The value of being a practitioner

The Black Swan

People in the classroom, not having faced many true situations of decision making under uncertainty, do not realize what is important and what is not—even those who are scholars of uncertainty (or particularly those who are scholars of uncertainty). What I call the practice of uncertainty can be piracy, commodity speculation, professional gambling, working in some branches of the Mafia, or just plain serial entrepreneurship

Interview with Leslie Lamport - The Man Who Revolutionized Computer Science With Math

I came to appreciate the idea of working in industry. That’s where most of the interesting problems that I found came from — from engineers having a problem to solve. It reminds me actually of something that Auguste Renoir once said. Someone asked him why he painted outside rather than in his studio, and what he said is, ‘If I were painting in the studio and I wanted to paint a leaf, I would be able to think of only a half dozen or so different kinds of leaves that I could paint. But when I was painting outdoors, there were just these millions of different kinds of leaves that were there that I could paint from.’ I found my research the same way — if I sat down and just contemplated my navel and thought about problems, there was this small number of problems that I could think of. But there were just scores of them sitting out in industry, waiting to be solved