From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
What's special about it as a science subject is that it is so awkward, it doesn't lend itself to easy solutions. It's a multi-factorial problem, very different to- for example- the question of what causes influenza?
...adoption of random strategies diminishes the probability of extreme events (in this case large capital increases or great losses) but also ensures almost the same average wealth over a long time period, at variance with other technical strategies...
Much of the pushback against science is related to a distrust of the establishment and of multinational corporations and their profit motive. It's easy to spread fear; as humans we're very tuned and sensitive to it.
Sensory data by itself is not red, it's not anything. It's just energy. Sensory signals don't come with labels attached. Redness is coming from within my brain, as a way of predicting how certain patterns of light appear.
Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.
When you observe chimpanzees and other apes, you see how extremely humanlike they are in almost everything they do. We have been so indoctrinated to think we are special (as a species) that when you see an ape up close and see they are- in essence- us, you don't know what to do with those feelings.
The only way to innovate is to follow Aristotle's prescription. To create a future that is different to the past is to imagine possibilities and choose the one for which the most compelling argument can be made, not the one for which there is the most data. If companies want to innovate, they need to realise that data analytics is killing innovation yet is lauded and used increasingly.
Once we take their quantum property into account, space and time changes dramatically. Space is granular, because one of the characteristics of quantum theory is to show that continuous things have often a granular structure, like light, which is a cloud of photons. Similarly, time cannot be anymore understood ad an external independently flowing entity. Time is just he counting of granular happenings in nature.
Most astronomers are surprised, but biologists look at the history of life on Earth. Many biologists I speak to would say it's almost incomprehensible that something as complex as us has even appeared at all—we might just be very lucky.
The phrase 'I don't know' serves as both an invitation and a challenge, a beckoning call to delve into the unknown and piece together the enigmatic puzzle of knowledge. Science, at its core, thrives not on regurgitating established facts but on the exhilaration of unearthing new discoveries.
One of the themes which is perhaps more important in the intellectual rather than practical world was the excessive love affair that people in the financial world had with the efficient markets hypothesis. If you take that literally, there can't be bubbles. Who can believe that now?
The easiest way to understand noise is by thinking about measurements. Suppose you are measuring a line with a very fine ruler. You will expect some variability such that you will not get the same number every time when you measure. That variability is noise. In the mathematics of accuracy, the expression for total error is very simple and quite compelling. It is bias-squared plus noise-squared. Bias and noise are both contributing to error and in that equation, they do so on the same basis.