lifecycle

 If you would persuade, appeal to interest and not to reason. —Benjamin Franklin I place this tendency first in my discussion because almost everyone thinks he fully recognizes how important incentives and disincentives are in changing cognition and behavior. But this is not often so. For instance, I think I’ve been in the top five percent of my age cohort almost all my adult life in understanding the power of incentives, and yet I’ve always underestimated that power. Never a year passes but I get some surprise that pushes a little further my appreciation of incentive superpower. One of my favorite cases about the power of incentives is the Federal Express case. The integrity of the Federal Express system requires that all packages be shifted rapidly among airplanes in one central airport each night. And the system has no integrity for the customers if the night work shift can’t accomplish its assignment fast. And Federal Express had one hell of a time getting the night shift to do...

"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." —Albert Allen Bartlett — We are surrounded by potential laws. A physical process responds to a potential law when the probability of an event occurring decreases as its magnitude increases. There are many phenomena that follow these laws: the relationship between the number of cities and inhabitants (few cities with many inhabitants and many with few), the connectivity of nodes on the Internet, the frequency of words in the language, the wealth of people, the size of living beings, internet links, terrorism, etc. It is curious that all these systems respond to potential laws quite accurately since, a priori, we could assume that people's wealth or the connection of nodes to the Internet are quite random phenomena in distribution where we would expect to obtain a bell curve. Therefore, in a potential law the events occur with variable frequency, where many events are small...

"There is a game, you can’t win, you can’t break even and you can’t even get out of the game." —Allen Ginsberg We, like all living beings, are open systems, that is, we exchange matter and energy with our environment. For example, you take in chemical energy in the form of food and do work on your surroundings by moving, talking, walking, and breathing. All the energy exchanges that occur within us, like your many metabolic reactions, and between us and our environment, can be described by the same laws of physics, as energy exchanges between hot and cold objects or gas molecules or whatever. "The laws of thermodynamics are a set of laws on which thermodynamics is based. Specifically, these are four laws that are universally valid when applied to systems that fall within the constraints implicit in each. Therefore, the deep impression which classical thermodynamics made on me. It is the only physical theory of universal content, which I am convinced, that within the  fra...

Love: I recognize the emotion for what it is, an irrational self- destructive impulse, which is disguised as joy. —Nikola Tesla to ignore faults of, and comply with wishes of, the object of his affection, to favor people, products, and actions merely associated with the object of his affection (as we shall see when we get to "Influence-from- Mere-Association Tendency," and to distort other facts to facilitate love. A newly hat ched baby goose is programmed, through the economy of its genetic program, to "love" and follow the first creature that is nice to it, which is almost always its mother. But, if the mother goose is not present right after the hatching, and a man is there instead, the gosling will "love" and follow the man, who becomes a sort of substitute mother. Somewhat similarly, a newly arrived human is "born to like and love" under the normal and abnormal triggering outcomes for its kind. Perhaps the strongest in-born tendency to love ...

 It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters. —Epictetus Stoicism proclaims that freedom and tranquility can be achieved only by being oblivious to material comforts, external fortune, and dedicating oneself to a life guided by the principles of reason and virtue (such is the idea of imperturbability or ataraxia). Assuming a materialistic conception of nature, the Stoics followed Heraclitus in the belief that the first substance is in the fire and in the veneration of the logos, which they identified with the energy, law, reason, and providence found in nature. The reason for men was also considered an integral part of the divine and immortal logos. The Stoic doctrine, which considered each person essential as a member of a universal family, helped break regional, social, and racial barriers, and paved the way for the spread of a universal religion. The Stoic doctrine of natural law, which converts human nature into a norm for evaluating social laws and insti...

 "You’ve got to have models in your head and you’ve got to array your experience—both vicarious and direct—onto this latticework of mental  models." —Charlie Munger We will see the most important ideas of each science. This classification will serve as a tool to order them, and although it is not closed, some will inevitably affect several fields of knowledge. The fact that an idea can be related to several sciences is another sign that knowledge, on its own, is not compartmentalized and we should relearn to appreciate it like that. That said, it is important to have a mental map of the sciences, from the purest to the humanities. When we use mental models routinely, we must do so starting with the purest sciences—starting from left to right on the below diagram with philosophy, mathematics and physics, as these form the basis of our known world. Thus, this map is not only of classification but of order. BRANCHES OF KNOWLEDGE Philosophy Mathematics Physics Statistics Engineer...