Dan Levy Quotes

Il est des petites choses que l'on laisse derrière soi, des moments de vie ancrés dans la poussière du temps. On peut tenter de les ignorer, mais ces petits riens mis bout à bout forment une chaîne qui vous raccroche au passé.

laisser entrer quelqu'un dans sa vie, c'est abattre les murs qu'on a construits pour se protéger, pas attendre que l'autre les enfonce !

A l'adolescence, on rêve du jour où l'on quittera ses parents, un autre jour ce sont vos parents qui vous quittent. Alors, on ne rêve plus qu'à pouvoir redevenir, ne serait-ce qu'un instant, l'enfant qui vivait sous leur toit, les prendre dans vos bras, leur dire sans pudeur qu'on les aime, se serrer contre eux pour qu'ils vous rassurent encore une fois.

Comme ils sont étranges ces jours où la joie de vivre est programmée dans les calendriers.

Il y a autant de mondes différents qu'il y a de vies dans l'univers ; mon monde à moi a commencé le jour où tu es né, au moment où je t'ai tenu dans mes bras.

• On peut être avec quelqu’un pour fuir sa solitude, on peut partager son quotidien pour digérer une rupture en continuant d’entretenir le souvenir d’un autre. On peut parler à quelqu’un en écoutant la voix d’un autre, regarder quelqu’un dans les yeux en voyant ceux d’un autre.

Savoir simplement que tu es là quelque part sur cette terre sera, dans mon enfer, mon petit coin de paradis.

C’est en regardant les objets du quotidien, tel un couteau à beurre, que l’on se rend compte que quelqu’un est parti et qu’il ne reviendra plus ; un stupide couteau à beurre qui taille à jamais des tranches de solitude dans votre vie.

Il y a des journées illuminées de petites choses, des riens du tout qui vous rendent incroyablement heureux ; un après-midi à chiner, un jouet qui surgit de l’enfance sur l’étal d’un brocanteur, une main qui s’attache à la votre, un appel que l’on attendait pas, une parole douce, vote enfant qui vous prend dans ses bras sans rien vous demander d’autre qu’un moment d’amour. Il y a des journées illuminées de petits moments de grâce, une odeur qui vous met l’âme en joie, un rayon de soleil qui entre par la fenêtre, le bruit de l’averse alors qu’on est encore au lit, les trottoirs enneigés ou l’arrivée du printemps et ses premiers bourgeons.

Chacun a son monde, le tout est de planter ses racines dans la terre qui nous convient.

– Tu t'es beaucoup ennuyée? – Soixante-quatre voitures sont passées dans ta rue, dont dix-neuf vertes!

Luc m'a pris dans ses bras. Je crois qu'il pleurait un peu, et je crois que moi aussi. C'est idiot, deux hommes qui sanglotent dans les bras l'un de l'autre. Peut-être pas, finalement, quand ce sont deux amis qui s'aiment comme des frères.

Je t'ai vu en companie de cet homme, et le regard que tu lui portais était celui que j'aurais rêvé voir dans tes yeux alors que tu me regardais. Il avait l'air si grand à tes côtés, et moi si petit dans cette allée. Si j'avais pu être cet homme, je t'aurais tout donné, mais je n'étais que moi, l'ombre de celui que tu avais aimé alors que nous étions enfants, l'ombre de l'adulte que j'étais devenu.

J'ai écouté le sermon du prêtre qui officiait devant la tombe de ma mère. On ne perd jamais ses parents, même après leur mort ils vivent encore en vous. Ceux qui vous ont conçu, qui vous ont donné tout cet amour afin que vous surviviez ne peuvent pas disparaître. Le prêtre avait raison, mais l'idée de savoir qu'il n'est plus d'endroit dans le monde où ils respirent, que vous n'entendrez plus leur voix, que les volets de votre maison d'enfance seront clos à jamais, vous plonge dans une solitude que même Dieu n'avait pu concevoir.

je suis une ombre dans ta vie,tu es bien plus que ça dans la mienne et ça me fait du mal

If you focus on people’s shortcomings, you’ll always be disappointed

Svakoga jutra,kad se probudimo,dobivamo kredit od 86 400 sekunda života za taj dan,a kad navečer zaspimo više nema prijenosa te svote,ono što nije proživljeno toga dana izgubljeno je zauvijek,jučer je upravo prošlo.Svakoga jutra ta čarolija počinje iznova,opet dobivamo kredit od 86 400 sekunda života i igramo uz to nezaobilazno pravilo:u bilo kojem trenutku,život se može zaustaviti...

