There is a famous Iraqi idiom which states that if you think your opponents can eat you for dinner, then you'd better eat them for lunch. If your opponent is too big and powerful to eat you right-now, you'd better eat them for lunch before they eat you. Commitment problems from our opponents lead us to act, and that's another reason why rational man can go to war.
— Christopher BlattmanThere's a compelling hypothesis in the field of machine learning called 'overfitting,' where systems become so tuned to recognizing patterns that they falter when faced with new, unexpected scenarios. Interestingly, some computer scientists are exploring ways to inject noise into computational models to keep them adaptable.
I want you to not deny your shadow, your darkest impulses, but to find ways to use them and turn them into something productive. We ought to take that ambition, those aggressive impulses, and channel them into our work, into great causes, into justice.
The Pritzker Prize recognizes not just technical excellence, but architects who have made a significant contribution to humanity through the built environment.
we make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves happy. The amount of work is the same…
Trying to figure out how we fit into the cosmos is old, it's a basic human question.
Water is like energy - it can neither be created nor destroyed, only transformed. But unlike energy, water is essential for every single biological process. We're not just managing a resource, we're managing life itself.
Creativity is about solving interesting problems, and problems are interesting because they have constraints. You cannot think outside the box, but you can think along the edges of the box. The box is something to lever and learn against. Look for the edges of the box and don't deny the boundaries!
What's unique about Stoic Capitalist is that I aimed to shift those ideas from mere coping to succeeding on a much larger scale. At its core, Stoicism as a coping mechanism involves reining in emotion and distinguishing between what you can and cannot control.
You are going to have to get out there and sell yourself. Make a fool of yourself – whatever it takes. Make sure you appear on the front page and not the back pages.
By far the most common is underestimating expenses. When industries do barely double-digits if their lucky, business plans ought not to be showing EBIT or EBITDA of 50-70% – that doesn't mean people are smart, it means they haven't understood the industry.
You have to re-earn your customer's business every single day – it's not just about listening to them, but anticipating what they don't realise they need, and staying ahead of them.
Until the Wall Street Crash of 1929, the economy had been measured in tonnes of grain and steel, and because of the crash- economists and politicians decided they wanted some grip over the scale of output of the economy- so they turned to a brilliant young scientist called Simon Kuznets and asked him how they should be measuring economic output. His answer was published in 1930s- he figured out a way to add-up all the tonnes of grains and steel and create a national income figure. He gave the caveat that it would scarcely be taken as the measure of welfare of a nation because it didn't include all the value created in a community, all the unpaid caring work at home, and only measured what was sold- not what was used-up!