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If you’re an adrenaline junkie, I understand why you’d find that exciting. But I’m not, and I don’t.
To me, the only good reason to take a risk is that there’s a decent possibility of a reward that outweighs the hazard. Exploring the edge of the universe and pushing the boundaries of human knowledge and capability strike me as pretty significant rewards, so I accept the risks of being an astronaut, but with an abundance of caution: I want to understand them, manage them and reduce them as much as possible.
It’s almost comical that astronauts are stereotyped as daredevils and cowboys. As a rule, we’re highly methodical and detail-oriented. Our passion isn’t for thrills but for the grindstone, and pressing our noses to it. We have to: we’re responsible for equipment that has cost taxpayers many millions of dollars, and the best insurance policy we have on our lives is our own dedication to training. Studying, simulating, practicing until responses become automatic—astronauts don’t do all this only to fulfill NASA’s requirements. Training is something we do to reduce the odds that we’ll die.
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Chris Hadfield (An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth)
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Astronauts are taught that the best way to reduce stress is to sweat the small stuff. We’re trained to look on the dark side and to imagine the worst things that could possibly happen. In fact, in simulators, one of the most common questions we learn to ask ourselves is, “Okay, what’s the next thing that will kill me?
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Chris Hadfield (An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth)
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He went through the vehicle usage manual in his head and recalled the simulator training. Then he unlocked the car, ushered her in, and started the engine. All went well until he rammed into the car parked in front.
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Cari Silverwood (Preyfinders: The Trilogy)
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For dinner Jade microwaves some Stars-n-Flags. They're addictive. They put sugar in the sauce and sugar in the meat nuggets. I think also caffeine. Someone told me the brown streaks in the Flags are caffeine. We have like five bowls each.
After dinner the babies get fussy and Min puts a mush of ice cream and Hershey's syrup in their bottles and we watch The Worst That Could Happen, a half hour computer simulation of tragedies that have never actually occurred but theoretically could. A kid gets hit by a train and flies into a zoo, where he's eaten by wolves. A man cuts his hand off chopping wood and while he's wandering around screaming for help is picked up by a tornado and dropped on a preschool during recess and lands on a pregnant teacher.
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George Saunders (Pastoralia)
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The future of aviation human factors lies primarily with the discipline of individual flyers, not high-powered training programs, 3D simulation, or advanced technology aircraft.
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Tony Kern (Flight Discipline (PB))
“
After dinner the babies get fussy and Min puts a mush of ice cream and Hershey's syrup in their bottles and we watch The Worst That Could Happen, a half-hour of computer simulations of tragedies that have never actually occurred but theoretically could. A kid gets hit by a train and flies into a zoo, where he's eaten by wolves. A man cuts his hand off chopping wood and while wandering around screaming for help is picked up by a tornado and dropped on a preschool during recess and lands on a pregnant teacher. ("Sea Oak")
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George Saunders (American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940s to Now)
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I see that both the living and the dead commute, riding their familiar trains. I am not, as you will have gathered, a person who needs false excitement, or simulated innovation. I am willing, though, to tear up the timetable and take some new routes; and I know I shall find, at some unlikely terminus, a hand that is meant to rest in mine.
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Hilary Mantel (The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher)
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Do not sneer at the humble beginnings, the heaving table or the flying tambourine, however much such phenomena may have been abused or simulated, but remember that a falling apple taught us gravity, a boiling kettle brought us the steam engine, and the twitching leg of a frog opened up the train of thought and experiment which gave us electricity.
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Arthur Conan Doyle
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the group listed dangerous insufficiencies that DARPA had to shore up at once: “Inadequate nuclear, BW, CW [biological weapon, chemical weapon] detection; inadequate underground bunker detection; limited secure, real-time command and control to lower-echelon units [i.e., getting the information to soldiers on the ground]; limited ISR [intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance] and dissemination; inadequate mine, booby trap and explosive detection capabilities; inadequate non-lethal capabilities [i.e., incapacitating agents]; inadequate modeling/simulation for training, rehearsal and operations; no voice recognition or language translation; inadequate ability to deal with sniper attacks.
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Annie Jacobsen (The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency)
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This remains a glaring police problem with a simple solution: Officers should train with their weapon at least every ninety days in stressful simulations. You can’t completely replicate the tension an officer feels as he or she approaches someone suspected of carrying a weapon, but enhanced firearm training under duress would go a long way to help reduce our national epidemic of officer-involved shootings
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Michael Fanone (Hold the Line: The Insurrection and One Cop's Battle for America's Soul)
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The reason for the difference between the architectural and engineering 'climate', so to speak, is very complex. It is partly a matter of terminology, partly a matter of historical accident, and the consequent training of architects and engineers, and mostly a matter of what is commonly supposed to be the difference in content or context - architecture being concerned with producing works of art; engineering with utility structures.
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Yanni Alexander Loukissas (Co-Designers: Cultures of Computer Simulation in Architecture)
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Starbucks Training. I had just read a book about habits and one of the most interesting sections in the book was about a guy who worked for Starbucks as a barista. He had a fly-off-the-handle kind of personality and part of his training at Starbucks was to go through exercises simulating how he would react to difficult customers. He anticipated both external and internal problems before they happened and was ready with a response for each one, so when those things happened, it wasn’t the first time he’d thought of how to deal with them.
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Julie Urbanski (A Long Way From Nowhere: A Couple's Journey on the Continental Divide Trail)
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Hadrian, an African born, a man accurately learned in the sacred writings as well as trained in monastical and ecclesiastical discipline, and right skilful in the Greek as well as the Latin tongue. This man being called to the pope was willed of him to take the bishopric upon him and travel unto Britain.
[Hadrianus, vir natione Afir, sacris literis diligenter imbutus, monasterialibus simul et ecclesiasticis disciplinis institutus, Graecae pariter et Latinae linguae peritissimus. Hunc ad se accitum Papa iussit episcopatu accepto Brittaniam venire.]
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Bede (Ecclesiastical History of the English People)
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Music is exquisite and requisite. It is the creative juice that greases the machinery for insight and serendipity. It unlocks the right brain, opening a door to novel domains. It constructs neural networks and fosters pattern recognition. It trains willpower and discipline. Playing music builds a bigger and better highway between the two sides of the brain. Its myelinated interconnectivity nurtures out-of-the-box thinking and simulates meditation and flow. Like dreaming, it allows our powerful unconscious mind to sift and filter all the accumulated detritus into a meaningful story.
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Douglas Wadle (Einstein’s Violin: The Love Affair Between Science, Music, and History’s Most Creative Thinkers)
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Because AIs aren’t sentient, they can’t be truly empathetic. Empathy involves sensing and modeling other’s emotions and contexts in your own mind. They can, however, simulate empathy quite well. Even with just a chat interface, large language models can interact in ways that are hard to discern from a well-trained, caring therapist. Engineers are augmenting these models with listening, speech, and vision capabilities that can add to the AI’s “understanding” of where the user is emotionally. Perhaps we should introduce a new term, artificial empath, or AE, as a great tool in the fight against loneliness, depression, and anxiety.
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Salman Khan (Brave New Words: How AI Will Revolutionize Education (and Why That's a Good Thing))
“
I hear two female voices around the corner and creep toward the end of the hallway to hear better.
“…just can’t handle her being here,” one of them sobs. Christina. “I can’t stop picturing it…what she did…I don’t understand how she could have done that!”