Identifier le bonheur lorsqu'il est à ses pieds, avoir le courage et la détermination de se baisser pour le prendre dans ses bras... et le garder. C'est l'intelligence du coeur. L'intelligence sans celle du coeur ce n'est que de la logique et ça n'est pas grand chose.

Car la nature humaine est ainsi faite, que les peines et les souffrances éprouvées simultanément ne s'additionnent pas totalement dans notre sensibilité, mais se dissimulent les unes derrière les autres par ordre de grandeur décroissante selon les lois bien connues de la perspective.

Je suis une ombre dans ta vie, tu es bien plus que ça dans la mienne et ça me fait mal. […] Pourquoi m’avoir laissée entrer dans ta vie si ce n’était qu’en simple visiteuse ? J’ai pensé cent fois te quitter, mais je n’y arrive pas toute seule. Alors je te demande un service, fais-le pour nous, ou si tu crois que nous avons quelque chose à partager, même si ce n’est que pour un temps, donne-nous vraiment les moyens de vivre cette histoire.

Tu étais entré dans ma vie comme arrive l’été, sans prévenir, avec ces éclats de lumière qu’on retrouve au matin.

famous saying among policy analysts is “let me pick your options, and I will make the decision for you,” which illustrates the importance of keeping an eye out for a better option.

Practice asynchronous reciprocity

Reuben (Jacob’s firstborn), Simeon, Levi, Judah, Issachar, and Zebulun. 24The sons of Rachel: Joseph and Benjamin. 25The sons of Bilhah, Rachel’s servant: Dan and Naphtali. 26The sons of Zilpah, Leah’s servant: Gad and Asher.

On est tous seuls, ici, à Paris, ou ailleurs. On peut essayer de fuir la solitude, déménagé, faire tout pour rencontrer des gens, cela ne change rien. A la fin de la journée, chacun rentre chez soi. Ceux qui vivent en couple ne se rendent pas compte de leur chance. Ils ont oublié les soirées devant un plateau-repas, l’angoisse du week-end qui arrive, le dimanche à espérer que le téléphone sonne. Nous sommes des millions comme ça dans toutes les capitales du monde. La seule bonne nouvelle c’est qu’il n’y a pas de quoi se sentir si différents des autres.

Cela pose un problème que...?" "Que tu ne sois pas juif? Pas le moins du tout, dit maman en riant. Ni mon mari ni moi n'accordons d'importance à la différence de l'autre. Bien au contraire, nous avons toujours pensé que'elle était passionnante et source de multiples bonheurs. Le plus important, quand on veut vivre à deux toute une vie, est d'etre sur que l'on ne s'ennuiera pas ensemble. L'ennui dans un couple, c'est lui qui tue l'amour. Tant que tu feras rire Alice, tant que tu lui donneras l'envie de te retrouver, alors que tu viens à peine de la quitter pour aller travailler, tant que tu seras celui dont elle partage les confidences et à qui elle aime aussi se confier, tant que tu vivras tes reves avec elle, meme ceux que tu ne pourras pas réaliser, alors je suis certaine que quelles que soient tes origines, la seule chose qui sera étrangère à votre couple sera le monde et ses jaloux.

Tu leur apprendras que rien ne compte plus sur cette terre que cette putain de liberté capable de se soumettre au plus offrant. Tu leur diras aussi que cette grande salope aime l'amour des hommes, et que toujours elle échappera à ceux qui veulent l'emprisonner, qu'elle ira toujours donner la victoire à celui la respecte sans jamais espérer la garder dans son lit.

Often times, I find myself or others around me making decisions based on absolutes instead of thinking marginally. Are those extra five hours of work worth the extra money when compared to spending an extra five hours with family? Of course, having a job and earning a decent living are good things, but usually we forget to ask ourselves whether that additional time spent doing such and such is worthwhile

Thinking probabilistically about the world involves three distinct elements: 1)    Understanding what these subjective probabilities actually mean (as we saw above), 2)    Assigning probabilities to many things (events, beliefs, etc.) in our lives, to help us better understand the world around us and make better decisions, and 3)    Updating these probabilities appropriately when relevant new information comes in.

