear for many more decades. However, he brought to physics the importance of mathematical measurement as part of the scientific method. In this respect he pointed the way to the crucial contributions of James Clerk Maxwell in the next century.25 By 1800 these men and others too numerous to mention had advanced electricity from a curiosity of nature to a growing field of scientific study. Yet no one knew what it was—the two-fluids-versus-one-fluid debate still raged— and no practical application had come from the work other than the lightning rod.


pages: 903 words: 235,753

The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty by Benjamin H. Bratton

1960s counterculture, 3D printing, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, additive manufacturing, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Cass Sunstein, Celebration, Florida, Charles Babbage, charter city, clean water, cloud computing, company town, congestion pricing, connected car, Conway's law, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Graeber, deglobalization, dematerialisation, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, distributed generation, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, facts on the ground, Flash crash, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, functional programming, future of work, Georg Cantor, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Guggenheim Bilbao, High speed trading, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Laura Poitras, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, McMansion, means of production, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, OSI model, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, peak oil, peer-to-peer, performance metric, personalized medicine, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, post-Fordism, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reserve currency, rewilding, RFID, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, skeuomorphism, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snow Crash, social graph, software studies, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Startup school, statistical arbitrage, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, the long tail, the scientific method, Torches of Freedom, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, working poor, Y Combinator, yottabyte

Concurrently, Max Weber would identify a tendency toward depersonalized rationalization through the formulation of people into interchangeable bureaucratic components as a key sociological feature of industrial capitalism. Paul Lazarsfeld's audience studies for the Princeton Radio Project (which momentarily included Theodor Adorno on the team) was among many midcentury attempts to apply the scientific method to the deduction of typical patterns in consumer thought and behavior used as templates for the formulation of products and propagandas. Information about audiences and Users would be used to inspire and validate the authorship of representative fictional personas that stand for those people by typifying them as ad hoc archetypes.9 Later, the requirements of software and interaction design came to rely on the specification of diverse groups of multiple hypothetical Users, each with different needs, all put into overlapping fictional worlds where optimum click paths could be modeled, categorized, and used to perfect possible GUI solutions.10 Whereas Joe and Josephine were absolutely generic, extranormal people, the complexities of designing dynamic interfacial systems means that any thing must be usable for people with heterogeneous aptitudes and intentions.


pages: 936 words: 252,313

Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease by Gary Taubes

Albert Einstein, California gold rush, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, cognitive dissonance, collaborative editing, Drosophila, Everything should be made as simple as possible, experimental subject, Gary Taubes, invention of agriculture, John Snow's cholera map, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, phenotype, placebo effect, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, selection bias, seminal paper, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, twin studies, unbiased observer, Upton Sinclair

The press’s favoring of articles that implied Keys’s hypothesis was right helped convince the public; their belief in turn would be used to argue that the time had come to advise cholesterol-lowering diets for everyone, thus further reinforcing the belief that this advice must be scientifically defensible. Believing that your hypothesis must be correct before all the evidence is gathered encourages you to interpret the evidence selectively. This is human nature. It is also precisely what the scientific method tries to avoid. It does so by requiring that scientists not just test their hypotheses, but try to prove them false. “The method of science is the method of bold conjectures and ingenious and severe attempts to refute them,” said Karl Popper, the dean of the philosophy of science. Popper also noted that an infinite number of possible wrong conjectures exist for every one that happens to be right.


pages: 824 words: 268,880

Blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

anthropic principle, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, dark matter, different worldview, epigenetics, gravity well, heat death of the universe, ITER tokamak, James Watt: steam engine, Kim Stanley Robinson, land tenure, new economy, phenotype, quantum entanglement, stem cell, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-masted sailing ship

As Sax wandered on, half listening to the conversations he passed, he was struck again by the apolitical nature of most scientists and technicians. There was something about politics they were allergic to, and he felt it as well, he had to admit it. Politics was irreducibly subjective and compromised, a process that went entirely against the grain of the scientific method. Was that true? These feelings and prejudices were subjective themselves. One could try to regard politics as a kind of science— a long series of experiments in communal living, say, with all the data consistently contaminated. Thus people hypothesized a system of governance, lived under it, examined how they felt about it, then changed the system and tried again.


Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook That Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and The... by Sally Fallon, Pat Connolly, Mary G. Enig, Phd.

British Empire, classic study, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, germ theory of disease, Louis Pasteur, Mason jar, out of africa, profit motive, the market place, the scientific method

With its system of facial diagnosis and treatment based upon correspondences of specific foods to various organs and conditions, it has many similarities to the medieval doctrine of the four humors, which has recently enjoyed something of a resurgence in Europe. Such intuitive and noninvasive methods can be very useful to the medical practitioner, especially when combined with more orthodox diagnostic techniques that are grounded in the scientific method. According to the macrobiotic system, sugar is the most yin food, followed by fruit juices, honey, tropical fruits, acid fruits, dairy products and vegetables of the nightshade family; pork is the most yang food, followed by beef, game, poultry, eggs and fish. Vegetables and legumes are slightly yin while grains are slightly yang.


I Am Charlotte Simmons: A Novel by Tom Wolfe

back-to-the-land, British Empire, clean water, dematerialisation, glass ceiling, public intellectual, stem cell, the scientific method, working poor

Did you by any chance think the assignment was to disprove the theory of evolution in fifteen to twenty pages?" The irony cut her to the quick. "No, sir." She could barely make her voice rise above a gasp. "The assignment," he continued, "was to assess the theory with regard to the conventional requirements of the scientific method. Perhaps you remember our discussing the fact that in science, no theory merits consideration unless you can provide a set of contraindications, which, if true, would prove it wrong." "Yes, sir," mumbled Charlotte. "From this standpoint," said Mr. Starling, "evolution has to be considered as a special case.


Europe: A History by Norman Davies

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, centre right, charter city, classic study, clean water, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, Corn Laws, cuban missile crisis, Defenestration of Prague, discovery of DNA, disinformation, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, equal pay for equal work, Eratosthenes, Etonian, European colonialism, experimental economics, financial independence, finite state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, gentleman farmer, global village, Gregor Mendel, Honoré de Balzac, Index librorum prohibitorum, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, land reform, liberation theology, long peace, Louis Blériot, Louis Daguerre, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Murano, Venice glass, music of the spheres, New Urbanism, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, Peace of Westphalia, Plato's cave, popular capitalism, Potemkin village, purchasing power parity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, road to serfdom, sceptred isle, Scramble for Africa, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, Thales of Miletus, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Transnistria, urban planning, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois

The philosophy of the Enlightenment was primarily concerned with epistemology, that is, the theory of knowledge—or how we know what we know. Here, the basis for debate was supplied by three Britons: the Englishman John Locke (1632–1704), the Irishman Bishop George Berkeley (1685–1753), and the Scotsman David Hume (1711–76), sometime secretary of the British Embassy in Paris. As empiricists, they all accepted that the scientific method of observation and deduction should be applied to human affairs, and hence the precept of their contemporary, Alexander Pope: Know then thyself, presume not God to scan, The proper study of mankind is Man.4 Locke’s famous Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) advanced the proposition that the human mind is blank at birth—a tabula rasa.

The social sciences—psychology, economics, sociology, political science— exerted a profound effect on all the older disciplines. Perhaps the most fruitful alternatives to the arid trends of the time, however, were supplied by the Austrian-born Karl Popper (1902–94). Popper’s Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934) overturned reigning assumptions about the scientific method. He argued, after Einstein’s example, that no knowledge was absolute or permanent, and that hypotheses were best established by searching for proof of their wrong-headedness. His Poverty of Historicism (1957) demolished the pretensions of social science to formulate laws governing historical development.


Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy by Irvin D. Yalom, Molyn Leszcz

cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, confounding variable, delayed gratification, deskilling, epigenetics, experimental subject, impulse control, meta-analysis, randomized controlled trial, TED Talk, the scientific method, traveling salesman, unbiased observer

Their texts are as well written, their optimism as unbridled, and their reported results as impressive as those of contemporary practitioners. Question: why have other health-care fields left treatment of psychological disturbance so far behind? Answer: because they have applied the principles of the scientific method. Without a rigorous research base, the psychotherapists of today who are enthusiastic about current treatments are tragically similar to the hydrotherapists and lobotomists of yesteryear. As long as we do not test basic principles and treatment outcomes with scientific rigor, our field remains at the mercy of passing fads and fashions.


pages: 945 words: 292,893

Seveneves by Neal Stephenson

Apollo 13, Biosphere 2, clean water, Colonization of Mars, Danny Hillis, digital map, double helix, epigenetics, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, Filipino sailors, gravity well, hydroponic farming, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, kremlinology, Kuiper Belt, low earth orbit, machine readable, microbiome, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, phenotype, Potemkin village, pre–internet, random walk, remote working, selection bias, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snow Crash, space junk, statistical model, Stewart Brand, supervolcano, tech billionaire, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tunguska event, VTOL, zero day, éminence grise

It was purely an intellectual curiosity and not at all a factor in real people’s lives: a thing Kath Two had heard of, like rabies or Watergate, and she was fascinated to find it stirring in her own mind here of all places. But that was only a passing notion. Presently her Survey mind kicked in and subsumed all under the scientific method. Here they were at a TerReForm outpost. Many thousands of these existed. Some were huddles of tents presaging more permanent works. Some, like this one, had been around for decades, others for centuries. Some were now abandoned, having served their purpose, and others had become nuclei of RIZes, campuses for gimmicky schools, prison camps, or scientific foundations.


pages: 1,108 words: 321,463

The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand

British Empire, collective bargaining, Easter island, laissez-faire capitalism, plutocrats, profit motive, the scientific method, yellow journalism

He hired a sensitive poet to cover baseball games. He hired an art expert to handle financial news. He got a socialist to defend factory owners and a conservative to champion labor. He forced an atheist to write on the glories of religion. He made a disciplined scientist proclaim the superiority of mystical intuition over the scientific method. He gave a great symphony conductor a munificent yearly income, for no work at all, on the sole condition that he never conduct an orchestra again. Some of these men had refused, at first. But they surrendered when they found themselves on the edge of bankruptcy through a series of untraceable circumstances within a few years.


pages: 976 words: 329,519

The Pursuit of Power: Europe, 1815-1914 by Richard J. Evans

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anton Chekhov, British Empire, clean water, company town, Corn Laws, demographic transition, Edward Jenner, Ernest Rutherford, Etonian, European colonialism, feminist movement, Ford Model T, full employment, gentleman farmer, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, Honoré de Balzac, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, imperial preference, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial cluster, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Jacquard loom, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, land bank, land reform, land tenure, Livingstone, I presume, longitudinal study, Louis Blériot, Louis Daguerre, Louis Pasteur, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, New Urbanism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pneumatic tube, profit motive, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, safety bicycle, Scaled Composites, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, source of truth, spinning jenny, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, trade route, University of East Anglia, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, vertical integration

Positivism, the doctrine developed by Auguste Comte in the 1840s, and made available in English in his major work A General View of Positivism, (1865), held that scientific observation was the only legitimate basis for action. A priori beliefs had to be jettisoned; only what could be seen and verified was true. If the scientific method was applied to every discipline, then all the facts would be known about everything. History, for example, should, in the view of Lord Acton, Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University from 1895 to 1902, satisfy ‘the scientific demand for completeness and certainty’. It was widely thought that history had been established as a science by Leopold von Ranke, and history professors everywhere emphasized the application of standard methods of source criticism in order to establish the authenticity of the documents on which historians now began to base their work.


