“Math-based decisions command wide agreement, whereas judgment-based decisions are rightly debated and often controversial, at least until put into practice and demonstrated. Any institution unwilling to endure controversy must limit itself to decisions of the first type. In our view, doing so would not only limit controversy – it would also significantly limit innovation and long-term value creation” - Jeff Bezos
Entrevista com Lee Kuan Yew, primeiro-ministro de Singapura de 1959 a 1990 e grande arquiteto do progresso do país. Embora realizada em 2005(!), os prognósticos permanecem extremamente atuais, desde as consequências inevitáveis do deslocamento do centro de gravidade econômico em direção à Ásia até os desafios impostos pela globalização ao modelo social (assintoticamente universalista) europeu.
“SPIEGEL: When you look to Western Europe, do you see a possible collapse of the society because of the overwhelming forces of globalization?
Mr. Lee: No. I see ten bitter years. In the end, the workers, whether they like it or not, will realize, that the cosy European world which they created after the war has come to an end.
SPIEGEL: How so?
Mr. Lee: The social contract that led to workers sitting on the boards of companies and everybody being happy rested on this condition: I work hard, I restore Germany's prosperity, and you, the state, you have to look after me. I'm entitled to go to Baden Baden for spa recuperation one month every year. This old system was gone in the blink of an eye when two to three billion people joined the race -- one billion in China, one billion in India and over half-a-billion in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.”
Trecho do livro “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!”, em que o físico relata sua experiência com o sistema educacional brasileiro.
Feynman descreve sua perplexidade diante de uma sistêmica adoção do aprendizado por memorização (rote learning) caracterizado por um ambiente em que todos sabiam repetir perfeitamente definições, fórmulas e passagens de textos, mas não demonstravam nenhum resquício de compreensão conceitual dos temas estudados.
Deveria funcionar como um conto “preventivo” (precautionary tale), mas dificilmente cumprirá esse papel.
“(…) Finally, I said that I couldn’t see how anyone could be educated by this self-propagating system in which people pass exams, and teach others to pass exams, but nobody knows anything. ‘However,’ I said, ‘I must be wrong. There were two Students in my class who did very well, and one of the physicists I know was educated entirely in Brazil. Thus, it must be possible for some people to work their way through the system, bad as it is.’
Well, after I gave the talk, the head of the science education department got up and said, ‘Mr. Feynman has told us some things that are very hard for us to hear, but it appears to be that he really loves science, and is sincere in his criticism. Therefore, I think we should listen to him. I came here knowing we have some sickness in our system of education; what I have learned is that we have a cancer!’ – and he sat down.
That gave other people the freedom to speak out, and there was a big excitement. Everybody was getting up and making suggestions. The students got some committee together to mimeograph the lectures in advance, and they got other committees organized to do this and that.
Then something happened which was totally unexpected for me. One of the students got up and said, ‘I’m one of the two students whom Mr. Feynman referred to at the end of his talk. I was not educated in Brazil; I was educated in Germany, and I’ve just come to Brazil this year.’
The other student who had done well in class had a similar thing to say. And the professor I had mentioned got up and said, ‘I was educated here in Brazil during the war, when, fortunately, all of the professors had left the university, so I learned everything by reading alone. Therefore I was not really educated under the Brazilian system.’
I didn’t expect that. I knew the system was bad, but 100 percent – it was terrible!“
Artigo do ex-funcionário da Amazon, Hulu e Oculus, Eugene Wei, sobre a arte da comunicação empresarial, e em particular o poder de uma retórica forte e “comprimida”.
Wei utiliza-se de exemplos da “mitografia” cuidadosamente curada por Jeff Bezos, entre outros, para explorar a desafiadora tarefa de internalizar valores nos mais diversos níveis de uma organização.
“Take one example: ‘Day 1.’ I don't know when he first said this to the company, but it was repeated endlessly all my years at Amazon. It's still Day 1. Jeff has even named one of the Amazon buildings Day 1. In fact, I bet most of my readers know what Day 1 means, and Jeff doesn't even bother explaining what Day 1 is at the start of his letter to shareholders, so familiar is it to all followers of the company. Instead, he just jumps straight into talking about how to fend off Day 2, which he doesn't even need to define because we all can probably infer it from the structure of his formulation, but he does so anyway.
Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1.
An entire philosophy, packed with ideas, compressed into two words. Day 1.”
Resenha do livro “Reentry: SpaceX, Elon Musk, and the Reusable Rockets that Launched a Second Space Age”. A dificuldade de avaliar figuras controversas tipicamente conduz a leituras pouco produtivas e ideológicas. Nesses casos, a chamada anecdata (anedotas acompanhadas de dados/fatos) acaba sendo uma saída para uma leitura mais sóbria da realidade.
Passagens como a abaixo, se não interpretadas pelo prisma de um ceticismo conspiratório e terminal, deixam uma única impressão: Musk pode ser uma força positiva ou negativa no arco histórico, mas uma coisa é certa - ele é consequencial.
