Peter Bevelin - Collected Quotes

"Changes in size or time influences form, function and behavior. If something of a certain size is made bigger or smaller, it may not work the same way. Some things get better and others get worse." (Peter Bevelin, "Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin to Munger",  2003)

"Every action has consequences. Both intended and unintended. No matter how carefully we plan, we can't anticipate everything. Often we fail to consider what other events are likely to occur as a result of some action. […] By solving one problem, we generate another one and sometimes create an even worse one." (Peter Bevelin, "Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin to Munger", 2003)

"It is hard to predict something when we don't (or can't) foresee or understand how an entire system works, what key variables are involved, their attributes, how they influence one another and their impact. Even if we know the key variables, their values may be impossible to estimate. They may also change over time and be dependent on context. It may also be impossible to estimate how they will interact as a whole." (Peter Bevelin, "Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin to Munger", 2003)

"Many systems fail because they focus on the machines, not the people that use them. […] Humans are involved in designing, execution and follow-up. Excluding ignorance and insufficient knowledge, given the complexity of human and non-human factors interacting, there is a multitude of ways in which things can go wrong." (Peter Bevelin, "Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin to Munger", 2003)

"Often we try to get too much information, including misinformation, or information of no use to explain or predict. We also focus on details and what's irrelevant or unknowable and overlook the obvious truths. Dealing with what's important forces us to prioritize. There are often just a few actions that produce most of what we are trying to achieve. There are only a few decisions of real importance." (Peter Bevelin, "Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin to Munger", 2003) 

"Optimization of one variable may cause the whole system to work less efficiently. Why? The performance of most systems is constrained by the performance of its weakest link. A variable that limits the system from achieving its goal or optimum performance. […] When trying to improve the performance of a system, first find out the system's key contraint(s)- which may be physical (capacity, material, the market) or non-physical (policies, rules, measurements) -and its cause and effect relationship with the system. Maybe the constraint is based on faulty assumptions that can be corrected. Then try to "strengthen" or change the weakest link. Watch out for other effects - wanted or unwanted - that pop up as a consequence. Always consider the effects on the whole system." (Peter Bevelin, "Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin to Munger", 2003)

"Predictions about the future are often just projections of past curves and present trends. This is natural since our predictions about the future are made in the present. We therefore assume the future will be much like the present. But the future can't be known until it arrives. It is contingent on events we can't see." (Peter Bevelin, "Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin to Munger", 2003)

"'Regression to the mean' […] says that, in any series of events where chance is involved, very good or bad performances, high or low scores, extreme events, etc. tend on the average, to be followed by more average performance or less extreme events. If we do extremely well, we're likely to do worse the next time, while if we do poorly, we're likely to do better the next time. But regression to the mean is not a natural law. Merely a statistical tendency. And it may take a long time before it happens." (Peter Bevelin, "Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin to Munger", 2003)

"Science works by elimination. To avoid drowning in low-information observations or experiments, scientists think in advance about what the most important and conclusive experiments would be: What are we trying to achieve or prove, and how can we reach these ends? What can't happen? This way, they narrow down the possibilities." (Peter Bevelin, "Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin to Munger", 2003)

"Some systems are more prone to accidents than others because of the number of components, their connections and interactions. The more variables we add to a system, and the more they interact, the more complicated we make it and the more opportunity the system has to fail. Improving certain parts in highly interconnected systems may do little to eliminate future problems. There is always the possibility of multiple simultaneous failures and the more complicated the system, the harder it is to predict all possible failures." (Peter Bevelin, "Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin to Munger", 2003)

"Try to optimize the whole and not a system's individual parts. Think through what other variables may change when we alter a factor in a system. Trace out the short and long-term consequences in numbers and effects of a proposed action to see if the net result agrees with our ultimate goal."  (Peter Bevelin, "Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin to Munger", 2003)

On Knowledge (Unsourced)

"All knowledge that is not the real product of observation, or of consequences deduced from observation, is entirely groundless and illusory." (Jean-Baptiste Lamarck)

"By observation, facts are distinctly and minutely impressed in the mind; by analogy, similar facts are connected ; by experiment, new facts are discovered ; and, in the progression of knowledge, observation, guided by analogy, leads to experiment, and analogy, confirmed by experiment, becomes scientific truth." (Sir Humphry Davy)