Christina’s sobs make me feel like I am about to crack open.
Cara takes her time responding.
“Well, I do,” she says.
“What?” Christina says with a hiccup.
“You have to understand; we’re trained to see things as logically as possible,” says Cara. “So don’t think that I’m callous. But that girl was probably scared out of her mind, certainly not capable of assessing situations cleverly at the time, if she was ever able to do so.”
My eyes fly open. What a--I run through a short list of insults in my mind before listening to her continue.
“And the simulation made her incapable of reasoning with him, so when he threatened her life, she reacted as she had been trained by the Dauntless to react: Shoot to kill.”
“So what are you saying?” says Christina bitterly. “We should just forget about it, because it makes perfect sense?”
“Of course not,” says Cara. Her voice wobbles, just a little, and she repeats herself, quietly this time. “Of course not.”
She clears her throat. “It’s just that you have to be around her, and I want to make it easier for you. You don’t have to forgive her. Actually, I’m not sure why you were friends with her in the first place; she always seemed a bit erratic to me.”
I tense up as I wait for Christina to agree with her, but to my surprise--and relief--she doesn’t.
Cara continues. “Anyway. You don’t have to forgive her, but you should try to understand that what she did was not out of malice; it was out of panic. That way, you can look at her without wanting to punch her in her exceptionally long nose.”
My and moves automatically to my nose. Christina laughs a little, which feels like a hard poke to the stomach. I back up through the door to the Gathering Place.
Even though Cara was rude--and the nose comment was a low blow--I am grateful for what she said.
”
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Veronica Roth (Insurgent (Divergent, #2))
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But now, preposterously, the morning hard-on was gone. The things one has to put up with in life. The morning hard-on - like a crowbar in your hand, like something growing out of an ogre. Does any other species wake up with a hard-on? Do whales? Do bats? Evolution daily reminder to male Homo Sapiens in case, overnight, they forget why they're here. If a woman didn't know what it was, it might well scare her to death. Couldn't piss in the bowl because of that thing. Had to force it downward with your hand - had to train it as you would a dog to the leash - so that the stream struck the water and not the upturned seat. When you sat to shit, there it was, loyally looking up at its master. There eagerly waiting while you brush your teeth - "What are we going to do today?" Nothing more faithful in all of life than the lurid cravings of the morning hard-on. No deceit in it. No simulation. No insincerity. All hail to that driving force! Human living with a capital L! It takes a lifetime to determine what matters, and by then it's not there anymore. Well, one must learn to adapt. How is the only problem.
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Philip Roth (Sabbath's Theater)
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Specifically, the awareness that I claim is demonstrably non-computational is our understanding of the properties of natural numbers 0,1,2,3,4,....(One might even say that our concept of a natural number is, in a sense, a form of non-geometric 'visualization'.) We shall see in 2.5, by a readily accessible form of Godel's theorem (cf. response to query Q16), that this understanding is something that cannot be simulated computationally. From time to time one hears that some computer system has been 'trained' so as to 'understand' the concept of natural numbers. However, this cannot be true, as we shall see. It is our awareness of what a 'number' can actually mean that enables us to latch on to the correct concept. When we have this correct concept, we can-at least in principle-provide the correct answers to families of questions about numbers that are put to us, when no finite set of rules can do this. With only rules and no direct awareness, a computer-controlled robot (like Deep Thought) would be necessarily limited in ways in which we are not limited ourselves-although if we give the robot clever enough rules for its behaviour it may perform prodigious feats, some of which lie far beyond unaided human capabilities in specific narrowly enough defined areas, and it might be able to fool us, for some while, into thinking that it also possesses awareness.
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Roger Penrose (Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness)
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55. The Risk: Reward Ratio
In mountaineering, climbers become very familiar with the ‘risk: reward ratio’.
There are always crunch times on a mountain when you have to weigh up the odds for success against the risks of cold, bad weather or avalanche. But in essence the choice is simple - you cannot reach the big summits if you do not accept the big risks.
If you risk nothing, you gain nothing.
The great climbers know that great summits don’t come easy - they require huge, concerted, continuous effort. But mountains reward real effort. So does life and business.
Everything that is worthwhile requires risk and effort. If it was easy, then everyone would succeed.
Having a big goal is the easy bit. The part that separates the many from the few is how willing you are to go through the pain. How able you are to hold on and to keep going when it is tough?
The French Foreign Legion, with whom I once did simulated basic training in the deserts of North Africa, describe what it takes to earn the coveted cap, the képi blanc cap: ‘A thousand barrels of sweat.’
That is a lot of sweat! Trust me.
But ask any Legionnaire if it was worth it and I can tell you their answer. Every time. Because the pain and the discomfort, the blisters and the aching muscles, don’t last for ever. But the pride in an achievement reached or dream attained will be with you for the rest of your days.
The greater the effort, the better the reward. So learn to embrace hard work and great effort and risk. Without them, there can be no meaningful achievement.
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Bear Grylls (A Survival Guide for Life: How to Achieve Your Goals, Thrive in Adversity, and Grow in Character)
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In the absence of expert [senior military] advice, we have seen each successive administration fail in the business of strategy - yielding a United States twice as rich as the Soviet Union but much less strong. Only the manner of the failure has changed. In the 1960s, under Robert S. McNamara, we witnessed the wholesale substitution of civilian mathematical analysis for military expertise. The new breed of the "systems analysts" introduced new standards of intellectual discipline and greatly improved bookkeeping methods, but also a trained incapacity to understand the most important aspects of military power, which happens to be nonmeasurable. Because morale is nonmeasurable it was ignored, in large and small ways, with disastrous effects. We have seen how the pursuit of business-type efficiency in the placement of each soldier destroys the cohesion that makes fighting units effective; we may recall how the Pueblo was left virtually disarmed when it encountered the North Koreans (strong armament was judged as not "cost effective" for ships of that kind). Because tactics, the operational art of war, and strategy itself are not reducible to precise numbers, money was allocated to forces and single weapons according to "firepower" scores, computer simulations, and mathematical studies - all of which maximize efficiency - but often at the expense of combat effectiveness.
An even greater defect of the McNamara approach to military decisions was its businesslike "linear" logic, which is right for commerce or engineering but almost always fails in the realm of strategy. Because its essence is the clash of antagonistic and outmaneuvering wills, strategy usually proceeds by paradox rather than conventional "linear" logic. That much is clear even from the most shopworn of Latin tags: si vis pacem, para bellum (if you want peace, prepare for war), whose business equivalent would be orders of "if you want sales, add to your purchasing staff," or some other, equally absurd advice. Where paradox rules, straightforward linear logic is self-defeating, sometimes quite literally. Let a general choose the best path for his advance, the shortest and best-roaded, and it then becomes the worst path of all paths, because the enemy will await him there in greatest strength...
Linear logic is all very well in commerce and engineering, where there is lively opposition, to be sure, but no open-ended scope for maneuver; a competitor beaten in the marketplace will not bomb our factory instead, and the river duly bridged will not deliberately carve out a new course. But such reactions are merely normal in strategy. Military men are not trained in paradoxical thinking, but they do no have to be. Unlike the business-school expert, who searches for optimal solutions in the abstract and then presents them will all the authority of charts and computer printouts, even the most ordinary military mind can recall the existence of a maneuvering antagonists now and then, and will therefore seek robust solutions rather than "best" solutions - those, in other words, which are not optimal but can remain adequate even when the enemy reacts to outmaneuver the first approach.
