John Cage, X : Writings '79-'82, page 149
quoted in
The Illicit Joyce of Postmodernism :
Reading Against the Grain
by Kevin J. H. Dettmar,
page 168, 249 notes 63-65
I have done Cage the disservice of presenting his thoughts as prose;
the original is a mesostic poem -- ed.
Shadows of Hope by
Sam Smith
quoted
here
Trying to discover the "absolute best" solution to a problem can be extremely time consuming. In the real world, one is generally better off to settle for a "good enough" solution, then move on to other things.
(Problems arise when a definition of "good enough" changes over time, or when parties don't agree on a definition of "good enough".)
Many people are surprised to learn (I know I was) that just as in the immeasurably simpler game of Tic-Tac-Toe, there is theoretically a One Best Algorithm for chess, a set of procedures which would automatically and inevitably result in a win, or at worst a draw, for White. This follows since no chance is involved in chess, only making the best move at each step of the game.
Unfortunately for would-be Eternal Grandmasters, discovering the complete One Best Chess Algorithm might take longer than the age of the Galaxy. Therefore existing players and programs use a satisficing strategy instead. One may not be able to determine the Best procedure, but quickly settling for one that gives you thousand-to-one odds in your favor is an excellent real-world compromise. As Daniel C. Dennett comments in his review of The Emperor's New Mind by Roger Penrose (The Times Literary Supplement, September 29-October 5, 1989), "You could safely bet your life, for instance, that the best of these programs would always beat me."
"It is entirely consistent with our rational tendency to rely on information acquired by actually seeing something to likewise place great reliance on information that is directly reported to us by others who have acquired it by seeing. `"I saw it with my own eyes," amounts to a personal guarantee of truth when someone reports something he has seen. By contrast, neither evolution nor our own experience has equipped us to have a 'feel' for highly abstract information based on numerical data about a large population we cannot possibly see."The review in New Scientist which generated a lively discussion
"... when designing the test environment, "you have to specify an upper limit" for the year. While everyone scribbled notes, an awful thought occurred to me. "But what upper limit?" I said out loud. "Should we be worrying about the year 9000? 10,001?"
Gehr stopped talking, heads came up from their notes, and the room went quiet.... Finally, from the back of the room came a voice: "Good question." "
"Vilfredo Pareto, a turn-of-the-century Italian economist, studied the distributions of wealth in different countries, concluding that a fairly consistent minority – about 20% – of people controlled the large majority – about 80% – of a society's wealth. This same distribution has been observed in other areas and has been termed the Pareto effect.
The Pareto effect even operates in quality improvement: 80% of problems usually stem from 20% of the causes. ... Concentrating improvement efforts on these few will have a greater impact and be more cost-effective than undirected efforts."
"Nothing is more certain than death, taxes, and mistakes.
Thanks to one of those mistakes, Wednesday, October 5, 1960, was almost the last day in history."
"There's always a reason why computer systems fail.
... the important reason---and the reason such errors keep happening---is that our largest systems are too complex for us to completely predict their behavior. We've lost control.
"We can't afford to guard against every eventuality, because there are too many of them and our brains are too tiny to encompass them all. So, for the most part, we have to look at things in the short term and wait until we're forced to do something. Then we throw money at it. Doing otherwise would be paying an impossibly high price for future safety."
"Medicine is not perfect. But it has not claimed to be perfect. It is at present further ahead than it has ever been. I'm alive because of it, being rescued from extinction on more than one occasion. Any system has 'innumerable shortcomings'. That's the nature of knowledge, science, and technology. No one should be surprised that medicine is still learning and discovering."
"Keeping URIs so that they will still be around in 2, 20 or 200 or even 2000 years is clearly not as simple as it sounds. However, all over the Web, webmasters are making decisions which will make it really difficult for themselves in the future. Often, this is because they are using tools whose task is seen as to present the best site in the moment, and no one has evaluated what will happen to the links when things change. The message here is, however, that many, many things can change and your URIs can and should stay the same. They only can if you think about how you design them."
"(This) dystopian vision describes unintended consequences, a well-known problem with the design and use of technology, and one that is clearly related to Murphy's law - "Anything that can go wrong, will." (Actually, this is Finagle's law, which in itself shows that Finagle was right.) ...
The cause of many such surprises seems clear: The systems involved are complex, involving interaction among and feedback between many parts. Any changes to such a system will cascade in ways that are difficult to predict; this is especially true when human actions are involved."
"Big breakthroughs generally evolve from projects that get repeatedly axed and restored. The end result emerges gradually, piece-by-piece from a trial-and-error process that Morone terms ''probe and learn.'' Failure is certain without staunch backing from at least one dogged champion, and 'typically you have to have multiple champions at different levels in the organization', says Mark P. Rice, assistant dean of RPI's Center for Entrepreneurship. The process is so complex and uncertain--lucky discoveries or accidents often send the work off in new directions--that 'what you end up with is rarely what you started with','' says Morone."
"... POGE — the Principle of Good Enough.
Credit where due: POGE is, to the best of my knowledge, a well- recognized but heretofore non-initialized principle. The initialization I owe to David Sifry, who uttered it over the phone one day."