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“it would appear that only rarely—if at all—will the utilities favor the continued employment of man over a model of man.” But how could that be? Why would the judgment of an expert—a medical doctor, no less—be inferior to a model crafted from that very expert’s own knowledge? At that point, Goldberg more or less threw up his hands and said, Well, even experts are human. “The clinician is not a machine,” he wrote. “While he possesses his full share of human learning and hypothesis-generating skills, he lacks the machine’s reliability. He ‘has his days’: Boredom, fatigue, illness, situational and interpersonal distractions all plague him, with the result that his repeated judgments of the exact same stimulus configuration are not identical. . . . If we could remove some of this human unreliability by eliminating this random error in his judgments, we should thereby increase the validity of the resulting predictions . . .”
The Undoing Project
Michael Lewis
Darwin was suggesting an idea even larger than natural selection: that the universe is governed by laws, not by divine whim, and that the transmutation of species by natural selection is merely one of those laws. He finished the rough sketch with a burst of eloquence. It was oddly consoling, Darwin noted, that from the hard Malthusian struggle involving “death, famine, rapine, and the concealed war of nature” had come a great good, the creation of the higher animals. “There is a simple grandeur,” he wrote, in the view of life with its powers of growth, assimilation and reproduction, being originally breathed into matter under one or a few forms, and that whilst this our planet has gone circling on according to fixed laws, and land and water, in a cycle of change, have gone on replacing each other, that from so simple an origin, through the process of gradual selection of infinitesimal changes, endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been evolved. He had made a big move toward putting his thoughts forward. But it was only a private memo to himself.
The Reluctant Mr. Darwin
David Quammen
Reluctantly, I punched out the message. Name of new brand is… A lot of things were rolling around in my head, consciously, unconsciously. First, Johnson had pointed out that seemingly all iconic brands—Clorox, Kleenex, Xerox—have short names. Two syllables or less. And they always have a strong sound in the name, a letter like “K” or “X,” that sticks in the mind. That all made sense. And that all described Nike. Also, I liked that Nike was the goddess of victory. What’s more important, I thought, than victory? I might have heard, in the far recesses of my mind, Churchill’s voice. You ask, What is our aim? I can answer in one word. It is victory. I might have recalled the victory medal awarded to all veterans of World War II, a bronze medallion with Athena Nike on the front, breaking a sword in two. I might have. Sometimes I believe that I did. But in the end I don’t really know what led me to my decision. Luck? Instinct? Some inner spirit? Yes. “What’d you decide?” Woodell asked me at the end of the day. “Nike,” I mumbled. “Hm,” he said. “Yeah, I know,” I said. “Maybe it’ll grow on us,” he said. Maybe.
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