The philosopher Carl G. Hempel, in his 1965 essay “Studies in the Logic of Confirmation,” brought to light a central paradox in the scientific method as it is commonly understood. This is called Hempel’s Ravens Paradox, and it deals with inductive reasoning, which is the first step in any scientific method: Observing and forming a hypothesis.

Hempel’s Ravens Paradox

Suppose you see a raven, and you note that it is black. “Hmm,” you say, “that raven was black.” Sometime later you notice a couple more ravens, and they also are black. “What a coincidence,” you remark, “those ravens are black too.” Time goes by and you see many more ravens. And it happens that all the ravens you see are black. “This is beyond coincidence,” you might reasonably think, and with the instincts of a good and observant scientist you form a hypothesis: All ravens are black.

Inductive Reasoning

There are always limits to an experimental apparatus, even if the apparatus is just a matter of observing as many ravens as possible to check their colour. Nonetheless, we feel justified in saying that each new observation of a black raven tends to confirm the hypothesis, and in time, if no green or blue or otherwise non-black ravens are observed, our hypothesis will eventually come to have the status of natural law.

The Limitation

Logically put, our hypothesis “all ravens are black” has the form of a conditional, that is, a statement of the form “if A then B.” In short, we are saying that if a given object is a raven, then that object is black. According to the laws of logic, a conditional is equivalent to its contrapositive. That is, a statement of the form “if A then B” is equivalent to the statement “if not B then not A.” This rule of logic is incontrovertible.

The Flaw In Our Logic

Our hypothesis “all ravens are black” therefore has the equivalent form “all non-black things are non-ravens,” or more precisely, “if an object isn't black then it is not a raven.” Consequently, if every sighting of a black raven confirms our hypothesis, then every sighting of a non-black non-raven equally confirms our hypothesis.

The Illogical Conclusion

Very well, you might say, but maybe every sighting of a non-black non-raven really does confirm, even if only to an infinitesimal degree, the hypothesis that all ravens are black. After all, if we could, somehow, check every non-black object in the universe, and if none of them were ravens, our statement that all ravens are black would be proved.

The Bottom Line

Stashed ideas

Hempel’s Ravens Paradox | Platonic Realms

You can’t build software without encountering incidents – from critical bugs to full-blown outages, dealing with incidents are an inevitable part of the process.As a result, you’ll find no shortage of articles telling you how to write a review – or as they’re commonly known, a post mortem – of your incident. These top tips are widely practised:<ul><li>Avoid blame</li><li>Focus on the details</li><li>Ask why multiple times</li></ul>

Get More From Incident Reviews

<ul><li>Do we know what happened?</li><li>Do we feel confident about how we detected this incident?</li><li>Was it easy and straightforward to mitigate, rather than difficult and slow?</li><li>Do we understand the takeaways, aka the lessons learned?</li><li>Do we feel confident that we can prevent this from reoccurring?</li></ul> the five-question format made presenters feel like they were on trial. They were in the hot seat, at the mercy of anyone with a question. This made the review a high-pressure, isolating experience for the engineer presenting. It’s hard to learn when you, or others around you, don’t feel safe.

The Old Way: Asking Five Key Questions

Another problem with the format was that it didn’t create natural openings in conversation for other engineers to jump in. By focusing on a single event with set questions, we often overlooked commonalities and trends across incidents. This made it difficult for other engineers to understand what they could take away from these meetings and how the lessons might apply to themselves and their team.

Unclear Takeaways

We decided to start experimenting.<ul><li>We looked at the main improvements we wanted to see:</li><li>We wanted everyone to feel truly safe</li><li>We wanted to open up the conversation, encouraging open dialogue and collective learning</li><li>We wanted to observe patterns and move beyond isolated incidents to observe recurring trends</li><li>We wanted our weekly meeting to feel valuable, to be a weekly highlight for engineers</li></ul>

The New Way: Updating The Incident Meeting Format

Facilitation is a learned and practised skill – hard to perfect but hugely rewarding when done right.The three desired outcomes as goals are:<ul><li>Time flies</li><li>Everyone stays engaged</li><li>Everyone grows, even the facilitator</li></ul>

Flex Your Facilitation Muscles

We set a goal to generate at least four strong talking points: two based on the particular incident under review and two that addressed common themes. At the start of every meeting we would launch a poll with each of our talking points and ask participants to vote for the topic they’d most like to discuss. We’d start with the topic that topped the poll and go from there.

Getting The Talking Points

The question and answer format was not working, that was clear. So how could we guide constructive conversations that brought about real learning? It has always been team practice to assess submitted reports before each review, to make sure they meet our standards for a good report. We decided to capitalize on this process and use this review as an opportunity to extract common themes across multiple incidents.

Extracting Common Themes

To make sure these techniques were working we started sending automated surveys to our incident review Slack channel after each review. The poll asked participants to anonymously agree or disagree with the following statements:<ul><li>This meeting was a good use of my time</li><li>I think we discussed the right things</li><li>This meeting felt safe and constructive</li><li>I learned something new in this meeting</li></ul>

Post Meeting Survey

The progress we’ve seen to date has been really promising. We still have our outstanding problems, like how to tie these learnings into actionable items on our roadmap, or how to keep attendance strong in particularly busy weeks. But the aim of our program is to build an honest, accountable, and constructive culture within teams that care about our customer experience. The way your organization processes failure is a mechanism of change – if that mechanism is broken, boring, or painful, then your organization can’t reach its full potential.