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Edward N. Luttwak
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Isaac Asimov’s short story “The Fun They Had” describes a school of the future that uses advanced technology to revolutionize the educational experience, enhancing individualized learning and providing students with personalized instruction and robot teachers. Such science fiction has gone on to inspire very real innovation. In a 1984 Newsweek interview, Apple’s co-founder Steve Jobs predicted computers were going to be a bicycle for our minds, extending our capabilities, knowledge, and creativity, much the way a ten-speed amplifies our physical abilities. For decades, we have been fascinated by the idea that we can use computers to help educate people. What connects these science fiction narratives is that they all imagined computers might eventually emulate what we view as intelligence. Real-life researchers have been working for more than sixty years to make this AI vision a reality. In 1962, the checkers master Robert Nealey played the game against an IBM 7094 computer, and the computer beat him. A few years prior, in 1957, the psychologist Frank Rosenblatt created Perceptron, the first artificial neural network, a computer simulation of a collection of neurons and synapses trained to perform certain tasks. In the decades following such innovations in early AI, we had the computation power to tackle systems only as complex as the brain of an earthworm or insect. We also had limited techniques and data to train these networks. The technology has come a long way in the ensuing decades, driving some of the most common products and apps today, from the recommendation engines on movie streaming services to voice-controlled personal assistants such as Siri and Alexa. AI has gotten so good at mimicking human behavior that oftentimes we cannot distinguish between human and machine responses. Meanwhile, not only has the computation power developed enough to tackle systems approaching the complexity of the human brain, but there have been significant breakthroughs in structuring and training these neural networks.
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Salman Khan (Brave New Words: How AI Will Revolutionize Education (and Why That’s a Good Thing))
“
THE IRIS OF THE EYE WAS TOO BIG TO HAVE BEEN FABRICATED AS A single rigid object. It had been built, beginning about nine hundred years ago, out of links that had been joined together into a chain; the two ends of the chain then connected to form a loop. The method would have seemed familiar to Rhys Aitken, who had used something like it to construct Izzy’s T3 torus. For him, or anyone else versed in the technological history of Old Earth, an equally useful metaphor would have been that it was a train, 157 kilometers long, made of 720 giant cars, with the nose of the locomotive joined to the tail of the caboose so that it formed a circular construct 50 kilometers in diameter. An even better analogy would have been to a roller coaster, since its purpose was to run loop-the-loops forever. The “track” on which the “train” ran was a circular groove in the iron frame of the Eye, lined with the sensors and magnets needed to supply electrodynamic suspension, so that the whole thing could spin without actually touching the Eye’s stationary frame. This was an essential design requirement given that the Great Chain had to move with a velocity of about five hundred meters per second in order to supply Earth-normal gravity to its inhabitants. Each of the links had approximately the footprint of a Manhattan city block on Old Earth. And their total number of 720 was loosely comparable to the number of such blocks that had once existed in the gridded part of Manhattan, depending on where you drew the boundaries—it was bigger than Midtown but smaller than Manhattan as a whole. Residents of the Great Chain were acutely aware of the comparison, to the point where they were mocked for having a “Manhattan complex” by residents of other habitats. They were forever freeze-framing Old Earth movies or zooming around in virtual-reality simulations of pre-Zero New York for clues as to how street and apartment living had worked in those days. They had taken as their patron saint Luisa, the eighth survivor on Cleft, a Manhattanite who had been too old to found her own race. Implicit in that was that the Great Chain—the GC, Chaintown, Chainhattan—was a place that people might move to when they wanted to separate themselves from the social environments of their home habitats, or indeed of their own races. Mixed-race people were more common there than anywhere else.
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Neal Stephenson (Seveneves)
“
The problem with fighting at a lower level is that it doesn't simulate reality well. You want to train harder than real combat, not easier.
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John Ringo (Gust Front (Posleen War, #2))
“
When Tris passes me I put out a hand, and it fits automatically in the space between her shoulder blades. I don’t even know if that was intentional or not. And I don’t really care.
The others start down the hallway, our original plan of spending time in the training room forgotten once Uriah and Zeke start bickering and Shauna and Marlene share the rest of a muffin.
“Wait a second,” I say to Tris. She turns to me, looking worried, so I try to smile, but it’s hard to feel like smiling right now.
I noticed tension in the training room when I posted the rankings earlier this evening--I never thought, when I was tallying up the points for the rankings, that maybe I should mark her down for her protection. It would have been an insult to her skill in the simulations to put her any lower on the list, but maybe she would have preferred the insult to the growing rift between her and her fellow transfers.
Even though she’s pale and exhausted, and there are little cuts around each of her nail beds, and a wavering look in her eyes, I know that’s not the case. This girl would never want to be tucked safely in the middle of the pack, never.
“You belong here, you know that?” I say. “You belong with us. It’ll be over soon, so…just hold on, okay?
”
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Veronica Roth (Four: A Divergent Story Collection (Divergent, #0.1-0.4))
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NASA had convened a conference to explore the benefit of a new kind of training: Crew Resource Management. The primary focus was on communication. First officers were taught assertiveness procedures. The mnemonic that has been used to improve the assertiveness of junior members of the crew in aviation is called P.A.C.E. (Probe, Alert, Challenge, Emergency).* Captains, who for years had been regarded as big chiefs, were taught to listen, acknowledge instructions, and clarify ambiguity. The time perception problem was tackled through a more structured division of responsibilities. Checklists, already in operation, were expanded and improved. The checklists have been established as a means of preventing oversights in the face of complexity. But they also flatten the hierarchy. When pilots and co-pilots talk to each other, introduce themselves, and go over the checklist, they open channels of communication. It makes it more likely the junior partner will speak up in an emergency. This solves the so-called activation problem. Various versions of the new training methods were immediately trialed in simulators. At each stage, the new ideas were challenged, rigorously tested, and examined at their limits. The most effective proposals were then rapidly integrated into airlines around the world. After a terrible set of accidents in the 1970s, the rate of crashes began to decline.
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Matthew Syed (Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do)
“
This book is a compilation of interesting ideas that have strongly influenced my thoughts and I want to share them in a compressed form. That ideas can change your worldview and bring inspiration and the excitement of discovering something new. The emphasis is not on the technology because it is constantly changing. It is much more difficult to change the accompanying circumstances that affect the way technological solutions are realized. The chef did not invent salt, pepper and other spices. He just chooses good ingredients and uses them skilfully, so others can enjoy his art. If I’ve been successful, the book creates a new perspective for which the selection of ingredients is important, as well as the way they are smoothly and efficiently arranged together.
In the first part of the book, we follow the natural flow needed to create the stimulating environment necessary for the survival of a modern company. It begins with challenges that corporations are facing, changes they are, more or less successfully, trying to make, and the culture they are trying to establish. After that, we discuss how to be creative, as well as what to look for in the innovation process.
The book continues with a chapter that talks about importance of inclusion and purpose. This idea of inclusion – across ages, genders, geographies, cultures, sexual orientation, and all the other areas in which new ways of thinking can manifest – is essential for solving new problems as well as integral in finding new solutions to old problems. Purpose motivates people for reaching their full potential. This is The second and third parts of the book describes the areas that are important to support what is expressed in the first part. A flexible organization is based on IT alignment with business strategy. As a result of acceleration in the rate of innovation and technological changes, markets evolve rapidly, products’ life cycles get shorter and innovation becomes the main source of competitive advantage.