"Generalization is necessary to the advancement of knowledge; but particularity is indispensable to the creations of the imagination." (Thomas B Macaulay)

"In imaginative thought there is no real knowledge of anything but similarities (ultimately identities): knowledge of differences is merely a transition to a new knowledge of similarities."  (Northrop Frye)

"No one sees further into a generalization than his own knowledge of detail extends." (William James)

"Real wisdom is not the knowledge of everything, but the knowledge of which things in life are necessary, which are less necessary, and which are completely unnecessary to know." (Lev N Tolstoy)

"The goal of education is not to increase the amount of knowledge but to create the possibilities for a child to invent and discover, to create men who are capable of doing new things." (Jean Piaget)

"The Information Age offers much to mankind, and I would like to think that we will rise to the challenges it presents. But it is vital to remember that information - in the sense of raw data - is not knowledge, that knowledge is not wisdom, and that wisdom is not foresight. But information is the first essential step to all of these." (Arthur C Clark)

"We call it 'explanation', but it is 'description' which distinguishes us from earlier stages of knowledge and science. We describe better - we explain just as little who came before us [...] We operate with nothing but things which do not exist, with lines, planes, bodies, atoms, divisible time, divisible space - how should explanation even be possible when we first make everything into an image, into our image!" (Friedrich W Nietzsche)

"You know how the divine Simplicity enfolds all things. Mind is the image of this enfolding Simplicity. If, then, you called this divine Simplicity infinite Mind, it will be the exemplar of our mind. If you called the divine mind the totality of the truth of things, you will call our mind the totality of the assimilation of things, so that it may be a totality of ideas. In the divine Mind conception is the production of things; in our mind conception is the knowledge of things. If the divine Mind is absolute Being, then its conception is the creation of beings; and conception in the human mind is the assimilation of beings." (Nicholas of Cusa)

On Chance (BC)

"No human being will ever know the Truth, for even if they happen to say it by chance, they would not even known they had done so." (Xenophanes, 5th century BC)

"The art of war teaches us to rely not on the likelihood of the enemy's not coming, but on our own readiness to receive him; not on the chance of his not attacking, but rather on the fact that we have made our position unassailable." (Sun Tzu, "The Art of War", cca. 5th century BC)

"[...] the freaks of chance are not determinable by calculation." (Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, cca. 5th century)

"Everything existing in the universe is the fruit of chance." (Democritus, 4th century BC)

"All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsions, habit, reason, passion, desire." (Aristotle, 4th century BC)

"Chance seldom interferes with the wise man; his greatest and highest interests have been, are, and will be, directed by reason throughout his whole life." (Epicurus, cca. 4th century)

"Thus all the action of men must necessarily be referred to seven causes: chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reason, anger, and desire." (Aristotle, "The Art of Rhetoric", 4th century BC)

"They say that the greatest and fairest things are the work of nature and of chance, the lesser of art, which, receiving from nature the greater and primeval creations, molds and fashions all those lesser works which are generally termed artificial." (Plato, "Nomoi" ["Laws"], cca. 360 BC)

"Everything that depends on the action of nature is by nature as good as it can be, and similarly everything that depends on art or any rational cause, and especially if it depends on the best of all causes. To entrust to chance what is greatest and most noble would be a very defective arrangement." (Aristotle, "Nicomachean Ethics", cca. 350 BC)


"How often things occur by mere chance which we dared not even hope for." (Publius Terentius Afer, "Phormio", cca. 161 BC)

"Suam habet fortuna rationem.’
"Chance has its reasons." (Gaius Petronius, "Satryicon liber" ["The Book of Satyrlike Adventures"], 1st century BC)

"Valor is of no service, chance rules all, and the bravest often fall by the hands of cowards." (Cornelius Tacitus, cca. 69-100 AD)

"But things that happen by chance cannot be certain." (Marcus T Cicero, "De Divinatione", cca 44 BC)

"Chance joins with force to guide the steel." (Virgil, "Aeneid", cca. 29–19 BC)

From Parts to Wholes (1700-1799)

