Skip to main content

Crowded 'Facts'

Crowded 'Facts':
"I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it.
Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent.
Depend upon it - there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones."
-- Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes)
Quite interesting it is that the same context, when applied to the premise (mind attic) of Business Analysis, holds equally true. It is the weeding out of 'useless' facts from the assortment of information is what makes of an effective analysis.

The cryptic puzzle of 'The Adventure of the Dancing Men'
Learning to Observe:
"Like all other arts, the science of deduction and analysis is one which can only be acquired by long and patient study, not is life long enough to allow any mortal to attain the highest possible perfecting in it.
Before turning to those mortal and mental aspects of the matter which present the greatest difficulties, let the inquirer begin by mastering more elementary problems. Let him, on meeting a fellow-mortal, learn at a glance to distinguish the history of man, and the trade of profession on which he belongs.
Puerile as such an exercise may seem, it sharpens the faculties of observation, and teaches one where to look and what to look for."
-- Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes)

It is much telling that the century-old master analyst has termed 'science of analysis' as an art.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

OpenAI and the Network Effect (ft. Md Rafi and Ola Krutrim)

"Who is the greatest Bollywood singer of all times?" I typed into chat.krutrim.com It listed seven, but missed Mohammad Rafi.  Horrified, I followed up, "Why is Mohammad Rafi not in this list?"  And it missed the context, replying, "Mohammad Rafi is not in the list because the list you are referring to is not provided." With a deep sigh, it reminded me of Altman's India visit June last year. Someone asked him if India should invest in building a Foundational model (assuming funding and talent is not as issue). And he replied , "it would be hopeless to compete with us on training foundation models.. you shouldn’t try”. Try they will, and they should. The world's fourth(?) largest economy has pockets of deep pockets that can sustain the demands of developing a resource hungry technology such at Foundational LLMs. But distribution, diffusion and monetisation remains challenging, when chatGPT, Copilot and Gemini in Indic languages are just an App ...
Post a Comment
Read more

$NVDA: When You are The Moat

NVIDIA had their earnings call yesterday for the quarter ending Dec'23. Markets were muted in anticipation. As expected, the S&P 500 rose by 2.5% on the back of a strong performance and pipeline. The day after, NVIDIA stock rallied to all time high of $800. This gave the company a market cap of USD 2 Tn, surpassing Alphabet, Inc., and becoming the fourth largest listed company in the world by market value.  For perspective consider this - the single day gain of USD 277Bn was bigger than the largest listed company in India - the world's 4th biggest equity market, and by an estimate its market cap was now larger than the entire SENSEX of India. Who knew? Perhaps not even Berkshire Hathaway. (See share holding pattern in the links below). One of the simplest reasons for the meteoric rise of NVIDIA is, as Warren Buffet once famously said about resilient businesses, that NVIDIA provides a moat to the the software firms for their business of developing and productising AI and, sp...
Post a Comment
Read more

Digitally.me (or, your next unicorn startup idea!)

Clone thyself as the next unicorn startup idea. Imagine you have the superpower to clone yourself. You can send this clone to as many places as you like. These clone presense will be present 24x7 for you. Serving you. As you. Like the various hats that you like to adorn, so do the clones. A clone for every Avatar of you that you’d like to personify. A clone for a situation, a clone for every need. Yes, imagine Agent Smith of the last act in The Matrix. Hundreds of “him”, doing work for him. Only, yours will be benign and avoid evil. Because you are not evil, and your clone is but what you are. My son was playing with a phone while I was on a separate WhatsApp call. He was making videos of himself, and he ended up capturing my voice from the call in the background. When I heard myself there, it gave me a start. Have you listened to yourself on a zoom call, video off, just a name displayed on the screen? Sarcasm aside, is that real you? Or is it an audio representation of you for tha...
Post a Comment
Read more