Business Process Management (BPM) goes from task-based automation, to process-based automation, so automating a number of tasks in a process, and then to functional automation across multiple processes andeven moves towards automation at the business ecosystem level. Analytics brought us information and insight; AI turns that insight into superhuman knowledge and real-time action, unleashing new business models, new ways to build, dream, and experience the world, and new geniuses to advance humanity faster than ever before.
Companies and industries are transforming our everyday experiences and the services we depend upon, from self-driving cars, to healthcare, to personal assistants. It is a central tenet for the disruptive changes of the 4th Industrial Revolution; a revolution that will likely challenge our ideas about what it means to be a human and just might be more transformative than any other industrial revolution we have seen yet. Another important disruptor is the blockchain - a distributed decentralized digital ledger of transactions with the promise of liberating information and making the economy more democratic.
You no longer need to trust anyone but an algorithm. It brings reliability, transparency, and security to all manner of data exchanges: financial transactions, contractual and legal agreements, changes of ownership, and certifications. A quantum computer can simulate efficiently any physical process that occurs in Nature. Potential (long-term) applications include pharmaceuticals, solar power collection, efficient power transmission, catalysts for nitrogen fixation, carbon capture, etc. Perhaps we can build quantum algorithms for improving computational tasks within artificial intelligence, including sub-fields like machine learning. Perhaps a quantum deep learning network can be trained more efficiently, e.g. using a smaller training set. This is still in conceptual research domain.
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”
Tomislav Milinović
“
Building on the Pentagon’s anthrax simulation (1999) and the intelligence agency’s “Dark Winter” (2001), Atlantic Storm (2003, 2005), Global Mercury (2003), Schwartz’s “Lockstep” Scenario Document (2010), and MARS (2017), the Gates-funded SPARS scenario war-gamed a bioterrorist attack that precipitated a global coronavirus epidemic lasting from 2025 to 2028, culminating in coercive mass vaccination of the global population. And, as Gates had promised, the preparations were analogous to “preparing for war.”191 Under the code name “SPARS Pandemic,” Gates presided over a sinister summer school for globalists, spooks, and technocrats in Baltimore. The panelists role-played strategies for co-opting the world’s most influential political institutions, subverting democratic governance, and positioning themselves as unelected rulers of the emerging authoritarian regime. They practiced techniques for ruthlessly controlling dissent, expression, and movement, and degrading civil rights, autonomy, and sovereignty. The Gates simulation focused on deploying the usual psyops retinue of propaganda, surveillance, censorship, isolation, and political and social control to manage the pandemic. The official eighty-nine-page summary is a miracle of fortune-telling—an uncannily precise month-by-month prediction of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic as it actually unfolded.192 Looked at another way, when it erupted five years later, the 2020 COVID-19 contagion faithfully followed the SPARS blueprint. Practically the only thing Gates and his planners got wrong was the year. Gates’s simulation instructs public health officials and other collaborators in the global vaccine cartel exactly what to expect and how to behave during the upcoming plague. Reading through the eighty-nine pages, it’s difficult not to interpret this stunningly prescient document as a planning, signaling, and training exercise for replacing democracy with a new regimen of militarized global medical tyranny. The scenario directs participants to deploy fear-driven propaganda narratives to induce mass psychosis and to direct the public toward unquestioning obedience to the emerging social and economic order. According to the scenario narrative, a so-called “SPARS” coronavirus ignites in the United States in January 2025 (the COVID-19 pandemic began in January 2020). As the WHO declares a global emergency, the federal government contracts a fictional firm that resembles Moderna. Consistent with Gates’s seeming preference for diabolical cognomens, the firm is dubbed “CynBio” (Sin-Bio) to develop an innovative vaccine using new “plug-and-play” technology. In the scenario, and now in real life, Federal health officials invoke the PREP Act to provide vaccine makers liability protection.
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
“
The nature of being at the correct distance from the opponent and of understanding the principle of reaction time does not give the attacker the luxury of completing more than one strike before being counterattacked by a skilled defender. Once you have created the distraction with your first strike, you need to continue and attack appropriately. Therefore, when you train, students need to gain a complete understanding of what they are drilling and the training drill should be designed accordingly. Be aware that the human mind is constantly trying to create imaginary connections between motion possibilities without always seeing the whole picture. Shortening the range from a kick to a hand strike cuts down on time between the first and subsequent attacks. Such an attempt does not recognize that a good defense against a kick eliminates the option for a continuous hand attack since that was already taken into account. Executing multiple attacks on the defense however would break the opponent’s train of thought and give the initiator another second to hit again. If you have reached the target through the first strike, with no obstacles, you are buying time for a more devastating attack. You must recognize that with less devastating strikes, you buy less time, and in a real fight it is measured in splits of a second. It should only take a few seconds to finish the opponent. Krav Maga principles dictate a perfect relationship in which a counterattack requires the same speed as the block, but sometimes the distance can be too close to accelerate the hand to a maximum speed—and then you are just buying another second and must follow up with a more devastating attack. If you deliver attacks of medium strength, your opponent might get the message and stop attacking you. However, while it is a good practice to change an attacker’s mind and habits, you may not want to risk your own life protecting your attacker from extensive harm. Finally, when executing a counterattack, please be as precise as possible, so you do not need to rework. I personally would not spend more than two seconds on one opponent, since it would occupy and distract me from other dangerous changes that might occur in the environment. If you break glass in a store, you would want to get out of there as quickly as possible instead of waiting around in the same spot. I’d like to remind the reader that the above paragraphs elaborate the dangers and safety in both training and in reality. By understanding safe training, you need to understand the dangers of reality. To master the process, you need to train in simulated scenarios that are as close as possible to a realistic fight for survival. Keep in mind that when you identify a threat, you should set your boundaries, and decide that if the opponent gets too close to you, you should attack him by kicking or punching according to the distance between you two. If however the attacker attacks you by surprise, not giving you enough time to think, your body instinctively defends itself. This means that if you are at the point where you notice an attack coming at you, your primary instinct is to defend as opposed to attack.
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Boaz Aviram (Krav Maga: Use Your Body as a Weapon)
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The Combat Maneuver Training Center, the unit in charge of military simulations, recommends that officers arrive at the Commander’s Intent by asking themselves two questions: If we do nothing else during tomorrow’s mission, we must _________________. The single, most important thing that we must do tomorrow is ________________.
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Chip Heath (Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die)
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But an untrained soul has as much chance of navigating its destiny as a leaf in the wind. Hallucinogens, lucid dreams, death and even meditation can provide a window to dimensions not tied down to the simulation's laws of physics but unless the soul has been trained enough to navigate beyond its material body it is not going very far. Even worse it can get tied down to an endless loop around its fears and weaknesses, like an eternal bad dream that repeats itself.
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Peter Clifford Nichols (The Word of Bob: an AI Minecraft Villager)
“
Technically, “deep” neural networks may have as few as three layers, but advances in computing power over the past decade have made much deeper networks practical. A key element of AlphaGo was a thirteen-layer neural network, which it used in 2015–16 to surpass the best human Go players. In order for this network to be useful, it needed massive amounts of data, so researchers trained it by simulating up to 1,000 games per second per computer processing unit. In 2017, AlphaGo Zero simulated about 29 million games with a 79-layer network, and beat the original AlphaGo 100 games to 0.
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Ray Kurzweil (The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI)
“
Dharma Master Cheng Yen is a Buddhist nun living in Hualien County, a mountainous region on the east coast of Taiwan. Because the mountains formed barriers to travel, the area has a high proportion of indigenous people, and in the 1960s many people in the area, especially indigenous people, were living in poverty. Although Buddhism is sometimes regarded as promoting a retreat from the world to focus on the inner life, Cheng Yen took the opposite path. In 1966, when Cheng Yen was twenty-nine, she saw an indigenous woman with labor complications whose family had carried her for eight hours from their mountain village to Hualien City. On arriving they were told they would have to pay for the medical treatment she needed. Unable to afford the cost of treatment they had no alternative but to carry her back again. In response, Cheng Yen organized a group of thirty housewives, each of whom put aside a few cents each day to establish a charity fund for needy families. It was called Tzu Chi, which means “Compassionate Relief.” Gradually word spread, and more people joined.6 Cheng Yen began to raise funds for a hospital in Hualien City. The hospital opened in 1986. Since then, Tzu Chi has established six more hospitals. To train some of the local people to work in the hospital, Tzu Chi founded medical and nursing schools. Perhaps the most remarkable feature of its medical schools is the attitude shown to corpses that are used for medical purposes, such as teaching anatomy or simulation surgery, or for research. Obtaining corpses for this purpose is normally a problem in Chinese cultures because of a Confucian tradition that the body of a deceased person should be cremated with the body intact. Cheng Yen asked her volunteers to help by willing their bodies to the medical school after their death. In contrast to most medical schools, here the bodies are treated with the utmost respect for the person whose body it was. The students visit the family of the deceased and learn about his or her life. They refer to the deceased as “silent mentors,” place photographs of the living person on the walls of the medical school, and have a shrine to each donor. After the course has concluded and the body has served its purpose, all parts are replaced and the body is sewn up. The medical school then arranges a cremation ceremony in which students and the family take part. Tzu Chi is now a huge organization, with seven million members in Taiwan alone—almost 30 percent of the population—and another three million members associated with chapters in 51 countries. This gives it a vast capacity to help. After a major earthquake hit Taiwan in 1999, Tzu Chi rebuilt 51 schools. Since then it has done the same after disasters in other countries, rebuilding 182 schools in 16 countries. Tzu Chi promotes sustainability in everything it does. It has become a major recycler, using its volunteers to gather plastic bottles and other recyclables that are turned into carpets and clothing. In order to promote sustainable living as well as compassion for sentient beings all meals served in Tzu Chi hospitals, schools, universities, and other institutions are vegetarian.
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Peter Singer (The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically)
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Additionally, many, if not most, of these assaults did not involve room entries. These statistics show that the opportunity for feedback about room entries for individual officers is extremely limited. Of course, feedback could be obtained through realistic force-on-force training exercises in which officers and role-player suspects engage in simulated gun battles, but many agencies do not engage in this type of training and the lessons learned may be inaccurate, as discussed later.
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Pete J. Blair (Evaluating Police Tactics: An Empirical Assessment of Room Entry Techniques (Real World Criminology))
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there is currently no simulator software for landing on water, and no real life training scenario in how to ditch a plane. To be fair, it would be a difficult situation to reproduce.
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Glenn Meade (Seconds to Disaster)
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Cadet One stepped gingerly off the silvery boarding plank slanting down out of the saucer. “Good morning Cadet”, said an invisible voice from the ceiling. “This is your Basic Proficiency Evaluation in survival on a hostile planet. The particular hostile planet we have simulated today is Earth, third planet of the Sol system. Please do not be alarmed or upset, this is only a test and may be repeated later in your training. We would like you to proceed one hundred metres north of your current position and locate a place called Starbucks. Once there, you are to sit down, use the Earth money in your pocket to acquire a thing called a ‘Grande Latte’, and await retrieval by your instructors.
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Dominic Green (Dog On The Highway (Ant and Cleo #5))
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I don’t get it,” Lex said to Uncle Mort, propelling herself through the air. “Why all these elaborate simulations? And why are the targets so far away from the starting point? When we scythe in to actual targets, they’re always right there in front of us. And time is frozen—and our hoodies protect us from the elements—so why use real fire, real everything?”
“Because the human mind is a tricky little bastard,” Uncle Mort said. “When Grims are thrown into scary situations, their brains still tell them to panic, despite the fact that there is really no need. If the training procedures force you to concentrate on the task at hand while being bombarded with danger from every direction, you’ll be all the more levelheaded when you’re actually in a safe environment.”
“Ah. That makes sense, I guess.”
“Of course it does. I came up with it.”
“With what?”
He gestured at their surroundings. “This.”
“Wait, wait,” said Ferbus. “You designed this?”
“Designed it, no. I don’t know what kind of situations these sadistic Necropolitans have cooked up in the time since I first mentioned it. But it was my idea to establish a training program in the first place.”
“Then why don’t we have one in Croak?” Lex asked.
“We do.” He smirked. “You’re looking at him.
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Gina Damico (Rogue (Croak, #3))
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the LGTSA was playing various miniature battle games weekly, usually on Saturday mornings, and with growing attendance. In fact, the group had drummed up enough regional notoriety that it managed to get the attention of the U.S. government who sent a pair of undercover Army intelligence agents, posing as a man-and-wife team of wargamers, to monitor the activities of the fledgling group. Because so little was known about wargaming and miniature combat groups, and it being a time of great social unrest, there was concern among various government agencies that such tabletop combat simulation was meant to train and plan for real-life insurgency. Mary
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Michael Witwer (Empire of Imagination: Gary Gygax and the Birth of Dungeons & Dragons)
“
Aldus Barnes, a structural engineer by training and member of the Advanced Geometry Unit (AGU) at Arup, has formed many successful collaborations and earned a prominent place for himself in architecture by adopting the language and skills of architects. "Talk in terms of texture and density, instead of torsion and shear. That way they don't think you are just another nerd," Barnes advises the young members of his team.
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Yanni Alexander Loukissas (Co-Designers: Cultures of Computer Simulation in Architecture)
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In the law enforcement and security professions most of the little training conducted surrounds physical skills training. Training focuses on firearm proficiency, how to swing and block with an impact weapon, use oleoresin capsicum (Pepper Spray), defensive tactics and handcuffing techniques. A small portion of time is spent talking about use of force decisions and filing appropriate reports as to the action taken by officers. Although there have been great strides in bringing new training techniques such as Redman suits, Sim-munitions and range 3000 simulators to combine the physical and mental realms of conflict. While this training is excellent, it is just a small part of the overall conditioning that must take place in the preparation of our profession. This type of response training is called conditioned response. It is a specific training for a specific reaction, and while it is important, does not fully prepare people for complex situations.
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Fred Leland (Adaptive Leadership Handbook - Law Enforcement & Security)
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For executives, simulator-style training is occasionally available in crisis leadership courses, where trainees are invited to take their turn at the helm in a crisis response exercise. But absent a crisis, most executive teams operate without any special training to help them interpret the myriad signals available or recognize important conditions quickly and pick the best response to different scenarios. In the absence of such training, many executive teams muddle through, having learned most of what they know through their own experience on the way up through the managerial ranks rather than through formal training. As one chief noted, the closest equivalent to executive-level simulator training is when one department has the opportunity to learn from the misery of another. A collegial network of police executives, ready to share both their successes and failures, is a valuable asset to the profession (see box 2-1).