"Probability is a degree of certainty and it differs from certainty as a part from a whole." (Jacob Bernoulli, "Ars Conjectandi", 1713)

"Principles taken upon trust, consequences lamely deduced from them, want of coherence in the parts, and of evidence in the whole, these are every where to be met with in the systems of the most eminent philosophers, and seem to have drawn disgrace upon philosophy itself." (David Hume, "A Treatise of Human Nature", 1739-40)

"As the analysis of a substantial composite terminates only in a part which is not a whole, that is, in a simple part, so synthesis terminates only in a whole which is not a part, that is, the world." (Immanuel Kant, "Inaugural Dissertation", 1770)

"It is unjust that the whole of society should contribute towards an expence of which the benefit is confined to a part of the society." (Adam Smith, 1776)

"Is it reasonable to assume a purposiveness in all the parts of nature and to deny it to the whole?" —  Immanuel Kant, "Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View", 1784)

"Look round the world: contemplate the whole and every part of it: You will find it to be nothing but one great machine, subdivided into an infinite number of lesser machines, which again admit of subdivisions, to a degree beyond what human senses and faculties can trace and explain. All these various machines, and even their most minute parts, are adjusted to each other with an accuracy, which ravishes into admiration all men, who have ever contemplated them. The curious adapting of means to ends, throughout all nature, resembles exactly, though it much exceeds, the productions of human contrivance; of human design, thought, wisdom, and intelligence." (David Hume, "Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion", 1779)

Benjamin Disraeli - Collected Quotes

"It is remarkable that when great discoveries are effected, their simplicity always seems to detract from their originality: on these occasions we are reminded of the egg of Columbus!" (Benjamin Disraeli, "Curiosities of Literature" Vol. 3, 1824)

"Knowledge must be gained by ourselves. Mankind may supply us with facts; but the results, even if they agree with previous ones, must be the work of our own minds." (Benjamin Disraeli, "The Young Duke", 1831)

"Nature is more powerful than education; time will develop everything." (Benjamin Disraeli, "Contarini Fleming", 1832)

"What we anticipate seldom occurs; what we least expected generally happens." (Benjamin Disraeli, "Henrietta Temple", 1837)

"Extreme views are never just; something always turns up which disturbs the calculations formed upon their data." (Benjamin Disraeli, 1847)

"As a general rule the most successful man in life is the man who has the best information." (Benjamin Disraeli, "Endymion", 1880)

"Imagination is too often accompanied by somewhat irregular logic." (Benjamin Disraeli, "Wit and Wisdom, Imagination", 1881)

"No one for a moment can pretend that printing is so great a discovery as writing, or algebra as a language." (Benjamin Disraeli, "Lothair", 1870)

"The world is devoted to physical science, because it believes theses discoveries will increase its capacity of luxury and self-indulgence. But the pursuit of science only leads to the insoluble. (Benjamin Disraeli, "Lothair", 1870)

"Philosophy becomes poetry, and science imagination, in the enthusiasm of genius." (Benjamin Disraeli)

"What art was to the ancient world, Science is to the modern; the distinctive faculty. In the minds of men, the useful has succeeded to the beautiful." (Benjamin Disraeli)

James Surowiecki - Collected Quotes

"Diversity and independence are important because the best collective decisions are the product of disagreement and contest, not consensus or compromise." (James Surowiecki, "The Wisdom of Crowds", 2005)

"Groups are only smart when there is a balance between the information that everyone in the group shares and the information that each of the members of the group holds privately. It's the combination of all those pieces of independent information, some of them right, some of the wrong, that keeps the group wise." (James Surowiecki, "The Wisdom of Crowds", 2005)

 Errors in individual judgment won’t wreck the group’s collective judgment as long as those errors aren’t systematically pointing in the same direction. One of the quickest ways to make people’s judgments systematically biased is to make them dependent on each other for information." (James Surowiecki, "The Wisdom of Crowds", 2005)

"The fact that cognitive diversity matters does not mean that if you assemble a group of diverse but thoroughly uninformed people, their collective wisdom will be smarter than an expert's. But if you can assemble a diverse group of people who possess varying degrees of knowledge and insight, you're better off entrusting it with major decisions rather than leaving them in the hands of one or two people, no matter how smart those people are." (James Surowiecki, "The Wisdom of Crowds", 2005)

