Mathias Meyer > Mathias's Quotes

“In complex systems, after all, it is very hard to foresee or predict the consequences of presumed causes. So it is not the consequences that we should be afraid of (we might not even foresee them or believe them if we could). Rather, we should be weary of renaming things that negotiate their perceived risk down from what it was before.”
― Sidney Dekker, Drift into Failure: From Hunting Broken Components to Understanding Complex Systems

“Arriving at the edge of chaos is a logical endpoint for drift. At the edge of chaos, systems have tuned themselves to the point of maximum capability.”
― Sidney Dekker, Drift into Failure: From Hunting Broken Components to Understanding Complex Systems

“If we adjudicate an operator’s understanding of an unfolding situation against our own truth, which includes knowledge of hindsight, we may learn little of value about why people saw what they did, and why taking or not taking action made sense to them.”
― Sidney Dekker, Drift into Failure: From Hunting Broken Components to Understanding Complex Systems

“Because we tend to be nice to other people when they please us and nasty when they do not, we are statistically punished for being nice and rewarded for being nasty.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“The worse the consequence, the greater the hindsight bias.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“The illusion that we understand the past fosters overconfidence in our ability to predict the future.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“An unbiased appreciation of uncertainty is a cornerstone of rationality—but it is not what people and organizations want.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Starting a company has become the way for ambitious young people to do something that seems simultaneously careerist and heroic.”
― Gideon Lewis-Kraus, No Exit: Struggling to Survive a Modern Gold Rush

“The Valley might not actually make much in the way of tangible goods, but like industrial centers before it, it’s the place where the astounding success of the very few has been held out to the youth in exchange for their time, their energy and, well, their youth.”
― Gideon Lewis-Kraus, No Exit: Struggling to Survive a Modern Gold Rush

“an MIT AI PhD can generally walk alone into an investor meeting wearing a coconut-shell bra, perform a series of improvised birdcalls, and walk out with $1 million.”
― Gideon Lewis-Kraus, No Exit: Struggling to Survive a Modern Gold Rush

“San Francisco was full of people walking around with their pockets stuffed with 1.2 percent of nothing.”
― Gideon Lewis-Kraus, No Exit: Struggling to Survive a Modern Gold Rush

“The antifragile loves randomness and uncertainty, which also means—crucially—a love of errors, a certain class of errors. Antifragility has a singular property of allowing us to deal with the unknown, to do things without understanding them—and do them well. Let me be more aggressive: we are largely better at doing than we are at thinking, thanks to antifragility. I’d rather be dumb and antifragile than extremely smart and fragile, any time.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder

“We suffer sometimes from the hubris of believing that control is a matter of applying sufficient force, or a sufficiently detailed set of instructions.”
― Mark Burgess, In Search of Certainty: The Science of Our Information Infrastructure

“We sometimes think we are in control because we either don’t have or choose not to see the full picture.”
― Mark Burgess, In Search of Certainty: The Science of Our Information Infrastructure

“Autonomous and voluntary behaviour.” These words, hewn from the discussion about avoiding conflicting interests, strike fear in the hearts of technologists. “Control and determinism” are the words they want to hear — those over-sold consorts of certainty.”
― Mark Burgess, In Search of Certainty: The Science of Our Information Infrastructure

“There is a rich & vibrant oral tradition about how to write fast programs, and almost all of it is horseshit.”
― Anonymous

“Don’t fall in-love with the solution you’ve built, but with the problem you’re trying to solve.”
― Anonymous

“Technical Debt is less scary than getting out of business”
― Anonymous

“This is one big problem with working remotely: no one believes you have a job at all.”
― Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

“Most people doubt online meetings can work, but they somehow overlook that most in-person meetings don't work either.”
― Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

“What good is something that scales well if it sucks? Why is size the ultimate goal or even a goal at all?”
― Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

“Making great things requires both intuition and logic, not a dominance of one over the other.”
― Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

“Defensive management is blind to recognizing how obsessing about preventing bad things also prevents good things from happening or sometimes even prevents anything from happening at all.”
― Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

“The bottleneck is never code or creativity; it's lack of clarity.”
― Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

“Not until those without information relinquish their control can an organization run better, smoother and faster and reach its maximum potential.”
― Simon Sinek, Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don't

“Good leadership is like exercise. We do not see any improvement to our bodies with day-to-day comparisons.”
― Simon Sinek, Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don't

“When it comes to creative inspiration, job titles and hierarchy are meaningless.”
― Ed Catmull, Creativity, Inc.: an inspiring look at how creativity can - and should - be harnessed for business success by the founder of Pixar

“People talking directly to one another, then letting the manager find out later, was more efficient than trying to make sure that everything happened in the “right” order and through the “proper” channels.”
― Ed Catmull, Creativity, Inc.: an inspiring look at how creativity can - and should - be harnessed for business success by the founder of Pixar

“Mistakes aren’t a necessary evil. They aren’t evil at all. They are an inevitable consequence of doing something new (and, as such, should be seen as valuable; without them, we’d have no originality).”
― Ed Catmull, Creativity, Inc.: an inspiring look at how creativity can - and should - be harnessed for business success by the founder of Pixar

“To be a truly creative company, you must start things that might fail.”
― Ed Catmull, Creativity, Inc.: an inspiring look at how creativity can - and should - be harnessed for business success by the founder of Pixar