Kenneth Cukier > Quotes

“The mental models that we choose and apply are frames: they determine how we understand and act in the world. Frames enable us to generalize and make abstractions that apply to other situations.”
― Kenneth Cukier, Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil

“If we focus on the wrong constraints, we don’t capture what’s needed. But focusing on all of them doesn’t help either. Select too few constraints and we lose focus on what matters; choose too many and we may miss something important.”
― Kenneth Cukier, Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil

“stability wasn’t critical, control was. They were bicycle experts, after all. Just as a cycle is inherently unstable but can be balanced and controlled by the rider when in motion, so too it was crucial that a plane could be controlled and balanced by a flier in the air.”
― Kenneth Cukier, Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil

“The minimal-change principle pushes us in a particular direction when picking counterfactuals: we tend to omit rather than add. It is easier for us to imagine a world without some features of reality than to introduce ones that do not yet exist.”
― Kenneth Cukier, Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil

“By imagining alternative ways in which a situation might play out, we activate a lot of our knowledge about how the world works, including causal insights that we would otherwise find difficult to articulate.”
― Kenneth Cukier, Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil

“Frames also help us to learn from single experiences and come up with general rules that we can apply to other situations—including ones that have not yet happened. They enable us to know something about the unobserved and even the unobservable; to imagine things for which no data exists. Frames let us see what isn’t there. We can ask “What if?” and foresee how different decisions might play out. It is this ability to envision other realities that makes possible individual achievement and societal progress.”
― Kenneth Cukier, Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil

“When we are choosing which constraints to modify, the principle of mutability suggests that we should single out elements that we can influence.”
― Kenneth Cukier, Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil

“By dreaming with constraints, we make sure that we have a bias toward impact, a bias toward effectiveness. What we achieve in our lives leaves footprints that others can follow—frames that others can adopt, adapt, and apply.”
― Kenneth Cukier, Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil

“Normally species go extinct because they cannot adapt to their circumstances. Human beings could be the first species that has everything we need to adapt but perishes because we did not use it—not because we have no other choice but because we failed to make the right choices.”
― Kenneth Cukier, Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil

“consistency. Constraints should not be placed in direct contradiction to one another. As we envisage alternative realities, one constraint cannot go against another one; otherwise our counterfactuals would keep running into contradictions.”
― Kenneth Cukier, Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil

“In this very sense, constraints—by providing curbs on the open canvas of our dreams—can actually be more liberating than limiting. But the constraints themselves are not what is most important; it is what we do with them. By changing constraints, we are shaping the alternative realities we come up with. What matters is the act of constraining our imagination. Loosening or tightening constraints is like operating valves in complex machinery: one needs to adjust the right combination to produce valuable results.”
― Kenneth Cukier, Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil

“Experiments have shown that omitting a mutable human action from a counterfactual requires less mental work than adding an action from the countless possibilities.”
― Kenneth Cukier, Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil

“In 2008 Nokia led the world in mobile phone sales. When Apple introduced the iPhone, few thought it would take off. The trend was to make handsets smaller and cheaper, but Apple’s was bulkier, pricier, and buggier. Nokia’s frame came from the conservative telecom industry, valuing practicality and reliability. Apple’s frame came from the breathlessly innovative computing industry, valuing ease of use and the extensibility of new features via software. That frame turned out to be a better fit for the needs and wants of consumers—and Apple dominated the market.”
― Kenneth Cukier, Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil

“Human brains are good at recognizing patterns, especially visual ones. At its core, pattern recognition is about generalizing from the specific.”
― Kenneth Cukier, Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil

“Our frames are always operating in the background. But we can stop and deliberately ask ourselves which frame we are applying, and whether it is the best fit for the circumstances. And if it’s not, we can choose another frame that is better. Or, we can invent a new frame altogether.”
― Kenneth Cukier, Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil

“Especially when compared with reasoning within a frame, switching frames is more about a stroke of insight than a methodical process.”
― Kenneth Cukier, Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil

“using mutability has a big advantage: it focuses our reasoning on things that we can influence, change, or shape. It helps us see choices and act on them.”
― Kenneth Cukier, Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil

