Teams in these scenarios are missing the concrete resources necessary to execute, and supplying those resources is the only way to help. Giving more ideas feels helpful, but isn’t.

— Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle

The problem with the Lambda Architecture is that maintaining code that needs to produce the same result in two complex distributed systems is exactly as painful as it seems it would be. I don’t think this problem is fixable.

— Jay Kreps, I Heart Logs

Suppose the coinage of a country has a portrait of one of its eminent sovereigns on one side and a specimen of its magnificent fauna on the other. Now consider a simple if-then rule: “If a coin has a king on one side, then it has a bird on the other.” Here are four coins, displaying a king, a queen, a moose, and a duck. Which of the coins do you have to turn over to determine whether the rule has been violated?

Answer: If you’re like most people, you said “the king” or “the king and the duck.” The correct answer is “the king and the moose.” Why? Everyone agrees you have to turn over the king, because if you failed to find a bird on the reverse it would violate the rule in so many words. Most people know there’s no point in turning over the queen, because the rule says “If king, then bird”; it says nothing about coins with a queen. Many say you should turn over the duck, but when you think about it, that coin is irrelevant. The rule is “If king, then bird,” not “If bird, then king”: if the duck shared the coin with a queen, nothing would be amiss. But now consider the moose. If you turned that coin over and found a king on the obverse, the rule “If king, then bird” would have been transgressed. The answer, then, is “the king and the moose.”

— Steven Pinker, Rationality

• A smartphone and a case cost $110 in total. The phone costs $100 more than the case. How much does the case cost?
• It takes 8 printers 8 minutes to print 8 brochures. How long would it take 24 printers to print 24 brochures?
• On a field there is a patch of weeds. Every day the patch doubles in size. It takes 30 days for the patch to cover the whole field. How long did it take for the patch to cover half the field? The economist Shane Frederick gave these questions (with different examples) to thousands of university students. Five out of six got at least one of them wrong; one in three got them all wrong.

Answers:

• $5
• 8 minutes
• 29 days

— Steven Pinker, Rationality

To make discoveries in science, both small and important, you must be an expert on the topic addressed. To be an expert innovator requires commitment. Commitment to a subject implies sustained hard work.

— Edward O. Wilson, Letters to a Young Scientist