Quotes About Problem-solving

Thinking about design is hard, but not thinking about it can be disastrous.

If you took one-tenth the energy you put into complaining and applied it to solving the problem, you'd be surprised by how well things can work out... Complaining does not work as a strategy. We all have finite time and energy. Any time we spend whining is unlikely to help us achieve our goals. And it won't make us happier.

Engineering isn't about perfect solutions; it's about doing the best you can with limited resources.

T OO MANY people go through life complaining about their problems. I've always believed that if you took one-tenth the energy you put into complaining and applied it to solving the problem, you'd be surprised by how well things can work out. I

Instead of "I think we should do A, not B," try "What if we did A, instead of B?" That allows people to offer comments rather than defend one choice.

It's so easy to fall into ruts and niches in our real lives, and I want online worlds to offer us exotic experiences and interaction with people we wouldn't interact with otherwise, and a chance to try out lifestyles and worldviews we otherwise wouldn't have, a chance to try to solve problems that we find difficult to tackle in the real world. Otherwise, why bother making them?

One of the things I did differently was to make my milkshakes with a soft product drawn from a tank, instead of hand-dipping ice cream. This changed the layout and gave us more space. One major problem in adapting the California-style building to the Midwestern climate was ventilation. I brought in architectual consultants one after the other in an attempt to solve the problem of exhausting the stale air and replacing it with fresh cool or heated air.

Fredkin believes that the universe is very literally a computer and that it is being used by someone, or something, to solve a problem. It sounds like a good-news/bad-news joke: the good news is that our lives have purpose; the bad news is that their purpose is to help some remote hacker estimate pi to nine jillion decimal places.

once an AI goal is achieved, it is no longer considered as falling within the realm of AI and becomes instead just a useful general technique. AI is thus often regarded as the set of problems that have not yet been solved.

as long as there is an AI shortcoming in any such area of endeavor, skeptics will point to that area as an inherent bastion of permanent human superiority over the capabilities of our own creations. This book will argue, however, that within several decades information-based technologies will encompass all human knowledge and proficiency, ultimately including the pattern-recognition powers, problem-solving skills, and emotional and moral intelligence of the human brain itself.

But the big feature of human-level intelligence is not what it does when it works but what it does when it's stuck. —MARVIN MINSKY

Our sole responsibility is to produce something smarter than we are; any problems beyond that are not ours to solve …

If you have difficulty reaching your goal, keep the goal, but change your strategy.

You want to have a good cake? Get two engineers to build it.

It's always nice to have more than just two hands if you're making cakes.

I know every actor says this, but the people behind the camera are great. They always have answers.

If it's hemorrhaging cash, you've got to do something about it. You can't live with your head in the sand.

The value of catastrophic events is that they can help people face up to problems that are otherwise impossible to address.

My dad was an engineer, and he became the CEO of Chevron. His was an engineer's mind-set: Everything's kind of a problem; how do you approach the problem?

Genius not only diagnoses the situation but supplies the answers.

Mostly I sat down and said, 'I'm not going to write a boring story.' And that actually, surprisingly, solves most of your problems.

You see, there are few objective limits. What they teach you is useful, but never accept the proposition that just because a solution satisfies a problem, that it must be the only solution.

It is the nature of things that many people are more interested in affixing blame than fixing the problem.

Vidiš, veoma je malo stvarnih ogreni?enja. Sve ?emu te u?e je korisno, ali nikad ne prihvataj tvrdnju da je neko rešenje *jedino* rešenje samo ako uspe da reši problem.