"The smartest groups, then, are made up of people with diverse perspectives who are able to stay independent of each other." (James Surowiecki, "The Wisdom of Crowds", 2005)

"[...] under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them. Groups do not need to be dominated by exceptionally intelligent people in order to be smart. Even if most of the people within a group are not especially well-informed or rational, it can still reach a collectively wise decision." (James Surowiecki, "The Wisdom of Crowds", 2005)

 

Mental Models XVII

"As infinite kinds of almost identical images arise continually from the innumerable atoms and flow out to us from the gods, so we should take the keenest pleasure in turning and bending our mind and reason to grasp these images, in order to understand the nature of these blessed and eternal beings." (Marcus TulliusCicero, "De Natura Deorum" ["On the Nature of the Gods"], 45 BC)

"The imagination is one of the highest prerogatives of man. By this faculty he unites, independently of the will, former images and ideas, and thus creates brilliant and novel results […] The value of the products of our imagination depends of course on the number, accuracy, and clearness of our impressions; on our judgment and taste in selecting or rejecting the involuntary combinations, and to a certain extent on our power of voluntarily combining them." (Charles Darwin, "The Descent of Man", 1874)

"That faculty which perceives and recognizes the noble proportions in what is given to the senses, and in other things situated outside itself, must be ascribed to the soul. It lies very close to the faculty which supplies formal schemata to the senses, or deeper still, and thus adjacent to the purely vital power of the soul, which does not think discursively […] Now it might be asked how this faculty of the soul, which does not engage in conceptual thinking, and can therefore have no proper knowledge of harmonic relations, should be capable of recognizing what is given in the outside world. For to recognize is to compare the sense perception outside with the original pictures inside, and to judge that it conforms to them.” (Johannes Kepler, “Harmonices Mundi” [“Harmony of the World”, 1619)

"The entire method consists in the order and arrangement of the things to which the mind's eye must turn so that we can discover some truth." (René Descartes, "Rules for the Direction of the Mind", 1628)

“[…] inner images are rather psychic manifestations of the archetypes which, however, would also have to put forth, create, condition anything lawlike in the behavior of the corporeal world. The laws of this world would then be the physical manifestations of the archetypes. […] Each law of nature should then have an inner correspondence and vice versa, even though this is not always directly visible today.” (Wolfgang Pauli, [letter to Markus Fierz] 1948)

“The process of understanding in nature, together with the joy that man feels in understanding, i.e., in becoming acquainted with new knowledge, seems therefore to rest upon a correspondence, a coming into congruence of preexistent internal images of the human psyche with external objects and their behavior. […] the place of clear concepts is taken by images of strongly emotional content, which are not thought but  are seen pictorially, as it were, before the minds eye.” (Wolfgang Pauli, “Der Einfluss archetypischer Vorstellungen auf die Bildung  naturwissenschaftlicher Theorien bei Kepler”, 1952)

“You cannot learn, through common sense, how things are you can only discover where they fit into the existing scheme of things.”  (Stuart Hall, 1977)

"Imagination is our means of interpreting the world, and it also is our means of forming images in the mind. The images themselves are not separate from our interpretations of the world; they are our way of thinking of the objects in the world. We see the forms in our mind’s eye and we see these very forms in the world. We could not do one of these things if we could not do the other" (Mary Warnock, "Imagination", 1978)

“[…] the human brain must work in models. The trick is to have your brain work better than the other person’s brain because it understands the most fundamental models: ones that will do most work per unit. If you get into the mental habit of relating what you’re reading to the basic structure of the underlying ideas being demonstrated, you gradually accumulate some wisdom."  (Charles T Munger, “Poor Charlie’s Almanack”, 2005)

“We know the world by a process of constantly transforming it into ourselves." (Alan Watts) 

On Intuition (1800-1849)

“We construct concepts when we represent them in intuition a priori, without experience, or when we represent in intuition  the object which corresponds to our concept of it. - The mathematician can never apply his reason to mere concepts, nor the philosopher to the construction of concepts. - In mathematics  the reason is employed in concreto, however, the intuition is not  empirical, but the object of contemplation is something a priori.” (Immanuel Kant, “Logic”, 1800)

