Recent quotes:

my '84 thesis

We cannot ever rule out the potential relevance of any one field of inquiry to another. At the level of inspiration this seems actually uncontroversial; to give a couple of examples of transfer of ideas between the natural and social sciences, economists have found use in adapting ideas from physics about exchanges of energy that occur during particle collision, and Darwin was apparently inspired by classical economists. In these cases social theory and physical theories have related just by, to speak, happenstance - it turned out to be useful for scientists to be reading and reflecting on ideas and models of the world dreamt up for quite other circumstances. Indeed, if you believe the theory of scientific creativity here, then we should think that very generally scientific creativity tends to be spurred by these sort of unusual interdisciplinary inspirations. I think this is relevant to my point, but I don't think people deny this possibility of fruitful inspiration from afar, and in addition I mean something a bit stronger. I think that we cannot rule out the potential evidential relevance of any one field to results gained from another.
#Yale #darwin #intellectual-history - sootyempiric.blogspot.com

What Separates the Ideas that Endure from Those That Fade? | Yale Insights

The results, published in Strategy Science, reveal that popular concepts tend to be affiliated with and similar to other popular concepts; that is, popular ideas often ride the coattails of other popular ideas. They also tend to be composed of like elements. “If a concept is new or unknown or both, then we find it benefits by appearing together with other famous concepts, and by covering similar ground,” Kovács says. “Specifically, ideas that do this appear more frequently in our data year over year.” “If you are an unpopular person or product or firm, then it pays to affiliate yourself with something similar and famous. But when you reach a certain level of popularity this affiliation can detract from your success. You should go your own way.” An important twist emerged in the results, though. As a concept gains in popularity, it starts to compete with other popular concepts: where once an idea benefited from this association, it eventually starts to suffer. This negative effect only occurs with concepts that are extremely popular, but the overall picture clarifies an intuitive notion. If it helps to attach yourself to well-known ideas when starting out, you must be sure to separate yourself at a certain point, as mentors and models eventually become competitors.
#darwin #intellectual-history - insights.som.yale.edu

Evolution of systems

Food in New York improves from bankruptcy to bankruptcy, rather than the chefs individual learning curves –compare the food quality in mortal restaurants to that in an immortal governmental cafeteria. And in the absence of the filtering of skin in the game, the mechanisms of evolution fail: if someone else dies in your stead, the built up of asymmetric risks and misfitness will cause the system to eventually blow-up.
#medicalindustrialcomplex #darwin #taleb - medium.com