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That whole book by Mark Manson: https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/48297245-the-subtle-ar...
This was at the early stages of a lot of agent based modeling, genetic algorithms, etc., etc. And John Holland wrote a book called Adaptation in Natural and Artificial Systems[1]. The universality of the idea that "simple" adaptation is learning applied to a lot of different domains was crisp and very powerful.
1. (https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/adaptation-natural-and-artifi...)
Everything is a metaphor. Literally everything.
The Central Limit Theorem. It's hard to explain the precise way in which an understanding of the central limit theorem has changed my life. However, knowing how any random distribution sums up to a Gaussian has subtly changed how I perceive and comprehend the world around me. Over time, this has added to a significant number of choices and decisions that I've subconsciously made, informed only by rough estimates of a…
Assuming the sum independent and identically distributed random variables converges to a distribution, that distribution is not necessarily the Gaussian, but a larger family called the Levy-Stable distributions [1].
Levy-Stable distributions are "heavy-tailed" in that far away from zero they behave like (inverse) power laws. This is probably why you see so many power laws in nature (gravity, "small-world" networks, income distribution, galaxy distribution density, etc.). This was one of the central themes of Mandelbrot's soapbox, that power laws were more fundamental than normal distributions. Mandelbrot gets remembered for the highly symmetric and pretty fractal pictures but those images (Koch curve, Dragon Curve, Sierpinski gasket, etc.) are like a focusing on a sine wave when talking about Fourier analysis.
The central limit theorem applies to sums of random variables with finite variance [2]. Once you relax the condition of finite variance, or finite mean for that matter, Levy-Stable distributions are the more likely result.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_distribution
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_limit_theorem " ... Mathematically, if X ... is a random sample ... taken from a population with mean ... and finite variance ... the limiting form of the distribution ... is the standard normal distribution." (emphasis mine)
Not quite so grand as some ideas here, but still... my feet are warm.
From Hamming
My personal realization that Evolution is the other “theory of everything”, with the exception of the laws of physics, evolutionary processes are shaping everything, including progress in science, economy, history, politics, ideas, social, emotions, religion, etc.
I've gotten a lot of shit for this in the past from people saying "you just don't stay informed?" or "it's your civic duty to know what's happening in the world!". If information is really important for me to know, I'll see it. If it doesn't end up on one of the few media sources I consume, it probably won't affect me. I got this idea from MMM [1], which was inspired by The Four Hour Work Week.
[1] https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2013/10/01/the-low-informati...