Astonishingly rapid now is the progress of society . . . but whither the progress is to lead, and where it is to end - except in the bosom of the Almighty, where it began - human imagination cannot conceive.
-excerpted from The Economist in 1853, and found here
A hallmark of true expertise and insight is making complex subjects understandable. A hallmark of mediocrity and bad strategy is unnecessary complexity—a flurry of fluff masking an absence of substance.
-Richard P. Rumelt, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters
The sensible answer to the question 'Will there be another global financial crisis in the next ten years?' is 'I don't know.' Both professional economists and economic agents, whether business or households, grapple with the question of 'What is going on here?' When experts claim knowledge they do not and could not have, they invite the response that people have 'had enough of experts.'
-John Kay and Mervyn King, Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making Beyond The Numbers
The ultimate success of a ruler thus derives from his ability to recognize the mutually constitutive relationships between political power, military force, prosperity, and justice for his people.
-Alan Mikhail, God's Shadow: Sultan Selim, His Ottoman Empire, and the Making of the Modern World
Major Devereaux, with twenty-seven years of service, was aware that the lives of men are dictated, to an extent far greater than most men wish to admit, by events beyond their control. Man rides the ocean of history and does what he can to weather its storms.
-Louis L"Amour, Under The Sweetwater Rim
One day in 1933, Arthur Krock, the Washington correspondent of The New York Times, met Huey Long coming out of the Senate. Huey stopped Krock and said that he could not understand the paper's treatment of him: it opposed him editorially but carried lengthy accounts of his speeches. "Why do you print what I say?" he demanded. "We have this foolish idea that the news columns should be honest," Krock explained, "and since you make news, we print it." The Kingfish seemed dumbfounded. "Godddamn it! I wouldn't run a newspaper that way if I owned one," he said.
-T. Harry Williams, Huey Long
Inspiration came to Sanger unexpectedly in the winter of 1971—in the form of inversion. He had spend decades learning to break molecules apart to solve their sequence. But what if he turned his own strategy upside down and tried to build DNA, rather than break it down? To solve a gene sequence, Sanger reasoned, one must think like a gene.
-Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Gene: An Intimate History
Unfortunately, good strategy is the exception, not the rule. And the problem is growing. More and more organizational leaders say they have a strategy, but they do not. Instead, they espouse what I call bad strategy. Bad strategy tends to skip over pesky details such as problems. It ignores the power of choice and focus, trying instead to accommodate a multitude of conflicting demands and interests. Like a quarterback whose only advice to teammates is "Let's win," bad strategy covers up its failure to guide by embracing the language of broad goals, ambition, vision, and values. Each of these elements is, of course, and important part of human life. But, by themselves, they are not substitutes for the hard work of strategy.
-Richard P. Rumelt, Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters
..............but when we do, it is because he says stuff like this:
The trouble with the theory is that government is not a machine, but a living thing. It falls, not under the theory of the universe, but under the theory of organic life. It is accountable to Darwin, not to Newton. It is modified by its environment, necessitated by its tasks, shaped to its functions by the sheer pressure of life.
-as excerpted from this Morgan Housel post
At the turn of the sixteenth century, most of the era's expanding empires faced the same challenge: minority rule. Whether in the Americas or in Asia, small bands of military elites conquered vast new territories, thereby gaining the right to rule over huge populations. The ascendent Muslim Mughals, for example, moved south from Central Asia to India, where they governed an enormous restive population of Hindus and other non-Muslims. The Aztecs, in their conquest of the Yucatan peninsula, ruled over peoples who shared neither their culture nor their worldview. And European global expansion in this period brought the continents's armies face to face with peoples they had never before encountered, in places they did not fully understand. These early modern empires changed the ethnic, linguistic, economic, and religious landscape of the world, creating new cultural synergies and new political possibilities even as they foreclosed others.
-Alan Mikhail. God's Shadow: Sultan Selim, His Ottoman Empire, and the Making of the Modern World
Ed. Note: The context for the paragraph above was the author's acknowledgment that much of the early Muslim Ottoman empire was populated by Christians, with Muslims being the ruling minority.
Michelangelo's David's not a warrior,
not just a clever boy—he's a cool young man.
Weight on the right leg, eyes left
brow crinkled, calculating, estimating
the text says Goliath is already down.
Left arm to his left shoulder and the stone-pouch,
right hand down at his side,
holds the ends
long leather sling straps—he has not
thrown it yet. Stands still, in a deep place
a hinge in time
modesty
and naked grace.
-Gary Snyder, Young David in Florence, Before the Kill
more than you wanted to know about Michelangelo's David may be found here
The disease of the modern character is specialization. Looked at from the standpoint of the social system, the aim of specialization may seem desirable enough. The aim is to see that the responsibilities of government, law, medicine, engineering, agriculture, education, etc., are given into the hands of the most skilled, best prepared people. The difficulties do not appear until we look at specialization from the opposite standpoint—that of individual persons. We then begin to see the grotesquery—indeed, the impossibility—of an idea of community wholeness that divorces itself from any idea of personal wholeness.
-Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture
The reason I like blogging over other social media formats is that bloggers seem to understand that they will disagree with some things written by a blogger and agree with other things written by the same person. They don’t get too ruffled about it. Life is too short and they have their own blog. When I read what others write, I take the information in and don’t feel any strong obligation to express either agreement or disagreement on every topic. I take it in and move on. I also appreciate the differing points of view.
-Kurt Harden, from this post, which reminded me of this:
Reflexivity undermines stationarity. This was the essence of Goodhart's Law - any business or government policy which assumed stationarity of social and economic relationships was likely to fail because its implementation would alter the behaviour of those affected and therefore destroy that stationarity. In an early example of reflexivity, Jonah prophesied the destruction of Nineveh, having received inside information concerning God's plant to punish the city (his journey to Nineveh was interrupted by a bizarre encounter with a whale). But after his arrival the citizens repented on hearing his forewarning and the city was spared. This outcome 'displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was very angry', feeling (unlike many modern forecasters) despondent at the very public refutation of his prediction. But God persuaded Jonah that the happy outcome was more important than the failure of his forecast.
-John Kay and Mervyn King, Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making Beyond the Numbers
The biblical story is found in Jonah 3-4.
Goodhart's Law = Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes. Also phrased as "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
A great deal of strategy work is trying to figure out what is going on. Not just deciding what to do, but he more fundamental problem of comprehending the situation.
-Richard Rumelt, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy
........The opening paragraphs to Louis L'Amour's Galloway:
The old elk walked up the knoll where the long wind blew. The wolves followed.
The elk realized what was happening, but he didn't know it was only part of something that had been going on since life began.
He didn't know that it was because of these wolves or their kindred that he had been strong, brave, and free-running all his past years. For it was the wolves who kept the elk herds in shape by weeding out the weak, the old, and the inept.
Now his time had come, and the wolves were there.
A man only begins to be a man when he ceases to whine and revile, and commences to search for the hidden justice which regulates his life. And he adapts his mind to that regulating factor, he ceases to accuse others as the cause of his condition, and builds himself up in strong and noble thoughts; ceases to kick against circumstances, but begins to use them as aids to his more rapid progress, and as a means of the hidden powers and possibilities within himself.
-James Allen, As A Man Thinketh
Reading dispels prejudices which hem our minds within narrow spaces. One of the things that will surprise you as you read good books from all over the world and from all times of man is that human nature is much the same today as it has been ever since writing began to tell us about it.
12 Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets.
-Matthew 7:12 The Holy Bible, King James Version
“Science cannot tell us a word about why music delights us, of why and how an old song can move us to tears.”
Ironically, the very features that enable a cell to read DNA are the features that make it incomprehensible to humans—to chemists, in particular. DNA, as Shrödinger had predicted, was a chemical built to defy chemists, a molecule of exquisite contradictions—monotonous and yet infinitely varied, repetitive to the extreme and yet idiosyncratic to the extreme.
-Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Gene: An Intimate History
. . . humans are social animals and communication plays an important role in decision-making. We frame out thinking in terms of narratives. And able leaders - whether in business, in politics, or in everyday life - make decisions, both personal and collective, by talking with others and being open to challenge from them. Humans, uniquely, produce artefacts of extraordinary complexity and are able to do so only by the successful development of networks of trust, cooperation and coordination. Market economies function only by virtue of being embedded in a social context.
-John Kay and Mervyn King, Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making Beyond The Numbers
Another thing I think should be avoided is extremely intense ideology because is cabbages up one's mind.
...............this will be an enjoyable book. The yellow highlighter is already working over time. A few snippets:
" . . . humans do not necessarily comprehend the consequences of their innovations."
"But we do not make good decisions by professing knowledge we do not and cannot have."
"Uncertainty is the result of our incomplete knowledge of the world, or about the connection between our present actions and their future outcomes."
"With radical uncertainty, however, there is no similar means of resolving the uncertainty - we simply do not know. Radical uncertainty has many dimensions: obscurity; ignorance; vagueness; ambiguity; ill-defined problems; and a lack of information that in some cases but not all we might hope to rectify at a future date. These aspects of uncertainty are the stuff of everyday experience.
Most important challenges are inevitably judgements which reflect an interpretation of a particular situation. Different individuals and groups will make different assessments and arrive at different decisions, and often there will be no objectively right answer, either before of after the event.
-John Kay and Mervyn King, Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making Beyond The Numbers
The meaning of rational behaviour depends critically on the context of the situation and there are generally many ways of being rational. We distinguish axiomatic rationality, as used by economists, from evolutionary rationality, was practiced by people. Many so-called 'biases' are responses to the complex world of radical uncertainty. Evolution in this uncertain world has led characteristics which are primarily adaptive to become embodied in human reasoning. Humans are successful at adapting to the environment in which they find themselves, and have not evolved to perform rapid calculations of well-defined problems at which computers excel. This is because the problems which humans face, whether sparkling at dinner party conversations or conducting international trade negotiations, are not well-defined problems amenable to rapid calculation.
-John Kay and Mervyn King, Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making Beyond The Numbers
Sensible - adaptive - public policy and business strategy cannot be determined by quantitative assessments of policies and projects, made by an industry of professional modellers using probabilistic reasoning. In this book we explain how it is that so many clever people came to believe otherwise - and why they are wrong.
-John Kay and Mervyn King, Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making Beyond The Numbers
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