Venkatesh Narayanamurti Quotes That Will Inspire You to Live Your Best Life

1. Engineering research is both extremely powerful and often underappreciated. Existing science can be a conservative force that denies the possibility of new technologies if they are inconsistent with current scientific understanding. But counter-to-current-science new technologies thrive and serve notice that nature, richer than we can imagine, is a fertile source of both new technology and new science. We must go beyond Bush and realize that engineering research grounds scientific research in the real world and in real problems; it is a key conduit through which nature surprises us and forces us to be creative; and it is a key cross-check on science. The Genesis of Technoscientific Revolutions: Rethinking the Nature and Nurture of Research

2. Researchers and research organizations who aim to 'change the way people think or do' must have the freedom, not only to be contrarian, bot also the be wrong. Contrariness sometimes leads to failure, but from failure comes learning, and from learning very often comes implausible utility, the useful and surprising.Contrariness is not the only thing required of researchers to achieve implausible utility, however. The second thing that is required is informedness. Conventional wisdom and existing paradigms 'work' - that is why we adopt them in the first place and that is why we resist so strongly their overthrow. If a researcher is going to take seriously observations and ideas that go against conventional wisdom, the researcher had better have good reasons for doing so - and the discipline to develop those good reasons. These reasons we call informedness - 'inside' knowledge or capabilities the researcher possess that the researcher's peers don't yet have. This inside knowledge makes the researcher think the researcher is right and conventional wisdom is wrong. The researcher is an 'informed contrarian,' going against conventional wisdom but in an informed way to reduce the tremendous risk associated with going against that very wisdom.Like a financial arbitrageur who uses greater informedness about the true value of an asset to buy those assets currently undervalued by conventional wisdom, informed contrarian researchers are research arbitrageurs who use their greater informedness about the value of a research observation or idea to take seriously those ideas currently undervalued by conventional wisdom. The Genesis of Technoscientific Revolutions: Rethinking the Nature and Nurture of Research

3. So long as module improvement respects the protocols by which the module connects to other modules, module improvement can proceed independently of those other modules.An extreme case of this is when the protocols are between different levels of the modular hierarchy and when there is richness on both sides of the protocol. When the upper side of the protocol is rich, the knowledge base on the lower side of the protocol is often referred to as a 'platform' on which knowledge modules above it can be based. In science, Newton's laws were a platform on which both celestial and terrestrial mechanics could be based. In technology, the personal computer software operating system is a platform on which a rich set of software application can be based. Moreover, when the lower side of the protocol is also rich, the shape of the knowledge network becomes hourglass-like. In the case of technological knowledge, the waist of the hourglass is a distinguished layer or protocol, with technologies underneath implementing the protocol and technologies above building on the protocol - with both sides 'screened' from each other by the protocol itself. As a result, the number of applications explodes independent of implementation details; similarly, the number of implementations explodes independent of application details. The number of software applications built on the Windows operating system is enormous; the number of hardware and software implementations of the Windows operating system is also enormous. In other words, imagine two complex adaptive systems, one organized modularly and one not. At one moment, both might be able to exploit their environments equally and thus be equally 'adapted' to their environment. But they will evolve at vastly different rates, with the one organized modularly quickly outstripping the one not so organized. Modularity appears to be an evolved property in biology, one that is mimicked in the organization of human knowledge. The Genesis of Technoscientific Revolutions: Rethinking the Nature and Nurture of Research