It is health that is real wealth and not pieces of gold and silver.
All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped. Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers. Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhoods completely into jagged little pieces, beyond repair.
This was chaos, but chaos was where she thrived. A world at peace, at stalemate, at cease-fire, had no use for her. She understood now what she needed to do to cling to power: submerge the world in chaos, and forge her authority from the broken pieces.
“Always such a hypocrite. I acted from necessity, just like you. We are precisely the same, you and I. We've acquired more power than any mortal should have the right to, which means we have to make the decisions no one else can. The world is our chessboard. It's not our fault if the pieces get broken.”
The group tracked the impact of research papers over time. They saw that papers with new knowledge combinations were more likely to be published in less prestigious journals, and also much more likely to be ignored upon publication. They got off to a slow start in the world, but after three years, the papers with new knowledge combos surpassed the conventional papers, and began accumulating more citations from other scientists. Fifteen years after publication, studies that made multiple new knowledge combinations were way more likely to be in the top 1 percent of most-cited papers.
To recap: work that builds bridges between disparate pieces of knowl- edge is less likely to be funded, less likely to appear in famous journals, more likely to be ignored upon publication, and then more likely in the long run to be a smash hit in the library of human knowledge.
Sayfa 282Kitabı okudu
Seeing small pieces of a larger jigsaw puzzle in isolation, no matter how hi-def the picture, is insufficient to grapple with humanity's great- est challenges. We have long known the laws of thermodynamics, but struggle to predict the spread of a forest fire. We know how cells work, but can't predict the poetry that will be written by a human made up of them. The frog's-eye view of individual parts is not enough. A healthy ecosystem needs biodiversity.
Even now, even in endeavors that engender specialization unprece- dented in history, there are beacons of breadth. Individuals who live by historian Arnold Toynbee's words that "no tool is omnicompetent. There is no such thing as a master-key that will unlock all doors." Rather than wielding a single tool, they have managed to collect and protect an entire toolshed, and they show the power of range in a hyper- specialized world.
Sayfa 267Kitabı okudu
Let’s try a little thought experiment. Imagine you’re playing shogi, and all of a sudden, your opponent starts moving pieces around however he wants with no rhyme or reason. And then, without even capturing your king, he looks at you as if to say, How’s that? I won.
…How did you react? Could it be that you wanted to punch him in the face? But can you think of a game where everyone plays that way? That’s right—that’s reality.
—Games and real life are different? No shit. We have a few words for the people who smugly state the obvious: Don’t even try to compare them, n00b.
After a lifetime of looking at cracked ceilings and peeling paint while pieces of her were ripped from her, he had given her a ceiling of beautiful stars and slowly put the pieces back together again.
He had touched her soul.
After a lifetime of looking at cracked ceilings and peeling paint while pieces of her were ripped from her, he had given her a ceiling of beautiful stars and slowly put the pieces back together again.
He had touched her soul.
Sayfa 181Kitabı okudu
“tried to bury us.
They didn’t know we were seeds.
—Mexican Proverb”