J’ai arpenté les galeries sans fin des grandes bibliothèque, les rues de cette ville qui fût la nôtre, celle où nous partagions presque tous nos souvenirs depuis l’enfance. Hier, j’ai marché le long des quais, sur les pavés du marché à ciel ouvert que tu aimais tant. Je me suis arrêté par-ci par-là, il me semblait que tu m’accompagnais, et puis je suis revenu dans ce petit bar près du port, comme chaque vendredi. Te souviendras-tu ? Je ne sais pas où tu es. Je ne sais pas si tout ce que nous avons vécu avait un sens, si la vérité existe, mais si tu trouves ce petit mot un jour, alors tu sauras que j’ai tenu ma promesse, celle que je t’ai faite. A mon tour de te demander quelque chose, tu me le dois bien. Oublie ce que je viens d’écrire, en amitié on ne doit rien. Mais voici néanmoins ma requête : Dis-lui, dis-lui que quelque part sur cette terre, loin de vous, de votre temps, j’ai arpenté les mêmes rues, ri avec toi autour des mêmes tables, et puisque les pierres demeurent, dis-lui que chacune de celles où nous avons posé nos mais et nos regards contient à jamais une part de notre histoire. Dis-lui, que j’étais ton ami, que tu étais mon frère, peut-être mieux encore puisque nous nous étions choisis, dis-lui que rien n’a jamais pu nous séparer, même votre départ si soudain.

For example, the value of fertilizer for a farmer is likely to be higher if other inputs (seeds, irrigation, farming practices, etc.) are available. The value of a blackboard in a school will depend on the availability of other school inputs (such as chalk, teachers, classrooms, etc.). In economics terms, the situations described above exhibit positive cross-partial derivatives.[80] In fact, when Richard teaches this maxim to his students, he refers to it as “capitalize on positive cross partial derivatives,” a much more technical formulation intended to be playful and memorable.

Tu veux comprendre ce qu'est une année de vie : pose la question à un étudiant qui vient de rater son examen de fin d'année. Un mois de vie : parles-en à une mère qui vient de mettre au monde un enfant prématuré et qui attend qu'il sorte de sa couveuse pour serrer son bébé dans ses bras, sain et sauf. Une semaine : interroge un homme qui travaille dans une usine ou dans une mine pour nourrir sa famille. Un jour : demande à deux amoureux transis qui attendent de se retrouver. Une heure : questionne un claustrophobe, coincé dans un ascenseur en panne. Une seconde : regarde l'expression d'un homme qui vient d'échapper à un accident de voiture, et un millième de seconde : demande à l'athlète qui vient de gagner la médaille d'argent aux jeux Olympiques, et non la médaille d'or pour laquelle il s'était entraîné toute sa vie.

When you are having trouble getting your thinking straight, consider an extreme or simple case. This will often give you the insight you need to move forward. More generally, make a problem as simple as possible without losing its essence – but no simpler. The world is full of uncertainty, much more than you think. Almost every important decision you make will be in the face of uncertainty. Therefore, learning to think probabilistically (assessing subjective probabilities of various scenarios and updating these probabilities with new information) is a critical life skill. Because of uncertainty, some good decisions will result in poor outcomes. In fact, for some decisions there are no good outcomes. Your job will be to choose the option likely to lead to the least bad outcome. Also, resist the tendency to dislike more the errors resulting from your actions (errors of commission) than the errors resulting from your inactions (errors of omission). These two types of errors are equally bad; what matters is their consequences, not their source.

1 – Thinking Straight Maxim 1 - When you are having trouble getting your thinking straight, go to an extreme case Maxim 2 - When you are having trouble getting your thinking straight, go to a simple case Maxim 3 – Don’t take refuge in complexity Maxim 4 - When trying to understand a complex real-world situation, think of an everyday analogue 2 – Tackling Uncertainty Maxim 5 - The world is much more uncertain than you think Maxim 6 - Think probabilistically about the world Maxim 7 - Uncertainty is the friend of the status quo 3 – Making Decisions Maxim 8 - Good decisions sometimes have poor outcomes Maxim 9 - Some good decisions have a high probability of a bad outcome Maxim 10 - Errors of commission should be weighted the same as errors of omission Maxim 11 - Don’t be limited by the options you have in front of you Maxim 12 - Information is only valuable if it can change your decision 4 – Understanding Policy Maxim 13 - Long division is the most important tool for policy analysis Maxim 14 - Elasticities are a powerful tool for understanding many important things in life Maxim 15 - Heterogeneity in the population explains many phenomena Maxim 16 - Capitalize on complementarities

Tu penses parfois au nombre de métiers qui ont disparu? Qui se souvient de la fierté de ceux qui les exerçaient? De ces vies laborieuses? Tiens, les allumeurs de réverbères par exemple, ces gars ont éclairé la ville pendant des siècles. De la tombée du soir jusqu'au petit matin, ils parcouraient les rues avec leur perche, je me demande combien de kilomètres de trottoirs ils ont éclairés. Un sacré score à la fin d'une carrière. Et voilà, pfff, soufflés comme leur flamme, des poussières étiolées dans la nuit, avant d'avoir gagné leur tombe. Combien de gens savent encore qu'ils ont existé?" Marc Levy, "Une Fille Comme Elle

