Signal To Noise Ratio Quotes

Customer Development experiments are short, simple, objective pass/fail tests. You’re looking for a strong signal in the signal/noise noise ratio, something like five of the first 12 customers you call on saying “I need this right now, even if it’s still buggy.” Early tests aren’t necessarily precise, but should give you a “good enough” signal to proceed.

Flow is an extremely potent response to external events and requires an extraordinary set of signals. The process includes dopamine, which does more than tune signal-to-noise ratios. Emotionally, we feel dopamine as engagement, excitement, creativity, and a desire to investigate and make meaning out of the world. Evolutionarily, it serves a similar function. Human beings are hardwired for exploration, hardwired to push the envelope: dopamine is largely responsible for that wiring. This neurochemical is released whenever we take a risk or encounter something novel. It rewards exploratory behavior. It also helps us survive that behavior. By increasing attention, information flow, and pattern recognition in the brain, and heart rate, blood pressure, and muscle firing timing in the body, dopamine serves as a formidable skill-booster as well. Norepinephrine provides another boost. In the body, it speeds up heart rate, muscle tension, and respiration, and triggers glucose release so we have more energy. In the brain, norepinephrine increases arousal, attention, neural efficiency, and emotional control. In flow, it keeps us locked on target, holding distractions at bay. And as a pleasure-inducer, if dopamine’s drug analog is cocaine, norepinephrine’s is speed, which means this enhancement comes with a hell of a high. Endorphins, our third flow conspirator, also come with a hell of a high. These natural “endogenous” (meaning naturally internal to the body) opiates relieve pain and produce pleasure much like “exogenous” (externally added to the body) opiates like heroin. Potent too. The most commonly produced endorphin is 100 times more powerful than medical morphine. The next neurotransmitter is anandamide, which takes its name from the Sanskrit word for “bliss”—and for good reason. Anandamide is an endogenous cannabinoid, and similarly feels like the psychoactive effect found in marijuana. Known to show up in exercise-induced flow states (and suspected in other kinds), this chemical elevates mood, relieves pain, dilates blood vessels and bronchial tubes (aiding respiration), and amplifies lateral thinking (our ability to link disparate ideas together). More critically, anandamide also inhibits our ability to feel fear, even, possibly, according to research done at Duke, facilitates the extinction of long-term fear memories. Lastly, at the tail end of a flow state, it also appears (more research needs to be done) that the brain releases serotonin, the neurochemical now associated with SSRIs like Prozac. “It’s a molecule involved in helping people cope with adversity,” Oxford University’s Philip Cowen told the New York Times, “to not lose it, to keep going and try to sort everything out.” In flow, serotonin is partly responsible for the afterglow effect, and thus the cause of some confusion. “A lot of people associate serotonin directly with flow,” says high performance psychologist Michael Gervais, “but that’s backward. By the time the serotonin has arrived the state has already happened. It’s a signal things are coming to an end, not just beginning.” These five chemicals are flow’s mighty cocktail. Alone, each packs a punch, together a wallop.

signal-to-noise ratio,

The signal to noise ratio online is completely out of hand, and as common as it is for people to write things complaining about their day or their boss or sniping at one another it’s also terrible.

achieve, the compelling (emotional and logical) reasons the achievements will be important to you, and the consistent methods you employ to get there. This intelligence encompasses what, why, for whom, with whom, when, where, and how you use your apps (skills) and other resources. It is wise to craft and execute a strategy for any given type of vision or outcome you want to achieve. Your execution is equivalent to your entire “system” actively working to purposefully, resourcefully, and effectively get things done, preferably with high signal-to-noise ratio. If your execution is poor, nothing matters. A combination of strong, positive, and

Sixty years ago, Einstein spoke with the voice of God. Thirty years ago, Walter Cronkite every day told us “the way it is,” and the New York Times delivered to our doorsteps “All the news that’s fit to print.” Twenty years ago, Alan Greenspan applied infallible formulas to ensure our prosperity. When I was a boy and factual disputes arose in my family, they were settled by consulting the Encyclopedia Britannica. Back then, the world of information was shaped like a pyramid. Those at the top decided signal from noise, knowledge from fraud, certainty from uncertainty. The public and mass media embraced this arrangement. All things being equal, authority was trusted and relied on. Today we drown in data, yet thirst for meaning. That world-transforming tidal wave of information has disproportionately worsened the noise-to-signal ratio. According to Taleb, “The more data you get, the less you know what’s going on.”67 And the more you know, the less you trust, as the gap between reality and the authorities’ claims of competence becomes impossible to ignore. If the IPCC climatologists fear a dispute with skeptics, how can they be believed? If the Risk Commission seismologists can’t warn us about catastrophic risk, who will? As I tried to show in this chapter, the public has lost faith in the people on whom it relied to make sense of the world—journalists, scientists, experts of every stripe. By the same process, the elites have lost faith in themselves.

Everyone agrees that exercise boosts levels of dopamine and norepinephrine. And one of the intracellular effects of these neurotransmitters, according to Yale University neurobiologist Amy Arnsten, is an improvement in the prefrontal cortex’s signal-to-noise ratio. She has found that norepinephrine boosts the signal quality of synaptic transmission, while dopamine decreases the noise, or static of undirected neuron chatter, by preventing the receiving cell from processing irrelevant signals. Arnsten also suggests that levels of the attention neurotransmitters follow an upside-down U pattern, meaning that increasing them helps to a point, after which there’s a negative effect. As with every other part of the brain, the neurological soup needs to be at optimum levels. Exercise is the best recipe.

A good idea has to be correct on some basic level, and we value good ideas because they tend to have a high signal-to-noise ratio. But that doesn’t mean you want to cultivate those ideas in noise-free environments, because noise-free environments end up being too sterile and predictable in their output. The best innovation labs are always a little contaminated.

Sixty years ago, Einstein spoke with the voice of God. Thirty years ago, Walter Cronkite every day told us “the way it is,” and the New York Times delivered to our doorsteps “All the news that’s fit to print.” Twenty years ago, Alan Greenspan applied infallible formulas to ensure our prosperity. When I was a boy and factual disputes arose in my family, they were settled by consulting the Encyclopedia Britannica. Back then, the world of information was shaped like a pyramid. Those at the top decided signal from noise, knowledge from fraud, certainty from uncertainty. The public and mass media embraced this arrangement. All things being equal, authority was trusted and relied on. Today we drown in data, yet thirst for meaning. That world-transforming tidal wave of information has disproportionately worsened the noise-to-signal ratio. According to Taleb, “The more data you get, the less you know what’s going on.”67 And the more you know, the less you trust, as the gap between reality and the authorities’ claims of competence becomes impossible to ignore. If

We all need a walkabout: nose :: signal ratio. We are constantly bombarded by more unnatural stimuli than ever before. We need to put ourselves in places of decreased sensory input, so we can decrease the noise background signals of our psychological process. When the noise decreases, the signals become clearer. We could hear ourselves again. We can reunite. Time alone simplifies the heart. Memory catches up. Opinions form. We meet truth again, and it teaches us, landing on stable feet, between our reaching out and retreat, letting us know we are not lonely in our state, just alone. Because our unconscious mind now has room to reveal itself, we see it again. It dreams, perceives, and thinks in pictures, which we can now observe.