The Premonition

“This is the crux of science,” he’d say with enthusiasm. “All science is modeling. In all science you are abstracting from nature. The question is: is it a useful abstraction.” Useful, to Bob Glass, meant: Does it help solve a problem?

Joe thought that scientists should be encouraged to look at stuff without having any idea of what they were looking for. “There’s a time and a place for a hypothesis,” said Joe, “and there’s a time and a place to let it go.” He also thought that people who looked at stuff without any preconception of what they might find were the ones who saw the t

Carter already had a view about these kinds of decisions. He thought that they should be approached the way an ICU doctor treated a patient clinging to life. Play forward whatever you are thinking about doing, or not doing, and ask yourself: Which decision, if you are wrong, will cause you the greatest regret?

No single intervention would stop a flu-like disease in its tracks, just as no single safety measure would prevent a doctor from replacing the right hip when it was the left hip that hurt. The trick was to mix and match strategies in response to the nature of the disease and the behavior of the population. Each strategy was like another slice of Sw