On peut se maçonner des refuges, bien sûr. Des sortes de niches intérieures qui vous tiennent à l’écart dela marée noire des tristes. On peut se faire des <<îles>, Kafka disait des ou des , qui seront autant de navettes, non spatiales, mais terrestres où on sera unpeu à l’abri. Mais des îles mentales, s’il vous plaît! Des concentrés d’espace et de temps qui seront comme de nouvelles coordonnées intérieures, adaptées à chacun! Des niches, d’accord, maisqu’on puisse emporter en voyage ou qui, au contraire, mais cela revient, là aussi, au même, pourront vous emmener, elles, en voyage! Pas forcément loin, notez bien. Voyager dans sa propre ville peut suffire - voyez le Debord de Panégyrique. Ou même autour de sa chambre - voyez Maistre, l’autre, Xavier de Maistre, qui, seul avec son chien (eh oui!), sut mener, entre ses quatre murs, la plus longue, laplus passionnante, la plus périlleuse des odyssées. Ou d’une identité à l’autre, voire à une multitude d’autres - Gary, Pessoa. Ou même d’un livre au livre suivant, d’un genre à un autre, - Sartre, Camus, tous ces écrivains pourchassés, abominés et qui ont su, en bons guerriers, funambules sur le fil bien tendu d’une oeuvre irisée de tous les éclats possibles de toutes les disciplines disponibles, semer leur poursuivants en parvenant à être, chaque fois, là où la meute ne les attendait pas.

tacit knowledge – “that which we know but cannot say.

Einstein is supposed to have remarked that “education is what remains when one has forgotten everything they learned at school”.

The inclusive atmosphere of the class was the key driver of allowing the class to be eager to learn. The focus really shifted away from grades and points, and towards understanding concepts and learning.” The key link is between inclusivity and the shift of focus away from test scores. When students are given the responsibility to support each other, their own score falls down the list of priorities.

The first key idea is that when you have a challenge for which measuring progress is hard, the ability to adapt is just as important as the ability to plan.

The failure here is an example of a common flaw in our approach to adaptive challenges: we try to solve them with technical solutions. Terrified of the unknown, we seek to replace problems we have no idea how to address with those we know how to solve. This is a form of ‘work avoidance’, a term coined by Heifetz[x]. If you have ever procrastinated by spending your whole afternoon making a brightly-coloured work plan, and then congratulated yourself on being productive, then you will be familiar with the concept. By focusing on what they know they can measure – the extent to which a lesson went as planned – some professors may avoid the harder work of trying to gauge the learning of their students.

With these issues in mind, Dan has a unique way of tying exams into the learning process. After attending a workshop run by the Nobel Prize winner Carl Wieman, he was converted to the idea of two-stage exams. The first stage of the exam is the same as any other. The second stage brings the students together in groups of four, and gives them all a subset of the questions they just answered in the first stage. The students are encouraged to discuss their answers in their groups, and they all submit a second version. Groups who manage to improve upon the students’ individual scores get a small boost in the final outcome.

Exams also give us a concrete example of Dan’s attempts to promote understanding over memorization. He encourages students to bring with them a ‘cheat sheet’, which can include anything they want. He does not want students being tested on whether they can remember the formula for the standard error of a distribution, and does not believe that it will be helpful for them to do so. Allowing cheat sheets means that students can bring more than just formulas with them: if they were struggling with a topic, they could bring all sorts of pre-cooked explanations to help them with the exam questions. In turn, this acts as an extra incentive to Dan to set questions that rely on a deeper understanding.

In Dan’s case, the interest in policymaking is so central to the students’ presence at Harvard that it would be foolish to run a statistics course that did not acknowledge it. He goes as far as to build this into the purpose of the course: as we heard earlier, his purpose is “not just to maximise learning about statistics, but also to maximise learning of the skills that will be useful to have out there in the world.

Acknowledging that students have competing purposes is the first step to managing them.

On the whiteboard in Dan’s office, he has written in bold black marker the phrase ‘TEACHING ≠ LEARNING’. He believes that most lecturers pay too much attention to what they are doing in a class. Planning is important, and professors are right to spend time in advance thinking about how the class will be structured. One downside, though, is that professors will often evaluate themselves against what they said they would do in the plan. If they covered the material without tripping up, and gave the right explanations at the right time, they will be happy about how the class went.

Recognising competing purposes Although few would have much trouble identifying ‘maximising learning’ as the purpose of the class, there may be several competing purposes in play, all of which are invisible. For students, maximising enjoyment, minimising effort, maximising test scores, maximising learning about something else, and making friends are all likely to be found across the classroom. For the teacher, we can add to that list maximising evaluation scores, which may be closer linked to student satisfaction than to student learning.

