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Fail Fast So You Can Fix Early. Corporate culture often puts more weight on forms, procedures, and meetings than on visible value creation that can be inspected at short intervals by users. Work that does not produce real value is madness. Working product in short cycles allows early user feedback and you can immediately eliminate what is obviously wasteful effort.
In the Northern Hemisphere, the switch to daylight savings time in March results in most people losing an hour of sleep opportunity. Should you tabulate millions of daily hospital records, as researchers have done, you discover that this seemingly trivial sleep reduction comes with a frightening spike in heart attacks the following day. Impressively, it works both ways. In the autumn within the Northern Hemisphere, when the clocks move back and we gain an hour of sleep opportunity time, rates of heart attacks plummet the day after. A similar rise-and-fall relationship can be seen with the number of traffic accidents, proving that the brain, by way of attention lapses and microsleeps, is just as sensitive as the heart to very small perturbations of sleep. Most people think nothing of losing an hour of sleep for a single night, believing it to be trivial and inconsequential. It is anything but.
Why We Sleep
Matthew Walker
Doctors in the midst of the scientific arrogance of the 1960s looked down at mothers’ milk as something primitive, as if it could be replicated by their laboratories—not realizing that mothers’ milk might include useful components that could have eluded their scientific understanding—a simple confusion of absence of evidence of the benefits of mothers’ milk with evidence of absence of the benefits (another case of Platonicity as “it did not make sense” to breast-feed when we could simply use bottles). Many people paid the price for this naïve inference: those who were not breast-fed as infants turned out to be at an increased risk of a collection of health problems, including a higher likelihood of developing certain types of cancer—there had to be in mothers’ milk some necessary nutrients that still elude us.
The Black Swan
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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