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Malcolm K. Sparrow (Handcuffed: What Holds Policing Back, and the Keys to Reform)
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welcomed the opportunity to become the first astronaut trained underwater in a swimming pool to simulate the effects of neutral buoyancy, trying to maneuver in a weightless environment in space. Some of my colleagues thought I was being eccentric, but the sensations in the pool prepared me for what it might feel like drifting along at 17,500 miles an hour, tethered to a spacecraft.
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Buzz Aldrin (No Dream Is Too High: Life Lessons From a Man Who Walked on the Moon)
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Likewise, in the eleventh-hour simulations atop the rocket at the Cape. Al showed only one sign of stress: the cycles—Smilin’ Al/Icy Commander—now came one on top of the other, in the same place, and alternated so suddenly that the people around him couldn’t keep track. They learned a little more about the mysterious Al Shepard here in the eleventh hour. Smilin’ Al was a man who wanted very much to be liked, even loved, by those around him. He wanted not just their respect but also their affection. Now, in April, on the eve of the great adventure, Smilin’ Al was more jovial and convivial than ever. He did his José Jiménez routine. His great grin spread wider and his great beer-call eyes beamed brighter than ever before. Smilin’ Al was crazy about a comedy routine that had been developed by a comedian named Bill Dana. It concerned the Cowardly Astronaut and was a great hit. Dana portrayed the Cowardly Astronaut as a stupid immigrant Mexican named José Jiménez, whose tongue wrapped around the English language like a taco. The idea was to interview Astronaut Jiménez like a news broadcaster. You’d say things like: “What has been the most difficult part of astronaut training, José?” “Obtaining de maw-ney, señor.” “The money? What for?” “For de bus back to Mejico, you betcha, reel queeck, señor.” “I see. Well, now, José, what do you plan to do once you’re in space?” “Gonna cry a lot, I theeeenk.” Smilin’ Al used to crack up over this routine. He liked to do the José Jiménez part; and if he could get someone to feed him the straight lines, he was in Seventh Heaven, Smilin’ Al version. Feed him the lines for his José Jiménez knock-off, and he’d treat you like the best beer-call good buddy you ever had. Of course, the Cowardly Astronaut routine was also a perfectly acceptable way for bringing up, on the oblique, as it were, the subject of the righteous stuff that the first flight into space would require. But that was probably unconscious on Al’s part. The main thing seemed to be the good fun, the camaraderie, the closeness and blustery affection of the squadron on the eve of battle. In these moments you saw Smilin’ Al supreme. And in the next moment— —some poor Air Force lieutenant, thinking this was the same Smilin’ Al he had been joking and carrying on with last night, would sing out, “Hey, Al! Somebody wants you on the phone!”—and all at once there would be Al, seething with an icy white fury, hissing out: “If you have something to tell me, Lieutenant … you will call me ‘Sir’!” And the poor devil wouldn’t know what hit him. Where the hell did that freaking arctic avalanche come from? And then he would realize that … all at once the Icy Commander was back in town.
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Tom Wolfe (The Right Stuff)
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Traditional training programmes can be a hit or a miss. A miss could arguably be attributed to their generic format of delivery or lack of consideration of the professional needs of an individual or an organisation. Line managers need to scrutinise business needs versus experience, knowledge or skill gaps to invest in relevant capacity enhancement for their human capital for concrete results.
Many excellent professionals work outside their fields of study because of :
- Learning on the job or through cross functional circuit stints
- Mentorship from seasoned professionals
- Relevant continuous professional development
- Participating in simulated learning environment
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Victor Manan Nyambala
“
She kissed him quick but deep with her tongue; bubbling over, she pulled away from his mouth, still in an arm-on-shoulders mutual embrace, said: 'Jack, Jack I watched you on television, I mean really watched you, really saw for the very first time what you were doing. You were magnificent, you were everything I always knew you would be the first day I met you in Berkeley, but better — better than anything I could've imagined—because then I was a girl, and you were a boy, and today you were a man, and I ... Well, maybe at the advanced age of thirty-five I'm leaving adolescence and I'm ready to try loving you the way a woman should love a man.'
'That's ... uh ... groovy,' he said, and now she thrilled even at the way he was preoccupied, the old Berkeley distant-focus preoccupation, thinking through her, above her, warm exciting man-thoughts enveloping her in him were the moments she had always loved him most.
'Groovy, and I dig what you're saying — I mean about us. But the show . . . look, Sara, there are things I've got to tell you. I mean, don't think I'm back in the silly old Baby Bolshevik bag. I suppose it looked that way to a lot of people, and there were moments when I ... but I don't do things without a reason, and there are things going on that—'
'I know, Jack,' she said. 'You don't even have to tell me. It stands out all over you. You're involved in something big, something important, the kind of thing you were always meant to do. Something real like you used to — '
'It's not what you think, not what anyone thinks,' he muttered, brows furrowed at some hidden contrapuntal train of thought. 'I don't even know the whole story myself. But I feel something, can smell it ... something so big, so ... I'm afraid to even think about it until I —
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Norman Spinrad (Bug Jack Barron)
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And the simulation made her incapable of reasoning with him, so when he threatened her life, she reacted as she had been trained by the Dauntless to react: Shoot to kill.
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Veronica Roth (The Divergent Library: Divergent; Insurgent; Allegiant; Four)
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Hard training was crucial. No matter how difficult training could be, combat was infinitely harder. Therefore training must be hard to simulate the immense challenges of real combat and apply pressure to decision-makers.
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Jocko Willink (The Dichotomy of Leadership)
“
positive impact on my recovery. (It also helps you sleep if used before bed.) Warning: Start slow. I tried to copy Amelia and did 20-plus minutes my first session. The next day, I felt like I’d been put in a sleeping bag and swung against a tree for a few hours. Rolling your foot on top of a golf ball on the floor to increase “hamstring” flexibility. This is infinitely more helpful than a lacrosse ball. Put a towel on the floor underneath the golf ball, lest you shoot your dog’s eye out. Concept2 SkiErg for training when your lower body is injured. After knee surgery, Amelia used this low-impact machine to maintain cardiovascular endurance and prepare for the 2014 World’s Toughest Mudder, which she won 8 weeks post-op. Kelly Starrett (page 122) is also a big fan of this device. Dry needling: I’d never heard of this before meeting Amelia. “[In acupuncture] the goal is not to feel the needle. In dry-needling, you are sticking the needle in the muscle belly and trying to get it to twitch, and the twitch is the release.” It’s used for super-tight, over-contracted muscles, and the needles are not left in. Unless you’re a masochist, don’t have this done on your calves. Sauna for endurance: Amelia has found using a sauna improves her endurance, a concept that has since been confirmed by several other athletes, including cyclist David Zabriskie, seven-time U.S. National Time Trial Championship winner. He considers sauna training a more practical replacement for high-altitude simulation tents. In the 2005 Tour de France, Dave won the Stage 1 time trial, making him the first American to win stages in all three Grand Tours. Zabriskie beat Lance Armstrong by seconds, clocking an average speed of 54.676 kilometers per hour (!). I now use a sauna at least four times per week. To figure out the best protocols, I asked another podcast guest, Rhonda Patrick. Her response is on page 7. * Who do you think of when you hear the word “successful”?
