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A quick glance at the Nobel Prize winners list show that many of them, obviously extreme specialists in something, had multidisciplinary interests that supported their achievements.
“80 or 90 important models will carry about 90 percent of the freight in making you a worldly-wise person. And, of those, only a mere handful really carry very heavy freight.”
He argued that knowledge is limited by our physical and language capabilities.
Just because maps and models are flawed is not an excuse to ignore them. Maps are useful to the extent they are explanatory and predictive.
Key elements of a map
the map is not the territory. In other words, the description of the thing is not the thing itself. The model is not reality. The abstraction is not the abstracted.
We
Models, then, are most useful when we consider them in the context they were
Maps can influence territories:
The difference between the detailed web of knowledge in the Lifer’s head and the surface knowledge in the Stranger’s head is the difference between being inside a circle of competence and being outside the perimeter.
if you don’t have at least a few years and a few failures under your belt, you cannot consider yourself competent in a circle.
How do you know when you have a circle of competence?
There are three key practices needed in order to build and maintain a circle of competence: curiosity and a desire to learn, monitoring, and feedback.
Ego is a powerful enemy when it comes to better understanding reality.
Keeping a journal of your own performance is the easiest and most private way to give self-feedback.
For when we stray too far, we get into areas where we don’t even know what we don’t know.
that if you can’t prove something wrong, you can’t really prove it right either.
As mutations appear, natural selection eliminates what doesn’t work, thereby strengthening the fitness of the rest of the population.
Another interesting piece of Popper’s work was an attack on what he called “historicism”—the idea that history has fixed laws or trends that inevitably lead to certain outcomes. This is where we use examples from the past to make definite conclusions about what is going to happen in the future. Popper considered this kind of thinking pseudoscience, or worse—a dangerous ideology that tempts wannabe state planners and utopians to control society. He did not consider such historicist
doctrines falsifiable. There is no way, for example, to test whether there is a Law of Increasing Technological Complexity in human society, which many are tempted to claim these days, because it is not actually a testable hypothesis. Instead of calling them interpretations, we call them laws, or some similarly connotative word that implies an unchanging and universal state that is not