Maximising enjoyment All students want to enjoy their classes. This simple truth means that teachers who can make learning fun will, other things equal, be more successful. If the only way students can enjoy themselves is to ignore the class and play on their phones, then student enjoyment is a headwind that slows the boat’s progress. By making learning fun, teachers can adjust the sails to take advantage of the wind and speed the boat up. The progress it makes may not be directly towards our destination, but we can use the sails nonetheless to pick up speed and get closer to it than we would otherwise have done.

The Google team at Project Aristotle concluded that there were five main traits of a successful team. Psychological safety was the most important, and their research suggested that it underpinned the other four[xxvi]. The five traits were as follows: (1)   Psychological safety: team members feel safe to take risks and be vulnerable in front of each other. (2)   Dependability: team members get things done on time, and meet Google’s high bar for excellence. (3)   Structure and clarity: team members have clear roles, plans, and goals. (4)   Meaning: work is personally important to team members. (5)   Impact: team members think their work matters and creates change.

What can I do to control an outcome? That’s the wrong question. What can I do to influence the odds? Now that’s productive. That I can work with – in my life and in my job.

Accepting that everything is effectively uncertain and that my thoughts, hopes, and actions can at best indirectly influence the world by influencing probability distributions: this has brought me a kind of peace through acceptance, and a greater mastery over the world around me.

If Dan knew getting points towards heaven was as simple as kissing his mother, he would have gone down on his mom to avoid burning in hell.

Norton I isn’t the only person buried in Colma, California—also buried there are Joe DiMaggio, William Randolph Hearst, Wyatt Earp, and Levi Strauss. The town, founded in 1924 (Norton’s remains were moved there in 1934), was designed to be a necropolis; it is made up mostly of cemeteries or land designated as future cemeteries. The residents of the town take their role in life (and death) with humor. In 2006, the mayor of Colma told the New York Times that the city “has 1,500 above-ground residents and 1.5 million underground,” while the town’s official website motto is, “It’s Great to Be Alive in Colma.

1These were the sons of Israel: Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Issachar, Zebulun, 2Dan, Joseph, Benjamin, Naphtali, Gad, and Asher.

One day, Aaron Levie, the twenty-six-year-old CEO of Box, a well-funded new tech company, tells me it’s really important to learn from what happened in the 1990s—which is why he has read a bunch of books about that era.

Bref, je n’ai jamais compris le comment et le pourquoi de cette lubie. Et, vu le caractère profondément vicieux du personnage, je n’exclus pas qu’il ait inventé sa fable dans l’unique but de me nuire. Mais le drôle, dans l’histoire, c’est d’abord les proportions que prit la rumeur (le grand rabbin Sitruk, nouvellement élu, crut bon de s’en inquiéter et lui donna, ainsi, un écho inespéré); et c’est, ensuite, la réaction de ma mère elle-même quand, la chose commençant de s’imprimer dans des journaux communautaires qu’elle ne lisait certes pas (mais enfin, on ne sait jamais...), je décidai de la mettre au courant. Je le fis avec ménagement. Je pris beaucoup de précautions avant de formuler les termes de l’offense. Je jurai d’ailleurs, dans le même souffle, que l’affront ne resterait pas impuni et que je n’aurais de cesse que de faire ravaler à Hallier sa calomnie (ce que j’avais, du reste, déjà fait en allant, le jour même, l’interpeller chez Lipp, lui demander de me suivre sur le trottoir et, comme il s’y refusait, le bousculer sur place, à sa table, près de la caisse - scandale qui fut assez mal pris et me valut une longue << interdiction de Lipp>> qui ne fut levée, des années plus tard, qu’à la mort de <>

The system of profit equations that Jerome Levy wrote down in 1914 anticipated a similar set of equations written down by the Polish economist Michal Kalecki in 1935. And Kalecki’s system is regarded by a lot of people as containing nearly all of what’s useful in J. M. Keynes’ General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, published in 1936 and widely accepted as one of the greatest works of economics ever. Levy went on to demonstrate that the proverb ‘if you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?’ was not applicable in this case; aided by his sons, the Levy family went into finance with sufficient success that the Jerome Levy Forecasting Institute they endowed at Bard College continues to promote their approach to economics today. You used to be able to buy a copy of the book Jerome wrote in 1943, Economics Is an Exact Science, from them; I got mine in about 2002. In the introduction to that book, Levy sets out his view of the purpose of capitalism: The working class is the original and fundamental economic class . . . The function of the investing class is to serve the members of the working class by insuring them against loss and by providing them with desired goods. The justification for the existence of the investing class is the service it renders the working class, measured in terms of wages and desired goods. The contrary is not true. The working class does not exist to serve the investing class. The working class has the right to insure itself through organizations composed of its members or through government, thereby eliminating the investing class.