“The crucial insight is that our choice isn’t limited to these two options. We do not have to decide between a dehumanizing singularity or a tsunami of populist terror—nor try to meld them into a suboptimal mix. We have at our disposal another strategy, a different human capacity that until now has been overlooked: framing. Our ability to apply, hone, and reinvent mental models provides us with the means to solve our problems without deferring to the machine or accepting the mob.”
― Kenneth Cukier, Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil

“reframing an issue allows us to see it from a new perspective, which reveals alternatives that we might not otherwise have imagined.”
― Kenneth Cukier, Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil

“The magic lies in understanding which constraints are mutable. SpaceX accepted that a rocket falling back to Earth needed to be slowed down, but it chose to use the built-in rocket engine instead of a wing to do it. Precisely because the SpaceX engineers were able to relax one set of now mutable constraints, they were able to see new possibilities and to develop the Falcon’s reusable rockets.”
― Kenneth Cukier, Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil

“The key to IKEA’s initial success was its use of an alternative mental frame of what furniture represents and is used for: not timeless but timely. Yet that frame wasn’t entirely new. It had been in the air. Other sectors were undergoing a transition from the durable to the disposable. Luckily for IKEA’s founder, the furniture sector had not yet, so his repurposed frame gave IKEA an edge.”
― Kenneth Cukier, Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil

“As we explain the world through causal frames, we accept that there is a force larger than ourselves that governs all that is under the sun—if not a divine entity, then at least something that obeys the laws of physics.”
― Kenneth Cukier, Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil

“Framers see the world not as it is, but as it can be. They do this by understanding, considering, rejecting, or accepting frames and communicating them to others. The principle of agility of mind asks us to never stop honing our skills of framing: seeing causation, generating a variety of counterfactuals and altering their features—in short, dreaming with constraints. Just as the free flow of information is the basis of interpersonal coordination, agility of mind is the foundation of human framing.”
― Kenneth Cukier, Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil

“The economist Andrew Lo at MIT believes it is time to transform economics from its frame of physics and its emphasis on equilibrium to the frame of biology with a focus on evolution and growth.”
― Kenneth Cukier, Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil

“counterfactuals make us better causal thinkers. In experiments, people improve their causal reasoning after engaging in counterfactual thinking than the other way around. Cognitive scientists, notably Ruth Byrne at Trinity College Dublin, suggest that counterfactuals are so helpful because they remind us of options, broadening rather than deepening our focus. As we think about options, we also ponder cause and effect; in contrast, when we just focus on a single cause, we are not stimulating our imagination. That’s why imagining alternative realities is such a central element for successful framing.”
― Kenneth Cukier, Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil

“But as our framing improved our decision-making, this success created its own weakness: a belief in a single frame of truth. In countless cases, humanity has created and enforced such frames, from the Spanish Inquisition to Soviet collectivism. And we have learned surprisingly little from their failures. We are still susceptible to monolithic thinking, convincing ourselves that past failures of single frames were due to the frame, not because it was singular.”
― Kenneth Cukier, Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil

“Frames are not “imagination” or “creativity” but they enable it.”
― Kenneth Cukier, Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil

“Nobody knew how to navigate through more than 200,000 miles of empty space between Earth and the moon. Experts at NASA had to imagine it, creating a mental model of space navigation and the tools that would enable it to happen. It wasn’t simply that a compass would not work—the whole idea of north and south makes no sense in space. Similarly, engineers had little experience with building motors that would work in the cold, airless vacuum of space—and could be started and restarted at the press of a button. So they constructed the rocket based on mental models of how engines work, not just in our planet’s atmosphere but also in space. Testing helped, of course, but mainly to validate what scientists had already conjured up in their minds.”
― Kenneth Cukier, Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil

“The frame was causal on a number of levels. First, Semmelweis understood that the disease caused the deaths; that it was contagious. Second, he understood that handwashing caused the incidence of puerperal fever to drop. But his reasoning for what caused puerperal fever in the first place—“cadaverous particles”—was not only vague but flawed. It wasn’t a death particle that caused women to become sick. It was that the bacteria that caused puerperal fever and remained on doctors’ hands were passed on to healthy women. Semmelweis’s causal frame was faulty, even though his proposed solution, to wash hands, was correct.”
― Kenneth Cukier, Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil

“Around the 1970s, the idea of “mental models” gained traction—along with the concept that human reasoning isn’t an operation of formal logic but works more like a simulation of reality: we assess options for action by imagining what might happen.”
― Kenneth Cukier, Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil