We all admire great accomplishments in the sciences, arts, and humanities - but we rarely acknowledge how much we achieve in the course of our everyday lives.
Interpretation
Greatness in life is often found in everyday achievements, not just in grand accomplishments.
Marvin Minsky highlights the importance of recognizing the significance of everyday accomplishments rather than exclusively celebrating monumental achievements in various fields. He suggests that many small, everyday successes contribute to the fabric of our lives and deserve acknowledgment and appreciation.
In practice
During a motivational speech to encourage employees to appreciate their daily efforts.
If you understand something in only one way, then you don't really understand it at all. The secret of what anything means to us depends on how we've connected it to all other things we know. Well-connected representations let you turn ideas around in your mind, to envision things from many perspectives until you find one that works for you. And that's what we mean by thinking!
There was a failure to recognize the deep problems in AI; for instance, those captured in Blocks World. The people building physical robots learned nothing.
You don't understand anything unless you understand there are at least 3 ways.
I think every person either inherits or eventually makes up their own idea of what they are and who they are and what caused the world to be, and it seems to me that these stories of creation myth, adopted by different cultures - most of them are less insightful than the stories made up by individual poets and writers.
I believe that everyone has to construct a mental model of what they are and where they came from and why they are as they are, and the word soul in each person is the name for that particular mish-mash of those fully formed ideas of one's nature.
If you just have a single problem to solve, then fine, go ahead and use a neural network. But if you want to do science and understand how to choose architectures, or how to go to a new problem, you have to understand what different architectures can and cannot do.
Tenderness and kindness are not signs of weakness and despair, but manifestations of strength and resolution.
Don't get bitter and twisted and nasty by life. You may have been wronged or cheated on; two wrongs never make a right. Instead learn your mistakes and learn your lessons. Remain strong with your head held high.
Integrity is the factor that determines which one will prevail. We struggle daily with situations that demand decisions between what we want to do and what we ought to do. Integrity establishes the ground rules for resolving these tensions. it determines who we are and how we will respond before the conflict even appears. Integrity welds what we say, think, and do, into a whole person so that permission is never granted for one of these to be out of sync.
Do not say things. What you are stands over you the while, and thunders, so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary.
If you donβt learn constantly, you donβt grow and you will wither. Too many people wither on the vine. Sure, it gets a little harder as you get older, but new experiences and new challenges keep it fresh.
Everyone can recognize history when it happens. Everyone can recognize history after is has happened; but only the wise man knows at the moment what is vital and permanent, what is lasting and memorable.
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