The criminologist Michael Levi once wrote that, if you have no convictions or bankruptcies on your record, “everyone gets one free shot at a long firm,” and I’d be lying if I said I’d never daydreamed.

Car la nature humaine est ainsi faite, que les peines et les souffrances éprouvées simultanément ne s'additionnent pas totalement dans notre sensibilité, mais se dissimulent les unes derrières les autres par ordre de grandeur décroissante selon les lois bien connues de la perspective. Mécanisme bien providentiel qui rend possible notre vie au camp. Voilà pourquoi on entend dire si souvent dans la vie courante que l'homme est peréptuellement insatisfait : en réalité bien plus que l'incapacité de l'homme à atteindre à la sérénité absolue, cette opinion révèle combien nous connaissons mal la nature complexe de l'état de malheur, et combien nous nous trompons en donnant à des causes multiples et hiérarchiquement subordonnées le nom unique de la cause principale.

Car la nature humaine est ainsi faite, que les peines et les souffrances éprouvées simultanément ne s'additionnent pas totalement dans notre sensibilité, mais se dissimulent les unes derrières les autres par ordre de grandeur décroissante selon les lois bien connues de la perspective. Mécanisme bien providentiel qui rend possible notre vie au camp. Voilà pourquoi on entend dire si souvent dans la vie courante que l'homme est peréptuellement insatisfait : en réalité bien plus que l'incapacité de l'homme à atteindre à la sérénité absolue, cette opinion révèle combien nous connaissons mal la nature complexe de l'état de malheur, et combien nous nous trompons en donnant à des causes multiples et hiérarchiquement subordonnées le nom unique de la cause principale ; jusqu'au moment où, celle-ci venant à disparaître, nous découvrons avec une douloureuse surprise que derrière elle il y en a une autre, et même tout une série d'autre.

Son ami de jeunesse Petre Solomon a souligné, dans "Paul Celan, l'adolescence d'un adieu" (Climats, 1990), l'importance des racines roumaines, pour celui qui choisirait de s'exprimer dans une autre langue. On s'est beaucoup interrogé sur ce choix de l'allemand. Certains exégètes, à considérer le travail de désarticulation opéré sur la langue de Goethe et de Rilke, pensent qu'il cherchait à tuer celle des bourreaux qui avaient tué ses parents. Pendant les quelque vingt années passées à Paris, il n'a pas écrit un seul vers en français, langue qu'il maîtrisait parfaitement et chérissait–c'est un autre mystère, chez ce rescapé de la mort, qui fut, avant Primo Levi, une victime, à retardement, de l'Holocauste. Ses poèmes roumains, qui datent de son court séjour de trois ans à Bucarest, ont été injustement négligés, selon Petre Solomon, qui en cite plusieurs. La "Chanson d'amour", malgré son titre, montre comment, chez ce poète de vingt-cinq ans, l'obsession du naufrage et, déjà, de la "noyade", avait tari toute possibilité de bonheur.

If we cannot judge the quality of the decision by the quality of the outcome, how should we judge it? The key is to understand what information you had (or could have had) at the time you made the decision, and then determine whether given this information you chose a path that would maximize the expected value of your decision. The formal procedure for doing this is to draw a decision tree with nodes for choices and chance events, the probabilities associated with each chance event, and the outcomes associated with each branch of the tree.

Maxim 9 Some decisions have a high probability of a bad outcome

Maxim 11 Don’t be limited by the options you have in front of you

Alice Heath, a student of Richard’s at the Harvard Kennedy School and one of his current teaching assistants, experienced this maxim very clearly when she started working with state child welfare agencies, whose mission is to prevent child abuse and neglect. The children and families they work with face very tough circumstances. Unfortunately, there is often no policy choice that a child welfare agency’s leadership can make that is likely to completely prevent abuse or neglect. “Completely preventing abuse or neglect would likely require draconian measures that would not be good for anyone. The best an agency can do is make the choice that has a higher probability of a better outcome relative to the other choices. Even with the best decisions there will still, sadly, be a high chance that some children suffer abuse and neglect. I have seen state legislators and commentators fail to understand this idea over and over, reading every tragic incident as a decision-making failure rather than the result of a set of choices where the best option is not a good option. As a result, state child welfare directors too often have very short terms and agencies lack stable leadership, which only makes things worse for the children and families who need help.

