18th century Europe was a particularly exciting time if you were in the seafaring business. There were multiple ventures, several with vast capital investment attempting some very bold goals (most of these ventures would be outright illegal or egregious by today’s standards or ethical standards of any age – colonial ambitions, slave trade et al.... Continue Reading →
#49: Problem Solving: Figuring out when to stop
Imagine this: you are going to the theater for a movie (in a post-covid world!) and you enter the parking lot. You have to make a choice as you drive towards the theater: do you pick the first open spot that you see (which means you have to walk longer and might miss the opening... Continue Reading →
Update your priors!
The other day, I saw a t-shirt slogan – ‘Update your priors!’ These nerdy t-shirt slogans are not uncommon in the Silicon Valley. This one caught my eye – to me, it has never been more relevant given the current swirl of data and analysis around Covid-19, now that epidemiologists and statisticians are in a... Continue Reading →
Complex Systems: Limits to our understanding
Over the last several weeks, I have been writing about decision making, with the focus being how to get better at navigating VUCA environments. This has been rooted in the paradigm of reasoning and a deterministic view of the world. Which to be sure, works pretty well in most situations. And then we got hit... Continue Reading →
Problem Solving: Learning from other disciplines
Richard Feynman Richard Feynman (he doesn’t need an introduction) was a consummate problem solver. When asked about his problem-solving techniques, his colleague Murray Gell-Mann (a Nobel Laureate himself) defined the ‘Feynman Problem Solving Algorithm’: Write down the problemThink very hardWrite down the answer While this was partly in jest, this to me captures why it... Continue Reading →
Navigating extreme events with small data
Here’s a thought experiment: Fred and Bay want to run a coin toss experiment. They want to make sure that the coin is completely unbiased – so they go to the US Mint and get a quarter that has passed all its tests (i.e. there is no manufacturing defect[1]); toss the coin 100 times. They... Continue Reading →
Designing a Learning System
In 1651, Thomas Hobbes wrote, “reason … is nothing but reckoning (that is, Adding and Subtracting) of the Consequences of generall names agreed upon.” It is widely accepted that with this, he laid the foundation for the Computational theory of the mind. And as often happens in science, one thing led to the other and... Continue Reading →
Problem-Solving: the value of Serendipity
I am currently reading ‘Enemy of all Mankind’ by Steven Johnson. It is a fascinating story of a pirate .. and in the introduction, he writes the main motivation behind the book: “we tend to think of grand organizations like corporations or empires coming through deliberate planning: designing the conceptual architecture for each imposing structure,... Continue Reading →
Problem solving: Avoiding narrative fallacies
Last week, I talked about ‘perfection being the enemy of good’ in problem-solving. However, what if we swing the pendulum to the other extreme and draw conclusions from anecdotal evidence? In other words, are we susceptible to ‘narrative fallacies’? In ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’, Daniel Kahnemann describes a (now famous) thought experiment that he and... Continue Reading →
Problem-solving: perfect is the enemy of good
Voltaire first mentioned this - he is supposed to have picked it fron an Italian aphorism. Shakespeare said it better, ‘Striving to better, oft we mar what’s well’ (King Lear). And as anyone who is in the business of problem solving outside the classroom would tell you, one of the practices that really distinguishes the... Continue Reading →
