Two Things

1) I am about fifty pages into Jonah Lehrer's book How We Decide, and I came across a line in his chapter on the importance of dopamine that I just had to share:

"Unless you experience the unpleasant symptoms of being wrong, your brain will never revise its models. Before your neurons can succeed, they must repeatedly fail. There are not shortcuts for this painstaking process."

I am going to post this quote on my wall at work and stare at it for thirty seconds every morning before I start my day. It is so cliched, but the only way we can ever become an expert in something is, to paraphrase the great physicist Niels Bohr, "...make all the mistakes that can be made in a narrow field."

Lehrer's quote also reminds me of some advice Charlie Munger often gives folks. He recommends that everyone keep a "Wall of Shame" as a constant reminder of the mistakes they have made.

When you combine Munger's advice with Bohr's quote, it's easy to see that making mistakes and focusing on the when, where, why, and how of those mistakes is the only real way to ever "revise our models."

2) I am about 100 pages into Ian Plimer's book Heave and Earth: Global Warming the Missing Science. I wanted to share a passage I read late last night:

"Those who claim the Earth is suffering human-induced global warming cite NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS) as an authority to support their beliefs. The GISS director claimed that nine of the ten warmest years in history have occurred since 1995, with the warmest being 1998. This was accompanied by a huge media fanfare. When NASA had to reverse its position on the basis of the work undertaken by Toronto-based statistician Steve McIntyre, there was no fanfare. NASA now states that the four years of high temperatures are from the 1930s (1934, 1931, 1938, and 1939). The warmest ever year was 1934. The years 1998, 1921, 2006, 1999, and 1953 were also warm. Several previously alleged warm years (2000, 2002, 2003, and 2004) are now cool years. Similarily, the UK's Meteorological Office has now confirmed a fall in average global temperatures since 1998, despite a 25% increase in the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas, which produced voluminous CO2 additions to the atmosphere.