Maxim 10 Errors of commission should be weighted the same as errors of omission

The two decisions are equivalent in their material consequences: both Pat and Chris invested $20,000 in stocks that were not Amazon stocks in 1998, and missed out on the monumental gain over the next two decades. But the two individuals perceived their decisions differently. Chris, who sold his stocks, kicks himself regularly for his stupidity. Pat, who didn’t buy the stocks, rarely thinks about it. If you are like most people, you would feel much more regret had you been Chris than had you been Pat.

More generally, errors of commission generally get weighted more heavily than errors of omission, a tendency sometimes referred to as omission bias.

As a doctor, you come to find, however, that the struggle for caring for people is more often with what you do not know than what you do. Medicine’s ground state is uncertainty. And wisdom — for both patients and doctors — is defined by how one copes with it.

For these ‘future leaders’ in the classroom, it is more important to understand the psychology of certainty. Often, we believe what we want to believe. Dan starts with an example of the 2016 Presidential Election in the United States. He asks the question: “Relative to what you expected to happen, how surprised were you when you learned that Trump had won the election?

The students are asked to rate their level of surprise on a five-point scale from ‘not surprised at all’ to ‘beyond shock’. Many describe feelings of total shock and numbness: a large majority indicate some level of surprise. He asks them: “Why were you surprised?

An American student, well-versed in U.S. politics, puts his hand up. He says he had been following Nate Silver’s ‘Five Thirty-Eight’ website, which had said that Trump only had about a 30% chance of winning the election.

The brain has conflicting goals: to provide you with information, and to reduce your anxiety about the worrying outcome. If you wanted Clinton to win in 2016, your brain achieved both goals by accepting the 30% figure but telling you it would not happen.

So Trump was 29% likely to win. What does 29% mean?” he asks. This is an odd question for many: they’re doing a Master’s degree at Harvard, and they’re being asked what a percentage means. The question is aiming at the gut reaction of the brain to the number. Inevitably, students think it might be a trick question. Dan waits a while, and when no-one raises their hands, he breaks away from the example to tell a story: “You know, when I first started teaching, I was terrified of silence. I thought, ‘oh my god, I’ve got to do something, they’re not saying anything’.” The class laughs: he has eased the tension created by the silence. “The more I taught, the more I realised that silences are important in a class – they give time for people to think. These days, I’m not afraid of silence at all.” After a few seconds, a woman puts up her hand. “Well, obviously, I knew that it meant there was some chance that he would win. But it was still a shock that the 29% happened.

Dan asks the class whether any of them has ever checked the weather on their phone to see if it’s likely to rain while they’re outside. Everyone has. “What do you do if you see there’s a 30% chance of rain?” “Take an umbrella”, several students all say at once.

It sounds like a lot of you are not too surprised if this 30% chance materialises,” Dan replies. “You take precautions against it. The rain, if it comes, doesn’t shock you, and you have your umbrella. So why was everyone so shocked about Trump?

I guess… it was just a shocking event. We’re not used to someone like him being President.” Here, the student reveals an availability bias in which we expect future outcomes to look like what has gone before.

After pausing, the student continues: “There’s also an element of believing something because you want it to happen.” This betrays a second bias in which we believe what we want to be true. This is a form of confirmation bias, which exacerbates the distorting effect of availability bias. We seek out information that confirms our existing beliefs or desires, and ignore information that refutes them.

In advance of the class, he asked students to fill in a quick survey in which he asked them to describe their own experiences with one of these three uses of statistics. He tells the students that he has read their answers, as well as their student profiles, and asks for volunteers to talk about what they wrote. Several hands go up, and he picks Juliana, a student from Brazil, interested in education. She starts to talk about a program she helped to run in Brazil which assessed whether improvements in teacher training had a causal effect on test scores. As she is talking, her words appear on the big screen, in big quotation marks, along with her photo. The class laughs, and as she looks up she realises she has become a celebrity.

What is the probability that at least two people in a group of 20 people will have the same birthday?

He asks the 80 students to respond based on their ‘gut feeling’. Again, students are given five options, ranging from ‘less than 1%’ to ‘above 40%’. About half of them believe the true answer is less than 5%, of which plenty go for the ‘less than 1%’ option. Only 1 in 6 get it right, picking the highest option: it turns out that the true figure is 41%. He invites those people – 13 in total – to stand up.

Now – those who got it right. On the count of three, I’d like you to sit down if you’d seen the question before. 1, 2, 3!”  Everyone who was standing sits down. This gets a huge laugh. The students who got the answer wrong suddenly feel much better about their mistake: in a Harvard class, not a single person got it right unless they had seen it before.

But everyone who guessed in this way went low, rather than high. It suggests that there is some form of systemic bias in play.

It turns out that you only need 23 people for it to be more likely to find a shared birthday than not.

