Sunday, March 20, 2022

Brain Food: Useful Not Accurate

FS | BRAIN FOOD

No. 464 — March 20, 2022 — Read on FS

Welcome to Sunday Brain Food: a weekly newsletter full of ideas and insights that never expire.

FS

"A model might show you some risks, but not the risks of using it. Moreover, models are built on a finite set of parameters, while reality affords us infinite sources of risks."

→ The Map and Territory

Insight

"A good photograph is knowing where to stand."

— Ansel Adams

You can easily double the quality of your photographs by spending a bit of time thinking about where to stand. But this idea is useful in other domains too. You can improve the quality of your writing by thinking of how to position it for the reader.

Investing a little time where others don't doubles your impact.

Tiny Thought

A lot of people miss useful ideas hiding in plain sight because they search for accuracy.

If you dismiss an idea because it is not 100% correct, you miss many ideas that are perfectly useful.

The real test for an idea, theory, or advice is utility. The more useful, the better.

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Explore Your Curiosity

"It's a truism that you always want to hire folks with very high standards, but I've seen a staggering number of folks fail in an organization primarily because they want to hold others to a higher standard than their organization's management is willing to enforce."

→ Hard to Work With

"Calorie obsession subsided slightly in the 1920s, as scientists informed the public of the value of vitamins, minerals, and amino acids. But, as we see from our nutrition apps today, the idea of quantifying the value of food was here to stay."

→ A Brief History of the Calorie