Recent quotes:

A toast to the error detectors

Scientists are very quick to say that science is self-correcting, but those who do the work behind this correction often get accused of damaging their field, or worse. My impression is that many error detectors are early-career researchers who stumble on mistakes made by eminent scientists, and naively think that they are helping by pointing out those problems — but, after doing so, are treated badly by the community.
Henry James called Dickens the greatest of superficial novelists … “We are aware that this definition confines him to an inferior rank in the department of letters which he adorns; but we accept this consequence of our proposition. It were, in our opinion, an offence against humanity to place Mr. Dickens among the greatest novelists. . . . He has added nothing to our understanding of human character.” Many future offenses against humanity would follow: “It isn’t worth any adult reader’s attention,” The New York Times pronounced concerning Nabokov’s Lolita. “Kind of monotonous,” the same paper said about Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. “He should’ve cut out a lot about these jerks and all at that crumby school.” “An absurd story,” announced The Saturday Review of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, while the New York Herald Tribune declared it “a book of the season only.”
In a sense, Mr. Morgan is a prisoner of two islands: Britain and Manhattan. While I may share his feelings about the need for additional strictures on guns, having grown up in the Midwest, I know that many people come by their guns honestly and hold onto them dearly for sincere reasons. Mr. Morgan’s approach to gun regulation was more akin to King George III, peering down his nose at the unruly colonies and wondering how to bring the savages to heel. He might have wanted to recall that part of the reason the right to bear arms is codified in the Constitution is that Britain was trying to disarm the citizenry at the time.
“What I found was that people had a lower chance of identifying the eventual winner if they only listened to the sound,” Tsay said. “People who just had the video — even without the sound — had surprisingly high rates of selecting the actual winner. Even with professional musicians, who are trained to use sound, and who have both expertise and experience, it appeared that the visual information was overriding the sound.” Because musical differences between two top performers are often slight, viewers can more easily pick up on visual cues they associate with high-quality performance, Tsay believes. Factors such as a performer’s engagement, passion, and energy resonate.
So why has Silicon Valley had so much trouble grasping these dynamics? Probably because the Valley is far too focused inwardly on its own peers and not enough on the real customer base – the hundreds of millions of people who live outside of the Bay Area (and New York City). Quick, tell me 10 startups that have sought out senior citizens as a key product market area and part of their core user groups. There are very, very few and rarely do they get covered in media, perpetuating the cycle of ignorance (both meanings intended).