- Be disciplined, but stay creative.
- Ask questions, find answers.
- Be helpful, but don’t do others’ work.
- Point out mistakes, don’t blame though.
- Find bugs, help get them fixed too.
- Communicate clearly, communicate crisply.
- Do good work, showcase value.
- Do the mundane things, innovate constantly.
- Stay doggedly steadfast, but be flexible.
- Observe well, see things that are hidden.
- Stay focussed, but have a 360 degree vision.
- Have a system’s view, but know the internals.
- Think like end user, while engineering solution.
- Analyse like an engineer when working with end users.
- Do what you must, automate everything else.
- Document tersely, do voraciously.
- Find what you must, prevent what you can.
- Do less, accomplish more.
- Engineer in code, to enable finding issues.
- Have an user’s mind, engineer’s brain, eagle’s eyes and a businessman’s head.
- Read, observe, analyse, explore, experiment, prove, disprove- Actively seek out.
- Analyse quantitatively the engineering data, present qualitatively the business impact.
- Strive for clarity, visualise the flow, spot anomalies in mind’s eye
- Don’t settle, constantly churn and evolve, unsettle
- Learn constantly, unlearn continually
Day: 24 October 2019
The Laws of Medicine: Field Notes from an Uncertain Science
T Ashok @ash_thiru
“It is easy to make perfect decisions with perfect information. Medicine asks you make perfect decisions with imperfect information”.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
In this wonderfully thin book “The Laws of Medicine: Field Notes from an Uncertain Science”, Siddhartha Mukherjee investigates the most perplexing cases of his career ultimately identifying three principles that govern modern medicine.
Law One: A strong intuition is much more powerful than a weak test.
“A test can only be interpreted sanely in the context of prior probabilities”
The answer to why a dignified fifty-six-year-old man, from a tiny Boston neighbourhood, who was suffering from weight loss and fatigue was solved by simply getting to know the patient better!
Law Two: “Normals” teach us rules; “outliers” teach us laws.
“Rather than figure out why a drug failed, he would try to understand why it occasionally succeeded “
The strange case of “patient 45,” who miraculously responded to an experimental drug for bladder cancer (patients 1 through 44 weren’t as lucky) was studied deeply by Solit resulting in a discovery of an unusual genetic marker that could identify which future patients could also be helped.
Law Three: For every perfect medical experiment, there is a perfect human bias.
“The greatest clinicians have a sixth sense for bias. What doctors really hunt is bias”
Countless biases pervade the medical literature, even when studies have been randomized and controlled to eliminate prejudices.
Read this brilliant book to understand counterintuitive thinking!