With 80 people, the size of this classroom, the probability that there will be no shared birthdays is so tiny as to be virtually impossible.

I’d like anyone who was born on March 22nd to stand up.” Two students stand up. They link eyes from across the room, and smile. The room laughs. “Now, anyone born on June 14th.” Another two stand up. The room laughs again. “Now, anyone born on August 2nd.” Two more: the class is laughing at each pair, and re-examining their original takes on how low the probability was likely to be. They are learning through experience about human fallibility with estimating probabilities, and at the same time learning something about their classmates. “How about December 21st?” This time, three students stand up. This gets a big laugh for two reasons: firstly, it is unexpected, and secondly, it helps to ram home the idea that in a class that size (there are about 3,000 pairs in a class of 80), there are likely to be “coincidences” everywhere.

Dan’s goal, taken from his mentor Richard Zeckhauser, is to get students to think probabilistically about the world. This means engaging with the challenge of understanding and accepting what 29% means in the context of a Trump victory, and fighting the brain’s natural inclination to see things in binary terms.

The phrases ‘certainty is an illusion’ and ‘think probabilistically about the world’, both introduced in the first class, are the first two examples of high-level concepts which Dan calls airport ideas.

There is also something powerful in the concept of an ‘airport idea’. On the surface, it links with Dan’s plea for what students should do if they meet him in an airport in five years’ time. But there are hidden suggestions too: the airport carries an association of being high-level, and fits in with the course’s aim of empowering the students with the tools they need to effect change. Once the course is over, they will disperse to airports across the world and put these ideas into practice in their home countries.

The great economist John Maynard Keynes is supposed to have said “when the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?

But few of us really stop to ask ourselves what new information might change our minds, especially on questions of politics and identity. We fall into the trap of confirmation bias, in which rather than updating our prior beliefs, we mould new information into a form that will confirm them.

I remember he said something like ‘this should be completely obvious to you’, and to me that was crushing… we had a conversation after the mid-term exam, in which the class had averaged 20 out of 90. It was 25 years ago, and I still remember what he said: ‘Frustration is necessary for learning. This idea that you can enjoy learning is a very American idea’.” Dan pauses, the memory of that conversation etched on his face. “I felt so offended by that claim. My professor felt that to learn, you had to push yourself. One of my dreams was to go back to Venezuela[7] and start a university, and I vowed that I would write in the walls of the university that frustration was not necessary for learning.

Dan’s use of two-stage exams kills two birds with one stone. Firstly, he maximises learning by ensuring that the exam itself is a learning experience. Second, in doing so, he makes clear that the grade is less important than the learning. Two-stage exams have not yet ‘taken off’ around the world, and grades remain the key outcome of most exams for most students. Dan, though, has taken advantage of his position in a graduate university environment to push the idea forward.

Even Netanyahu’s most scathing critics acknowledged that he deserved credit for doing something that no other world leader had been able to do. Gideon Levy, a columnist for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, credited Netanyahu with playing “a decisive role in obtaining vaccines” and wrote that the prime minister’s opponents “need to put in a kind word—even Satan occasionally does something that’s praiseworthy, and he must be told so.

... l’enfance a ses vertus. Elle nous sert à construire les fondations de nos rêves et de nos vies. C’est dans cette mémoire que tu viendras puiser tes forces, fouiller tes colères, entretenir tes passions, et bien souvent repousser les frontières de tes peurs, et de tes limites.

Alors, elle cherche comment aller plus loin, et si tu ne fais pas très attention elle finit par atteindre son but, elle se glisse dans ta tête pour te noyer, et quand elle a réussi, elle s’enfuit par tes yeux pour aller noyer quelqu’un d’autre. Ne mens pas, je l’ai vue la pluie dans tes yeux, tu as eu beau essayer de la retenir en toi, c’était trop tard, tu l’as laissée entrer, tu as perdu ! [...] — Elle est dangereuse cette pluie-là, parce que dans ta tête elle enlève des bouts du cerveau, tu finis par renoncer et c’est comme ça que tu meurs.

Well,” he said, “we think that companies suck.” Yahoo!’s president, Dan Rosensweig, broke the tension with a quip. “At Yahoo!, we like to think we suck less.” Everyone had a good laugh.

Availability bias prevents us from setting our prior beliefs appropriately, whereas confirmation bias stops us from updating them for new information.

Ketika lidah berfungsi sebagaimana mestinya, itu laksana musim semi yang menyengarkan dan pohon buah yang memberi sari - sari makanan untuk pertumbuhan yang sehat.

Pikiran berada di tempatnya dan di dalam dirinya dapat membuat surga sebagai neraka, neraka sebagai surga.