Capital Thinking Blog

Ben Evans, Teddy Roosevelt, and Sherlock Holmes

Eric Chunn -

Capital Thinking • Issue #108 • View online

Sometimes, we all need a little reminder to clean up our thought processes.  

Ben Evans makes a point or two about machine learning and why we probably won’t have a Robbie Robot of our very own running around anytime soon.

Teddy Roosevelt reminds of the qualities needed and expected to maintain a republic. Timely, wouldn’t you say?

And Sherlock Holmes may get kudos for being a genius, but learning to reason well is a valuable skill.

Ways to think about machine learning — Benedict Evans
Everyone has heard of machine learning now, and every big company is working on projects around ‘AI’. We know this is a Next Big Thing. But we don’t yet have a settled sense of quite what machine learning means - what it will mean for tech companies or for companies in the broader economy, how to
Benedict EvansBenedict Evans

One of the challenges in talking about machine learning is to find the middle ground between a mechanistic explanation of the mathematics on one hand and fantasies about general AI on the other.

Machine learning is not going to create HAL 9000 (at least, very few people in the field think that it will do so any time soon), but…

It’s all very well to say ‘this lets you ask these new kinds of questions’, but it isn’t always very obvious what questions.

You can do impressive demos of voice recognition and image recognition, but again, what would a normal company do with that?

Being rational all the time isn’t going to do you any favors
Rationality is one of the most valuable life tools, but alone, it’s not enough.
QuartzZat Rana

When Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky published their paper on Prospect Theory in 1979, few people could have imagined the long-term implications.

The findings were still elementary at the time, and they hadn’t yet developed a full framework around it, but the seeds of change were there.

Theodore Roosevelt on the Two Pillars of Good Citizenship and the Most Dangerous Enemy of Democracy
“In a republic, to be successful we must learn to combine intensity of conviction with a broad tolerance of difference of conviction.”
The MarginalianMaria Popova

“In a republic, to be successful we must learn to combine intensity of conviction with a broad tolerance of difference of conviction.”

Deductive vs Inductive Reasoning: Make Smarter Arguments, Better Decisions, and Stronger Conclusions - Farnam Street
You can’t prove truth, but using deductive and inductive reasoning, you can get close. Learn the difference between the two types of reasoning and how to use them when evaluating facts and arguments.
Farnam Street

You can’t prove truth, but using deductive and inductive reasoning, you can get close. Learn the difference between the two types of reasoning and how to use them when evaluating facts and arguments.