Billy Foster, PhD

Billy Foster

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Quotations

As a skeptic, I reject a sole time series of the past as an indication of future performance; I need a lot more than data. My major reason for this is the rare event, but I have others. On the surface, my statement here may seem to contradict earlier discussions, where I blame people from not learning enough from history. The problem is that we read too much into shallow recent history, with statements like ‘this has never happened before,’ but not from history in general… [H]istory teaches us that things that never happened before do happen. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Posts Tagged ‘division of labor’

It takes an entire civilization to build a toaster. Designer Thomas Thwaites found out the hard way, by attempting to build one from scratch: mining ore for steel, deriving plastic from oil … it’s frankly amazing he got as far as he got. A parable of our interconnected society, for designers and consumers alike.