The structure of scientific revolutions by Thomas s. Kuhn.

 

Let's see. What do I want to remember.

 

The books talks about the different between knowledge and tacit knowledge.  knowledge is when I learn something. Tacit Knowledge is when I learn how to map the knowledge to unfamiliar situations. So, call it the difference between book learning and wisdom or street smarts. Kuhn suggests that when we learning anything new, we always go through stages of "ignorance" (I don't know) to "learned knowledge" (I know the facts, but can't apply them to novel situations) to "tacit knowledge" (I can solve new problems by mapping them back to things I once learnt)

 

That history is written by the victors and it's impact on now we see the past. The victors (and their related authors) are not interested in discussing the doubt and uncertainty that lead up to there conclusions. They want to present their points so that readers can understand them. So when you look back over historical texts, and modern text books, you get an overly linear view of scientific progress.

 

The science is unique in its view of progress. In science, your ideas must encompass all past ideas, plus you must add your own. In art, any idea that encompasses all past ideas would be taken as derivative.

 

Scientific paradigm shifts are not clean an easy. Sometimes the new and better shifts take decades to take root. People hated Newton's ideas because it didn't explain why gravity existed. Also, the instruments at the time were very erratic. Newton's laws didn't explain the data that much better than the old.

 

New scientist adopt the new theories because they are more useful than the old. Old scientists die off.  Sometimes there will be a definitive test that proves the new theory correct, and the old wrong. This is the exception. Most new theories are just slightly better than the old theories they replaced.

 

the discovery of oxygen is a good example. The old, wrong, theory, had a simple, clean explanation for why fire needed air to burn.  The idea that air contained oxygen, nitrogen, CO2 and other gases each with there own properties, sounds like you are making things up to explain your observations. It took a long time for the theory of oxygen to take over.

 

 

 

 

To be fruitful and grow, you must welcome manure-- Nietzsche

 

 

The art of living lies in finding uses for our difficulties. Montaingne

 

 

The signal and the noise.

This is an interesting book on predicting, why some predictions succeed, and why most fail.  The research in it is fascinating, but the conclusions are little bit of a bummer.  That we will never be able to predict well, thought we can forecast, and contingency plann.  The author encourages us to think baysien about predictions, with false positives and false negatives.

nate silver was a professional poker player for a couple of years.  His insights on beating poker are in those veins.  He observes that if everyone had a poker table is good then no one is getting rich.  The winnings are distributed randomly. the players are just passing money amongst each other.  To win at poker you need to have a loser at the table.

Spotting the losers is hard work.  It's not just a guy who's winning the most often.  That could be a good player who's having a run of bad luck.

 

When the U.S. tightened up the laws about online poker playing, poker got much harder, as most of the losers stopped playing online poker. With fewer experienced losers online, fewer experienced losers headed out to the casino.

This also relates to the paritio principle, that 20% of your efforts bring 80% of the results.  If you were at a table where everyone had their basics down, then you have to put in an order of magnitude more effort in to get to the next level.  If everyone is doing that, then you have a lot of work ahead of you.  Such is the nature of highly competitive play. For every step ahead of your competition, you have to put in an order of magnitude more effort. Not a little more effort, cause anyone can do that, but a lot more effort.

Rather than predicting the author encourages us to model for insight and for contingency planning.  He also observes that when things go wrong it's because of the things we didn't expect.  We confuse unfamiliar with improbable.  He puts 911 in that category.  Suicide pilots flying planes into buildings were unfamiliar so the idea was dismissed as improbable.