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Timothy Ferriss (Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers)
“
on a seagull poo–like texture when mixed into cold water. Amelia saved my palate and joints by introducing me to the Great Lakes hydrolyzed version (green label), which blends easily and smoothly. Add a tablespoon of beet root powder like BeetElite to stave off any cow-hoof flavor, and it’s a whole new game. Amelia uses BeetElite pre-race and pre-training for its endurance benefits, but I’m much harder-core: I use it to make tart, low-carb gummy bears when fat Tim has carb cravings. RumbleRoller: Think foam roller meets monster-truck tire. Foam rollers have historically done very little for me, but this torture device had an immediate positive impact on my recovery. (It also helps you sleep if used before bed.) Warning: Start slow. I tried to copy Amelia and did 20-plus minutes my first session. The next day, I felt like I’d been put in a sleeping bag and swung against a tree for a few hours. Rolling your foot on top of a golf ball on the floor to increase “hamstring” flexibility. This is infinitely more helpful than a lacrosse ball. Put a towel on the floor underneath the golf ball, lest you shoot your dog’s eye out. Concept2 SkiErg for training when your lower body is injured. After knee surgery, Amelia used this low-impact machine to maintain cardiovascular endurance and prepare for the 2014 World’s Toughest Mudder, which she won 8 weeks post-op. Kelly Starrett (page 122) is also a big fan of this device. Dry needling: I’d never heard of this before meeting Amelia. “[In acupuncture] the goal is not to feel the needle. In dry-needling, you are sticking the needle in the muscle belly and trying to get it to twitch, and the twitch is the release.” It’s used for super-tight, over-contracted muscles, and the needles are not left in. Unless you’re a masochist, don’t have this done on your calves. Sauna for endurance: Amelia has found using a sauna improves her endurance, a concept that has since been confirmed by several other athletes, including cyclist David Zabriskie, seven-time U.S. National Time Trial Championship winner. He considers sauna training a more practical replacement for high-altitude simulation tents. In the 2005 Tour de France, Dave won the Stage 1 time trial, making him the first American to win stages in all three Grand Tours. Zabriskie beat Lance Armstrong by seconds, clocking an average speed of 54.676 kilometers per hour (!). I now use a sauna at least four times per week. To figure out the best protocols, I asked
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Timothy Ferriss (Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers)
“
I later learn it’s called an altitude-simulation tent, and when the generator is hooked up it sucks the O2 out of the tent and helps the body produce more red blood cells. It makes your cardio system work like you’re sleeping on top of Mount Everest.
I’d have to bet I’m the only guy on the Upper West Side of NYC with an inflatable raft, an oxygen deprivation tank, a tent, and a SEAL in his apartment. I get into my bed and open the window in our room. I suck in the cold NY air coming into my apartment off Central Park. It feels great. As I fall asleep I think about the lack of oxygen in SEAL’s tent and again think to myself… I’m such a pussy.
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Jesse Itzler (Living with a SEAL: 31 Days Training with the Toughest Man on the Planet)
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While weather forecasters and handicappers get accurate and timely feedback, long-term investors don’t. Maybe one day we’ll create a simulator that provides investors the training they need to make better decisions. Of course, the result will be markets that are even harder to beat.
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Michael J. Mauboussin (More Than You Know: Finding Financial Wisdom in Unconventional Places)
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During the great trials in Moscow, the procurator Andrei Vyshinsky, who was an intellectual with a traditional classical training, threw himself into a veritable frenzy of animalization: “Shoot these rabid dogs! Death to this gang who hide their ferocious teeth, their eagle claws, from the people! Down with that vulture Trotsky, from whose mouth a bloody venom drips, putrefying the great ideals of Marxism! Let’s put these liars out of harm’s way, these miserable pygmies who dance around rotting carcasses! Down with these abject animals! Let’s put an end once and for all to these miserable hybrids of foxes and pigs, these stinking corpses! Let their horrible squeals finally come to an end! Let’s exterminate the mad dogs of capitalism, who want to tear to pieces the flower of our new Soviet nation! Let’s push the bestial hatred they bear our leaders back down their own throats!” (Qtd. In The Black Book of Communism, p. 750.)
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Michael Rectenwald (Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom)
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In the Israeli military, there is a tendency to treat all performance—both successful and unsuccessful—in training and simulations, and sometimes even in battle, as value-neutral. So long as the risk was taken intelligently, and not recklessly, there is something to be learned.
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Dan Senor (Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle)
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This remains a glaring police problem with a simple solution: Officers should train with their weapon at least every ninety days in stressful simulations. You can’t completely replicate the tension an officer feels as he or she approaches someone suspected of carrying a weapon, but enhanced firearm training under duress would go a long way to help reduce our national epidemic of officer-involved shootings.
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Michael Fanone (Hold the Line: The Insurrection and One Cop's Battle for America's Soul)
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This is not to say that you shouldn’t warm up at all. One of the most studied warm-up routines in the world is FIFA’s “11+” routine—which consists of isometric holds, agility drills, balance training, and game-play simulations. Studies of female soccer players have demonstrated that this type of warm-up reduces injury rates by around 30%.193 Passive stretching is conspicuously vacant from the 11+ warm-up.
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Scott H Hogan (Built from Broken: A Science-Based Guide to Healing Painful Joints, Preventing Injuries, and Rebuilding Your Body)
“
A somewhat provocative example of the interconnections between the gaming industry and finance. A technologist working for a large London hedge fund hinted this to me in interview. Trained in computer science and engineering, this interviewee first worked as a network programmer for large online multiplayer games. His greatest challenge was the fact that the Internet is not instantaneous: when a player sends a command to execute in action, it takes time for the signal to reach the computer server and interact with the commands of other players. For the game to be realistic, such delays have to be taken into account when rendering reality on the screen. The challenge for the network programmer is to make these asymmetries as invisible as possible so that the game seem 'equitable to everyone.' The problem is similar in finance, where the physical distance from the stock exchange's matching engines matters tremendously, requiring a similar solution to the problem of latency: simulating the most likely state of the order book on the firm's computers in order to estimate the most advantageous strategies or the firm's trading algorithms. Gaming and finance are linked not through an institutional imperative of culture or capital - or even a strategy, as such - but rather through the more mundane and lowly problems of how to fairly manage latency and connectivity.
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Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra (Automating Finance: Infrastructures, Engineers, and the Making of Electronic Markets)
“
This approach, called Simulated Annealing, seemed like an intriguing way to map physics onto problem solving. But would it work? The initial reaction among more traditional optimization researchers was that this whole approach just seemed a little too … metaphorical. “I couldn’t convince math people that this messy stuff with temperatures, all this analogy-based stuff, was real,” says Kirkpatrick, “because mathematicians are trained to really distrust intuition.
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Brian Christian (Algorithms To Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions)
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you can do to speed it up, you unfortunately cannot make it disappear. Trading in a simulator account is expediting your learning curve exponentially. One day of trading in a simulator can be worth weeks of training in real accounts or offline.