“(…) What makes this book so good is that most of it is just stories of a rocket company following the Haywood Algorithm. For instance: when SpaceX is preparing to move their Falcon 9 rocket from its test stand to the launch site for the very first time, they hire ‘the second largest crane in Texas’ to first stack the pieces of the rocket on top of each other, and then lower them onto a waiting trailer. Halfway through the operation, they realize it won’t work because of the wind and that they’ll have to assemble them on the ground. But the piece currently dangling from the crane and blowing like a sail in the wind isn’t designed to bear its own weight, so they literally can’t put it down.
The guy in charge of the operation joined the company a few weeks ago as a rocket engineer in California, and he is now watching the future of the company dangling in front of him from the second largest crane in Texas. Darkness is falling. What does he do? He does what he has to do: calls a few dozen welders to come the next morning, then stays up all night designing a custom ‘cradle’ that the rocket can be lowered into while anxiously watching to make sure the crane doesn’t start leaking hydraulic fluid. He notes: ‘At Northrop [Grumann], building a custom cradle would have become its own mini-program with design reviews, taking months to build rather than hours.’
Once the rocket is down, they need to move it. To Florida. NASA and other rocket makers generally move their rockets by sea, but that’s slow and expensive. SpaceX doesn’t like to do things that are slow and expensive, so they decide to drive it there. Unfortunately, when lying down on its cradle, the rocket can’t fit under a standard freeway overpass. This is the point at which, if you did not follow the Haywood Algorithm, you would rent a barge and allow the rocket to arrive a few months late. But SpaceX always acts as if any delay at all will kill the company, so they instead set off on ‘the road trip from hell,’ finding an absurd and tortuous route down backroads from Texas to Florida.”
Artigo do excelente blog do fundador da revista Wired, Kevin Kelly, sobre a hipótese da autodomesticação humana, sugerindo que os traços que compreendem a nossa “humanidade” são menos o resultado de um simples processo “bestial” de seleção natural e mais fruto de uma auto-reprodução seletiva, - favorecendo traços sociais, cooperativos e menos agressivos, - essenciais ao sucesso da civilização.
“Our self-domestication is just the start of our humanity. We are self-domesticated apes, but more important, we are apes that have invented ourselves. Just as the control of fire came about because of our mindful intentions, so did the cow and corn arise from our minds. Those are inventions as clear as the plow and the knife. And just as domesticated animals were inventions, as we self-domesticated, we self-invented ourselves, too. We are self-invented humans.
We invented our humanity. We invented cooking, we invented human language, we invented our sense of fairness, duty, and responsibility. All these came intentionally, out our imaginations of what could be. To the fullest extent possible, all the traits that we call ‘human’ in contrast to either ‘animal’ or ‘nature,’ are traits that we created for ourselves. We self-selected our character, and crafted this being called human. In a real sense we collectively chose to be human.
We invented ourselves. I contend this is our greatest invention. Neither fire, the wheel, steam power, nor anti-biotics or AI is the greatest invention of humankind. Our greatest invention is our humanity.”
Entrevista com Joseph Heinrich, professor de antropologia e biologia evolucionária de Harvard, autor dos livros “The WEIRDest People in the World” (“WEIRD“ é um acrônimo para “Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic”) e “The Secret to our Success”.
A entrevista é extensa e percorre uma grande parte do trabalho de Heinrich sobre os motores do progresso civilizatório, estruturado principalmente através da teoria de “cérebro coletivo” — a dinâmica de retroalimentação do aprendizado cultural individual-coletivo. Trata abrangentemente desde os sucessos das civilizações mais antigas até o surgimento das características inéditas por trás do sucesso do “ocidente moderno”.
Artigo do economista Dan Davies sobre o conceito de target fixation, fenômeno no qual a atenção exagerada a um obstáculo particular aumenta a probabilidade de colisão. Ou, mais interessante, quando aplicado a contextos históricos, como a fixação exagerada nos erros da última crise geralmente resultam em outras vulnerabilidades ao redor do sistema.
“The great irony – perhaps the tragedy – of our time is that just at the moment when we have delegated so much important decision making to data, models and evidence, we are faced with so many problems that aren’t in the dataset because they have never happened before.”
Baseado nas pesquisas da renomada psicóloga de Stanford, Carol Dweck, este artigo destaca algumas das importantes conclusões do seu trabalho sobre motivação infantil. Em especial, o prejudicial hábito de elogiar uma criança por sua inteligência que, contraintuitivamente, ao invés de estimular a busca por desafios, as desencoraja de enfrentar situações difíceis por receio do fracasso e a consequente perda do rótulo.
“(…) Then the students were given a choice of test for the second round. One choice was a test that would be more difficult than the first, but the researchers told the kids that they’d learn a lot from attempting the puzzles. The other choice, Dweck’s team explained, was an easy test, just like the first. Of those praised for their effort, 90 percent chose the harder set of puzzles. Of those praised for their intelligence, a majority chose the easy test. The ‘smart’ kids took the cop-out.
Why did this happen? ‘When we praise children for their intelligence,’ Dweck wrote in her study summary, ‘we tell them that this is the name of the game: Look smart, don’t risk making mistakes.’ And that’s what the fifth-graders had done: They’d chosen to look smart and avoid the risk of being embarrassed."