Sublime

But what physicists do so well, and most of us do so poorly, is that they carefully delimit what Newtonian and Einsteinian physics are able to explain. They know down to many decimal places where those maps are useful guides to reality, and where they aren’t. And when they hit uncharted territory, like quantum mechanics, they explore it carefully

It traditionally assumed that firms were independent, and so changes would be independent, and so their sizes and aggregate effects would be distributed normally.

And they are instantiated as a distributed processing system on human beings. They don’t particularly care about human beings. Their motives are inscrutable, to the extent that they have any, except that they’d like to get bigger. They’ve run on people. They’re implemented on people. But they are not people. They are not persons in any meaningful

By altering the ingredients of the idea menu they are exposed to, we might, in turn, minimize the dangerous inputs to the processes of belief and network updating.

James Coleman,

Combined, the drivers of population and development are expected to grow energy demand by about 50 percent through 2050.

We also need to better understand the tremendously complex climate models we’ve built.

As University of Wisconsin statistician George Box said famously in 1978: “All models are wrong, but some are useful.”

I’ve also been dismayed by how difficult it is for people, the media included, to understand what’s actually written in the assessment reports.