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AMS Publishing Group (Intelligent Stock Market Trading and Investment: Quick and Easy Guide to Stock Market Investment for Absolute Beginners)
“
You never get used to the feeling of hot metal, entering your skull and exiting through the back of your head. It’s simulated in glorious detail. A burning train through your forehead, a warm spray of blood and brain on your shoulders and back, the sudden chill – and finally, the black, when things stop. The Archons of the Dilemma Prison want you to feel it. It’s educational. The Prison is all about education. And game theory: the mathematics of rational decision-making. When you are an immortal mind like the Archons, you have time to be obsessed with such things. And it is just like the Sobornost – the upload collective that rules the Inner Solar System – to put them in charge of their prisons. We play the same game over and over again, in different forms. An archetypal game beloved by economists and mathematicians. Sometimes it’s chicken: we are racers on an endless highway, driving at each other at high speeds, deciding whether or not to turn away at the last minute. Sometimes we are soldiers trapped in trench warfare, facing each other across no-man’s-land. And sometimes they go back to basics and make us prisoners – old-fashioned prisoners, questioned by hard-eyed men – who have to choose between betrayal and the code of silence. Guns are the flavour of today. I’m not looking forward to tomorrow.
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Hannu Rajaniemi (The Quantum Thief (Jean le Flambeur #1))
“
While some commanders took full responsibility for blue-on-blue, others blamed their subordinates for simulated fratricide incidents in training. These weaker commanders would get a solid explanation about the burden of command and the deep meaning of responsibility: the leader is truly and ultimately responsible for everything.
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Jocko Willink (Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win)
“
Therefore we currently have an incentive system in place to generate fake creativity: an incentive system in which there are un-creative people who dishonestly strive to be regarded as original because they want to appropriate the label of creative and usurp the title of ‘genius’. In sum, under modernity creativity has been reduced to novelty – and novelty can be simulated. It is trivially easy for clever and well-trained people to generate mere novelty, so there is an excess of it (we call it ‘fashion’). Therefore the discriminative test applied to novelties is whether they are approved by the social systems that allocate high status. When novelty is socially approved, then the person who generated it gets to be called creative – maybe even a creative genius. Thus: Novelty of outcome + Social Approval of that outcome = Fake creativity And fake creativity is an attribute bestowed upon an outcome or person; bestowed by the social systems for generating status – in other words the mass media (primarily), politics, civil administration, the legal system, education... in a nutshell the Leftist Establishment.
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Edward Dutton (The Genius Famine: Why We Need Geniuses, Why They're Dying Out, Why We Must Rescue Them)
“
Training focuses on simulations. Coaching lives in the real world with real situations.
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David Brock (Sales Manager Survival Guide: Lessons from Sales' Front Lines)
“
Taking a superior variation always makes sense, but we would only take inferior ones when the die shows, say, a 2 or more. After a while, we’d cool it further by only taking a higher-price change if the die shows a 3 or greater—then 4, then 5. Eventually we’d be mostly hill climbing, making the inferior move just occasionally when the die shows a 6. Finally we’d start going only uphill, and stop when we reached the next local max. This approach, called Simulated Annealing, seemed like an intriguing way to map physics onto problem solving. But would it work? The initial reaction among more traditional optimization researchers was that this whole approach just seemed a little too … metaphorical. “I couldn’t convince math people that this messy stuff with temperatures, all this analogy-based stuff, was real,” says Kirkpatrick, “because mathematicians are trained to really distrust intuition.
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Brian Christian (Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions)
“
The skills it learns in the dream world are transferrable to the real computer game as well, so it gets better at the real thing by training in its internal model. Not all the AI’s dream-tested strategies worked in the real world, however. One of the things it learned was how to hack its own dream—just like all those AIs in chapter 6 that hacked their simulations. By moving in a certain way, the AI discovered that it could exploit a glitch in its internal model that would prevent the monsters from firing any fireballs at all. This strategy, of course, failed in the real world. Human dreamers can sometimes be similarly disappointed when they wake and discover they can no longer fly.
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Janelle Shane (You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: How Artificial Intelligence Works and Why It's Making the World a Weirder Place)
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Companies should utilize the CSIPP™ framework whenever they face crises. The 12 elements of CSIPP™, or Crisis Solution Internal Philosophy and Practice, include:
1. Immunity (Immune Systems): Organizations, akin to living organisms, possess inherent vulnerabilities. The CSIPP™ framework advocates for the establishment of proactive and self-regulating systems within an organization which autonomously identify, respond to, and mitigate threats, thereby enhancing the organization's resilience and adaptability.
2. Surveillance: Organizations need to cultivate a culture of informed awareness. This entails the implementation of judicious surveillance mechanisms to gather both internal and external intelligence. Such insights empower organizations to preemptively identify potential risks and opportunities, enabling more agile and effective decision-making. Data serves as the lifeblood of CSIPP™. It is imperative that organizations prioritize the collection, analysis, and interpretation of relevant data. This data-driven approach facilitates evidence-based decision-making, informed risk assessments, and the optimization of crisis response strategies.
3. Decisiveness: Decisiveness is particularly important during times of crisis. Leaders must be able to gather and synthesize the data, and make quick and definite decisions to move the organization forward.
4. Capital Reserves/Liquidity: Financial preparedness is a cornerstone of crisis management. Organizations must maintain adequate reserves of liquid capital to navigate unforeseen challenges. Moreover, they should proactively identify internal assets, both tangible and intangible, that can be readily redeployed in times of crisis.
5. Communication: Effective communication is pivotal during a crisis. Organizations should establish a comprehensive communication plan encompassing all stakeholders - employees, customers, investors, and the community at large. This plan should ensure timely, transparent, and accurate information dissemination, fostering trust and mitigating the spread of misinformation.
6. Response: The ability to respond swiftly and decisively is critical in crisis situations. Organizations must develop well-defined response protocols that outline roles, responsibilities, and escalation procedures. Regular drills and simulations can enhance preparedness and ensure a coordinated response.
7. Risk Evaluation: A continuous process of risk evaluation and assessment is essential. Organizations need to proactively identify, analyze, and prioritize potential risks based on their likelihood and potential impact. This enables the development of targeted mitigation strategies and contingency plans.
8. Leadership: Strong and decisive leadership is indispensable during a crisis. Leaders must be able to make difficult decisions under pressure, communicate effectively, and inspire confidence in their teams. A clear chain of command and delegation of authority are vital for effective crisis management.
9. Readiness (Drills/Training): All individuals likely to be involved in crisis response should receive comprehensive training and participate in regular drills. This ensures that they are familiar with their roles, responsibilities, and the organization's crisis management protocols.
10. Post-Crisis Analysis: Following a crisis, it is crucial to conduct a thorough post-mortem analysis. This involves evaluating the organization's response, identifying lessons learned, and implementing corrective actions to improve future crisis management efforts.
11. Nuanced Adjustment: Crisis management is not a one-size-fits-all endeavor. Organizations need to be adaptable and flexible, adjusting their strategies and tactics as the situation evolves.
12. Protocol: Clear and well-defined protocols are the backbone of effective crisis management. Organizations should establish a set of standard operating procedures (SOPs) that outline the steps to be taken in various crisis scenarios.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
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Before making the transcontinental move, however, Malachowsky decided to apply for jobs at other companies, solely for the purpose of getting some practice interviewing. His first invitation came from the nascent supercomputer division at Evans and Sutherland, a graphics company otherwise known for making high-end flight simulators for military training. He was rejected right away; his interviewers thought he questioned the status quo too much and felt that he would be a poor fit at the company. (Malachowsky believed their feedback didn’t bode well for the company’s future. He was right. Evans and Sutherland’s first supercomputer later failed to sell, and the looming end of the Cold War meant that simulator demand from the military was already drying up.)
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Tae Kim (The Nvidia Way: Jensen Huang and the Making of a Tech Giant)