Quote of the Day

One of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever heard goes something like this: If you want success, figure out the price, then pay it. It sounds trivial and obvious, but if you unpack the idea it has extraordinary power.

- Scott Adams

The Friendship That Made Google Huge

In graduate school, at M.I.T., Sanjay found a tight-knit group of friends. Still, he never dated, and does so only “very, very infrequently” now. He says that he didn’t decide not to have a family—it just unfolded that way. His close friends have learned not to bother him about it, and his parents long ago accepted that their son would be a bachelor. Perhaps because he’s so private, an air of mystery surrounds him at Google. He is known for being quiet but profound—someone who thinks deeply and with unusual clarity. On his desk, he keeps a stack of Mead composition notebooks going back nearly twenty years, filled with tidy lists and diagrams. He writes in pen and in cursive. He rarely references an old notebook, but writes in order to think. At M.I.T., his graduate adviser was Barbara Liskov, an influential computer scientist who studied, among other things, the management of complex code bases. In her view, the best code is like a good piece of writing. It needs a carefully realized structure; every word should do work. Programming this way requires empathy with readers. It also means seeing code not just as a means to an end but as an artifact in itself. “The thing I think he is best at is designing systems,” Craig Silverstein said. “If you’re just looking at a file of code Sanjay wrote, it’s beautiful in the way that a well-proportioned sculpture is beautiful.”

[---]

At Google, Jeff is far better known. There are Jeff Dean memes, modelled on the ones about Chuck Norris. (“Chuck Norris counted to infinity . . . twice”; “Jeff Dean’s résumé lists the things he hasn’t done—it’s shorter that way.”) But, for those who know them both, Sanjay is an equal talent. “Jeff is great at coming up with wild new ideas and prototyping things,” Wilson Hsieh, their longtime colleague, said. “Sanjay was the one who built things to last.” In life, Jeff is more outgoing, Sanjay more introverted. In code, it’s the reverse. Jeff’s programming is dazzling—he can quickly outline startling ideas—but, because it’s done quickly, in a spirit of discovery, it can leave readers behind. Sanjay’s code is social.

“Some people,” Silverstein said, “their code’s too loose. One screen of code has very little information on it. You’re always scrolling back and forth to figure out what’s going on.” Others write code that’s too dense: “You look at it, you’re, like, ‘Ugh. I’m not looking forward to reading this.’ Sanjay has somehow split the middle. You look at his code and you’re, like, ‘O.K., I can figure this out,’ and, still, you get a lot on a single page.” Silverstein continued, “Whenever I want to add new functionality to Sanjay’s code, it seems like the hooks are already there. I feel like Salieri. I understand the greatness. I don’t understand how it’s done.”

[---]

“Hey,” Jeff said. He snapped his fingers and pointed at the screen. Although in conversation he is given to dad jokes and puns, he can become opinionated, brusque, and disapproving when he sits at a computer with Sanjay. Sanjay takes this in stride. When he thinks Jeff is moving too fast, he’ll lift his hands off the keyboard and spread his fingers, as if to say, “Stop.” (In general, Jeff is the accelerator, Sanjay the brake.) This is as close as they get to an argument: in twenty years together, they can’t remember raising their voices.

- More Here

Quote of the Day

There are risks and costs to a program of action. But they are far less than the long-range risks and costs of comfortable inaction.

- John F. Kennedy

Wisdom Of The Week

The Hungarian immigrant directs the Center for Complex Network Research at Northeastern University and has an appointment at Harvard Medical School. Demonstrating his mastery of networking, he landed rave blurbs for the book from Black Swan author Nassim Nicholas Taleb and top scholars at Yale University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and elsewhere.

He concedes that it might seem brash to declare “universal laws of success” and not just, say, “guidelines” or “hints.” But he says that the five laws were the inescapable findings from analysis of massive data sets related to sports, business, the arts, academia, and innovation. “Outright resisting them is about as futile as trying to fly by flapping our arms up and down,” he writes.

Enough preamble, then. What are Barabasi’s five laws?

• Performance drives success, but when performance is immeasurable, networks determine success.
• Performance is bounded, but success is unbounded.
• Fitness x Previous Success = Future Success.
• While team success requires diversity and balance, a single individual will receive credit for the group’s achievements.
• Success can come at any time as long as we are persistent.

- Review of the book The Formula: The Universal Laws of Success by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi

Quote of the Day

What is needed, however, isn't just that people working together be nice to each other. It is discipline. Discipline is hard--harder than trustworthiness and skill and perhaps even than selflessness. We are by nature flawed and inconstant creatures. We can't even keep from snacking between meals. We are not built for discipline. We are built for novelty and excitement, not for careful attention to detail. Discipline is something we have to work at.

- Atul Gawande

Quote of the Day

Capitalism is disappearing, but Socialism is not replacing it. What is now arising is a new kind of planned, centralized society which will be neither capitalist nor, in any accepted sense of the word, democratic. The rulers of this new society will be the people who effectively control the means of production: that is, business executives, technicians, bureaucrats and soldiers, lumped together by Burnham, under the name of “managers.” These people will eliminate the old capitalist class, crush the working class, and so organize society that all power and economic privilege remain in their own hands. . . . The new “managerial” societies will not consist of a patchwork of small, independent states, but of great super-states grouped round the main industrial centers in Europe, Asia and America. These super-states will fight among themselves for possession of the remaining uncaptured portions of the earth, but will probably be unable to conquer one another completely. Internally, each society will be hierarchical, with an aristocracy of talent at the top and a mass of semi-slaves at the bottom.

- Second Thoughts on James Burnham by George Orwell

Quote of the Day

Wisdom cannot be imparted. Wisdom that a wise man attempts to impart always sounds like foolishness to someone else ... Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.

- Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

Quote of the Day

Although this information was not new to me, I had not yet acted on it. What made this trip different? Again, it was in part the experience of simply seeing and touching the lucky few animals who had been saved from such fates. (There was a male dairy cow named Snickers who was a huge, impressive creature. It turns out that the reason he seemed so large in my eyes was that most of us have never seen an adult male dairy cow. They are all killed before adulthood.) What I found most interesting was that a simple slogan had a transformative impact on me: "In every glass of milk, there's a little bit of veal." This powerful statement not only captures a powerful truth, but it is devastating in its simplicity. Once the tour guide said it, I could never think about milk or cheese the same way again.

One lesson that I drew from this experience, therefore, is a renewed appreciation for the concept of framing and the psychology of learning. Even an academic who values arguments and facts can compartmentalize things if they are not presented powerfully enough. As regular readers of this blog know, I am especially fascinated by the power of rhetoric; but even I was surprised by the impact of something so simple as that bumper-sticker statement. Content matters profoundly, of course, but I will never again even consider doubting the power of form.

The other major lesson that I have drawn in the few days since I chose to become a vegan is, to put it simply, that the U.S. economy makes it difficult -- but by no means prohibitive -- to be a vegan. Again, I claim no great new insight here; but experiencing is different from knowing. The most surprising thing about becoming a vegan is that it requires so much thinking! As Professor Colb noted to me, it was a huge relief to be able to go to the snack bar at the Sanctuary and simply buy something that looked like it would taste good. (I assure the skeptics that there were plenty of items that were very appealing.) In a regular grocery store or restaurant, everything has to be filtered through the question of whether the items in question are vegan-friendly. Everything requires at least a little bit of research and a lot of skepticism. In restaurants, questions about these matters are met with blank stares, obvious misinformation, and outright hostility.

- Meat, Dairy, Psychology, Law, Economics

Max Holiday Card 2018

Wish You All Happy Holidays !

Quote of the Day