The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science by J. Kenji López-Alt

coastline paradox / Richardson effect, haute cuisine, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Kickstarter, mandelbrot fractal, oil rush, place-making, the scientific method

It’s not about lab coats and safety goggles, and it’s definitely not about trying to make yourself sound fancy. Science is not an end in and of itself, but a path. It’s a method to help you discover the underlying order of the world around you and to use those discoveries to help you predict how things will behave in the future. The scientific method is based on making observations, keeping track of those observations, coming up with hypotheses to explain those observations, and then performing tests designed to disprove those hypotheses. If, despite your hardest, most sincere efforts, you can’t manage to disprove the hypotheses, then you can say with a pretty good deal of certainty that your hypotheses are true.


pages: 1,157 words: 379,558

Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris by Richard Kluger

air freight, Albert Einstein, book value, California gold rush, cognitive dissonance, confounding variable, corporate raider, desegregation, disinformation, double entry bookkeeping, family office, feminist movement, full employment, ghettoisation, independent contractor, Indoor air pollution, junk bonds, medical malpractice, Mikhail Gorbachev, plutocrats, power law, publication bias, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, stock buybacks, The Chicago School, the scientific method, Torches of Freedom, trade route, transaction costs, traveling salesman, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, vertical integration, War on Poverty

It had neither money nor power to challenge the tobacco interests, and its chairman, former advertising executive Emerson Foote, a convert to the embryonic anticigarette cause, was more well-meaning than effectual. Barron’s, the pro-business financial weekly, used the first anniversary of the Surgeon General’s report as the occasion to charge that Surgeon General Terry had “made a mockery of the scientific method” and to belittle Foote as a mere ex-huckster and turncoat fanatic. The only national organization effectively involved in combating the smoking peril, the American Cancer Society, pointedly declined to invest its high standing in the Interagency Council. Lane W. Adams, for twenty-three years the executive director of the ACS, conceded in retrospect that the cancer society was not then prepared to subordinate its leadership role.


pages: 1,234 words: 356,472

Pandora's Star by Peter F. Hamilton

Apollo 11, carbon-based life, clean water, corporate governance, disinformation, Magellanic Cloud, megacity, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, operational security, plutocrats, random walk, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, stem cell, the scientific method, trade route, urban sprawl

The amount of produce that could be grown by a motile doubled within a decade. Seeing the possibility of the concept, the immotiles began to experiment, studying how the plants grew, what soils were best. MorningLightMountain itself was the one who worked out cross-pollination as a method of increasing yield and breeding new varieties. It was the start of the scientific method, and all that implied. MorningLightMountain amalgamated its twenty-ninth immotile a decade after it began sowing crops. Twenty years later, a thousand years after it had begun its original singleton life, the number of connected units in the group reached forty, an unheard-of rate of expansion.


pages: 1,293 words: 357,735

The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance by Laurie Garrett

Albert Einstein, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bill Atkinson, biofilm, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, clean water, contact tracing, correlation does not imply causation, discovery of penicillin, disinformation, double helix, Edward Jenner, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, germ theory of disease, global macro, global pandemic, global village, Gregor Mendel, Herbert Marcuse, indoor plumbing, invention of air conditioning, it's over 9,000, John Snow's cholera map, land reform, Live Aid, Louis Pasteur, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, megacity, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, phenotype, price mechanism, Ralph Nader, Recombinant DNA, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, San Francisco homelessness, seminal paper, South China Sea, the scientific method, trade route, transfer pricing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Zimmermann PGP

They all have severe weight loss—the most severe we have ever seen in this hospital in adults.” Kidenya, Tkimalenka, and the hospital’s stout surgeon, Clint Nyamuryekunge, scoured medical records for clues. A recent graduate of Muhimbili Medical School, Nyamuryekunge was convinced that the puzzle could be solved using the scientific method. As bombastic and aggressive as Kidenya was discreet, Nyamuryekunge argued that all they needed was a good pool of plague patients to compare with a group of normal venereal disease patients. Kidenya contacted the directors of other hospitals in the Kagera region—a difficult procedure in an area with no telephone service.