“There are two things cheap and common enough when separated, but as costly in value, as irresistible in power, when combined - truth and novelty. Their union is like that of steam and of fire, which nothing can overcome. Truth and novelty, when united, must overthrow the whole superincumbent pressure of error and of prejudice, whatever be its weight; and the effects will be proportionate to the resistance. But the moral earthquake, unlike the natural, while it convulses the nations, reforms them too.” (Charles C Colton, “Lacon”, 1820)

“This is the test and triumph of originality, not to show us what has never been, and what we may therefore very easily never have dreamt of, but to point out to us what is before our eyes and under our feet, though we have had no suspicion of its existence, for want of sufficient strength of intuition, of determined grasp of mind to seize and retain it.” (William Hazlitt, “Table Talk; or, Original Essays”, 1821)

“[...] it should be noted that the seeds of wisdom that are to bear fruit in the intellect are sown less by critical studies and learned monographs than by insights, broad impressions, and flashes of intuition.” (Carl von Clausewitz, “On War”, 1832)

“Logic is the procession or proportionate unfolding of the intuition; but its virtue is as silent method; the moment it would appear as propositions, and have a separate value, it is worthless.” (Ralph W Emerson, “Essays”, 1841)

“We study the complex in the simple; and only from the intuition of the lower can we safely proceed to the intellection of the higher degrees. The only danger lies in the leaping from low to high, with the neglect of the intervening gradations.” (Samuel T Coleridge, “Physiology of Life”, 1848)

On Extrema II (Extrema in Context)

“As in mathematics, when there is no maximum nor minimum, in short nothing distinguished, everything is done equally, or when that is not nothing at all is done: so it may be said likewise in respect of perfect wisdom, which is no less orderly than mathematics, that if there were not the best (optimum) among all possible worlds, God would not have produced any.” (Gottfried W Leibniz, “Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God and Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil”, 1710)

“For since the fabric of the universe is most perfect and the work of a most wise Creator, nothing at all takes place in the universe in which some rule of maximum or minimum does not appear.” (Leonhard Euler, “De Curvis Elasticis”, 1744)

“Like a great poet, Nature produces the greatest results with the simplest means.” (Heinrich Heine)

“The triumph of a theory is to embrace the greatest number and the greatest variety of facts.” (Charles A Wurtz, “A History of Chemical Theory from the Age of Lavoisier to the Present Time”, 1869) 

“It is the constant aim of the mathematician to reduce all his expressions to their lowest terms, to retrench every superfluous word and phrase, and to condense the Maximum of meaning into the Minimum of language.” (James J Sylvester, 1877)

“In pure mathematics the maximum of detachment appears to be reached: the mind moves in an infinitely complicated pattern, which is absolutely free from temporal considerations. Yet this very freedom – the essential condition of the mathematician’s activity – perhaps gives him an unfair advantage. He can only be wrong – he cannot cheat.” (Kytton Strachey, “Portraits in Miniature”, 1931)

“[…] science, properly interpreted, is not dependent on any sort of metaphysics. It merely attempts to cover a maximum of facts by a minimum of laws.” (Herbert Feigl, “Naturalism and Humanism”, American Quarterly, Vol. 1, No. 2, 1949)

“The concept of the ‘singleness of the superlative’ is simple: no problem in dynamics can be properly formulated in terms of more than one superlative, whether the superlative in question is stated as a minimum or as a maximum (e.g., a minimum expenditure of work can also be stated as a maximum economy of work). If the problem has more than one superlative, the problem itself becomes completely meaningless and indeterminate.” (George Kingsley Zipf, “Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort: An Introduction of Human Ecology”, 1949)

“To a considerable degree science consists in originating the maximum amount of information with the minimum expenditure of energy. Beauty is the cleanness of line in such formulations along with symmetry, surprise, and congruence with other prevailing beliefs.” (Edward O Wilson, “Biophilia”, 1984)

“The main goal of physics is to describe a maximum of phenomena with a minimum of variables.” (CERN Courier)