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MAKING SENSE OF INFORMATION For the experts we just described, the key benefit of mental representations lies in how they help us deal with information: understanding and interpreting it, holding it in memory, organizing it, analyzing it, and making decisions with it.
Peak
Anders Ericsson, Robert Pool
The truth is, even at the most basic level, it’s always a hardware and software story. The hardware is useless without the software, just as the reverse is true. Sport skill acquisition does not happen without both specific genes and a specific environment, and often the genes and the environment must coincide at a specific time.
The Sports Gene
David Epstein
Well, I finally started getting my clearances in 1958, ten years after my father gave his up. They turned out to be useful in the end. In 1969 they allowed me to read the Top Secret Pentagon Papers and to keep them in my safe at the RAND Corporation, from which I delivered copies of them that year to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and later to nineteen newspapers. But in an important sense, for a decade before that, my clearances had been my undoing. And not only mine. Precisely because we were exposed to secret intelligence estimates, in particular from the Air Force, I and my colleagues at the RAND Corporation were preoccupied in the late fifties with the urgency of averting nuclear war by deterring a Soviet surprise attack that would exploit an alleged “missile gap.” That supposed dangerous U.S. inferiority was exactly as unfounded in reality as the earlier Manhattan Project fear of a Nazi crash bomb program had been, or to pick a more recent example, as concern over Saddam Hussein’s supposed possession of weapons of mass destruction in 2003. Working conscientiously, obsessively, on a wrong problem, countering an illusory threat, I and my colleagues at RAND had distracted ourselves and helped distract others from dealing with real dangers posed by the mutual superpower pursuit of nuclear weapons—dangers which we were helping make worse—and from real opportunities to make the world more secure. Unintentionally, yet inexcusably, we made our country and the world less safe. I have known for a long time that official secrecy and deceptions about our nuclear weapons posture and policies and their possible consequences threaten the survival of the human species. To understand the urgency of radical changes in our nuclear policies that may truly move the world toward the elimination of Doomsday Machines, and ultimately to abolition of nuclear weapons, we need a new understanding of the real history of the nuclear age. I turn now to one more chapter in that hidden history.
The Doomsday Machine
Daniel Ellsberg
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