pages: 1,437 words: 384,709

The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes

Able Archer 83, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, Brownian motion, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, death from overwork, Donner party, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, Etonian, fixed income, full employment, God and Mammon, Isaac Newton, jitney, John von Neumann, Louis Pasteur, nuclear winter, publish or perish, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, the scientific method, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, Works Progress Administration

“Make it seem inevitable,” Louis Pasteur used to advise his students when they prepared to write up their discoveries. But it was. To wish that it might have been ignored or suppressed is barbarous. “Knowledge,” Niels Bohr once noted, “is itself the basis for civilization.” You cannot have the one without the other; the one depends upon the other. Nor can you have only benevolent knowledge; the scientific method doesn’t filter for benevolence. Knowledge has consequences, not always intended, not always comfortable, not always welcome. The earth revolves around the sun, not the sun around the earth. “It is a profound and necessary truth,” Robert Oppenheimer would say, “that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them.”


pages: 1,178 words: 388,227

Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson

Danny Hillis, dark matter, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, Fellow of the Royal Society, Free Software Foundation, gentleman farmer, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Neal Stephenson, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, retrograde motion, short selling, short squeeze, Snow Crash, the scientific method, trade route, urban planning

It started to come out in the twentieth century that Newton had devoted more of his time and energy to alchemy during his career than he had devoted to mathematical physics. That’s a fact that is obvious enough if you look at his papers — he made no particular effort to conceal this. But it was sort of suppressed a little bit during the Enlightenment and Victorian era, when people didn’t know what to make of it. They wanted to view Newton as this paragon of the scientific method, and it was difficult to fit alchemy into that structure. The view of more modern scholarship is that alchemy was all over the place. Robert Boyle was heavily involved into it; John Locke was involved in it; Newton of course; and quite a few of these other people. They didn’t really observe a clean distinction between alchemy and what we now think of as the modern practice of science.


pages: 1,318 words: 403,894

Reamde by Neal Stephenson

air freight, airport security, autism spectrum disorder, book value, crowdsourcing, digital map, drone strike, Google Earth, industrial robot, informal economy, Jones Act, large denomination, megacity, messenger bag, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, new economy, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, ransomware, restrictive zoning, scientific management, side project, Skype, slashdot, Snow Crash, South China Sea, SQL injection, the built environment, the scientific method, young professional

Possibly because of devastating experiences earlier in her life, she was some kind of a psychopath, a born killer; the comfortable circumstances under which she’d been living until a week ago had made it possible for this to go unnoticed, but now stress was bringing it out. She considered hypothesis 3 to be quite unlikely, since she didn’t feel the least bit psychopathic, but included it in the list out of respect for the scientific method. One thing had certainly changed, though: she had fought back and she had eliminated one of these guys. What was to say she couldn’t do it again? The answer came to her immediately: after they had landed, Jones had been about to kill her. She had saved her life only by offering herself as a hostage: a resource by which something might be extorted from Uncle Richard.


pages: 1,799 words: 532,462

The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication From Ancient Times to the Internet by David Kahn

anti-communist, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Charles Babbage, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Easter island, end-to-end encryption, Fellow of the Royal Society, heat death of the universe, Honoré de Balzac, index card, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Louis Daguerre, machine translation, Maui Hawaii, Norbert Wiener, out of africa, pattern recognition, place-making, planned obsolescence, Plato's cave, pneumatic tube, popular electronics, positional goods, Republic of Letters, Searching for Interstellar Communications, stochastic process, Suez canal 1869, the scientific method, trade route, Turing machine, union organizing, yellow journalism, zero-sum game

The statements of cryptanalysis, whose denial would not be self-contradictory, are synthetic. It might even be said that cryptography deals with noumena, cryptanalysis with phenomena. The empirical nature of cryptanalysis appears in its operations. These consist of the four steps of what is commonly called the “scientific method,” which scientists apply in attacking problems in the natural sciences. They are: analysis (such as counting the letters), hypothesis (x might be e), prediction (if x is e, then some plaintext possibilities should emerge), and verification (they do) or refutation (they don’t, so x is probably not e), either case starting a new chain of reasoning.