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Balancing Intellectual Exploration and Action
• There is an anti-pattern in certain podcasts that overemphasizes intellect and underemphasizes action.
• Consuming knowledge from brilliant people can be stimulating, but it may lead to overthinking and under-practicing.
• It is important to balance intellectual comprehension with taking action, initiating projects, and practicing.
• Encouraging agency, initiative, entrepreneurship, and proactive energy is crucial.
Transcript:
Speaker 1
One piece of the puzzle, I think, is that there's an anti-pattern of podcasts, especially in the game, B space and related sort of sense making intellectual philosophical spaces, Which is I'm concerned about an overdoing the intellect and an underdoing the action. You know, there's all of the people that you interview on your show. They're brilliant people. You know, and it's like, every time I can get a new episode of my favorite podcast and listen to this person and be like, wow, they're so smart. And it's really stimulating to listen to these smart people that can communicate really clearly. And the concern that I have is that people get into a habit of just consuming knowledge, just listening to more and more different people and assembling this sort of like pristine map Of how they think reality works. And maybe they start a little bit to think about how they might initiate some kind of community or some project or something that they're interested in, but still they do this thing of Like way over engineering and overthinking it and under practicing, under experimenting. And so my energy is to try and interfere with that tendency and push people more towards their agency, more towards their initiative, their entrepreneurship, their get up and do it Kind of energy.
EP51 Richard Bartlett on Self-Organizing Collaboration
The Jim Rutt Show
When business leaders describe their organisational cultures as embracing what it means to ‘fail fast’ or suggesting that we are all in a ‘learning organisation’, it rings hollow if the aspirations are not lived and structurally supported. Employees see through the public relations of an organisation that markets itself as innovative yet executes the same playbook year after year.
Driving Data Projects: A Comprehensive Guide
Haskell, Christine
How Measurability/Mathematical Bias Limits the Scope of Scientific Inquiry and Human Discovery
Transcript:
Speaker 1
So there's this old paper from the, I think, 1960s by Eugene Vigner, the Nobel Prize physicist. It's called something like, on the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics. The fun paper, and he's like, there's no good reason why mathematics should work as well as it does. And there's no good reason why there should be a tool that allows humans to predict things as well as math does. There's no good reason. It's kind of nuts. And we should all just be grateful. And he says some other things, but he's basically just kind of being all about how great mathematics is and how there's no good reason why it should be. And it's pretty cool that it does work so well. I think that there's a counter to that, which is that not everything is that easily described that mathematics. And there's lots of things for which mathematics is not that effective at describing. And it's actually just the things that were well described or easily described by mathematics are the things that were discovered using mathematical tools. They're the things that lend themselves that were amenable to mathematical inquiry. And a lot of the things that we're interested in terms of social science and cognitive science and the related philosophical inquiry are things that are much less tangible in terms Of this kind of specification. And you can see it like in a physics equation, right, a physical theory, whether it's about mass or electricity or something else, right, you have a theory about how things work. And then you can write out equations. And all the terms in the equations have units. And they are all directly related to the things that are measurable. The theories are directly about relationships between things that are measured. And in social theories and cognitive theories, so often our theories are about relating constructs. And then we have proxy measurements, but the theory isn't about the relationship between the proxy measures. The theory is about the constructs and the relationships between the constructs that are social in nature, that are cognitive in nature, but aren't the things that are being measured. And so there's this gap. And I don't know the extent to which that gap can be overcome.
Paul Smaldino & C. Thi Nguyen on Problems With Value Metrics & Governance at Scale
COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life
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