Building an Honest, Accountable and Constructive Culture

You can’t build software without encountering incidents. We changed up our incident review, or post mortem, process to learn more every time.

How your engineering team can get more from incident reviews

Larger companies can be difficult to compete against because they seem to have all the advantages. Knowing the advantages and disadvantages of the larger competitor can help you to use them strategically to build your business profitably.

Smaller companies can capitalise on their strengths

<ol><li>They have more resources: multiple locations, more people, more cash. </li><li>Bigger network: They have more suppliers, more customers, more shareholders, and a better-developed network.</li><li>Purchasing economy: They can benefit from the best discounts on big volumes.</li><li>Location advantages: Larger companies can have multiple locations and distribution centres.</li><li>Depth of skill: They can support specific skills smaller companies can't afford.</li></ol>

Common advantages of larger competitors

<ol><li>More agile: A smaller company can change direction faster.</li><li>Less need for volume to absorb overhead.</li><li>Closer to the customer. A larger size often separates the customer from the business. Larger competitors may have layers of management between the decision-makers and the customer.</li><li>More focused. Larger companies need a higher gross revenue and more customers to sustain the business.</li></ol>

Advantages of a smaller company

<ul><li>Speciality strategy. A smaller company can be the best in quality, service, innovation etc.</li><li>Segment focus. Building a business around a subset of the market may limit your size but is more likely to lead to a strong market share. Larger companies have to serve multiple segments to reach their volume targets.</li><li>Moving faster. Smaller companies can chase changes in the market.</li><li>Customer intimacy. Smaller companies are often closer to their customers and can understand their customers better than larger competitors.</li></ul>

How to compete with a larger company

Competing with a larger company is hard. Here are the advantages of being smaller and four key strategies that will help you win.

How to compete with a larger company - Center for Simplified Strategic Planning

Cloud computing is on-demand access, via the internet, to computing resources—applications, servers (physical servers and virtual servers), data storage, development tools, networking capabilities, and more—hosted at a remote <a href="https://www.ibm.com/cloud/learn/data-centers">data center</a> managed by a cloud services provider (or CSP). The CSP makes these resources available for a monthly subscription fee or bills them according to usage.Cloud computing has the following benefits:<ol><li>Lower IT costs</li><li>Improved agility and Time-To-Value</li><li>Better scaling.</li></ol>

Cloud Computing

The term ‘cloud computing’ also refers to the technology that makes the cloud work. This includes some form of virtualized IT infrastructure—servers, operating system software, networking, and other infrastructure that’s abstracted, using special software, so that it can be pooled and divided irrespective of physical hardware boundaries.

Virtualization Of IT Infrastructure

IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service), PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service), and SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) are the three most common models of cloud services.<ul><li>IaaS provides on-demand access to fundamental computing resources–physical and virtual servers, networking, and storage—over the internet on a pay-as-you-go basis.</li><li>PaaS provides software developers with an on-demand platform—hardware, complete software stack, infrastructure, and development tools.</li><li>SaaS—also known as cloud-based software or cloud applications—is application software that’s hosted in the cloud accessible via a web browser or app.</li></ul>

Cloud computing services

Serverless computing (also called simply serverless) is a cloud computing model that offloads all the backend infrastructure management tasks–provisioning, scaling, scheduling, patching—to the cloud provider, freeing developers to focus all their time and effort on the code and business logic specific to their applications.A subset of serverless. FaaS allows developers to execute portions of application code (called functions) in response to specific events.

Serverless computing 

Public cloud is a type of cloud computing in which a cloud service provider makes computing resources—anything from SaaS applications, to individual <a href="https://www.ibm.com/cloud/learn/virtual-machines">virtual machines (VMs)</a>, to <a href="https://www.ibm.com/cloud/learn/bare-metal-and-dedicated-servers">bare metal computing hardware</a>, to complete enterprise-grade infrastructures and development platforms—available to users over the public internet.

Types Of Cloud Computing: Public Cloud

A private cloud is a cloud environment in which all cloud infrastructure and computing resources are dedicated to, and accessible by, one customer only. Private cloud combines many of the benefits of cloud computing—including elasticity, scalability, and ease of service delivery—with the access control, security, and resource customization of on-premises infrastructure.

A hybrid cloud is just what it sounds like—a combination of public and private cloud environments. Specifically, and ideally, a hybrid cloud connects an organization's private cloud services and public clouds into a single, flexible infrastructure for running the organization’s applications and workloads.

Types Of Cloud Computing: Hybrid cloud

Multicloud is the use of two or more clouds from two or more different cloud providers. Having a multicloud environment can be as simple as using email SaaS from one vendor and image editing SaaS from another. Hybrid multicloud is the use of two or more public clouds together with a private cloud environment. Organizations choose multicloud to avoid vendor lock-in, to have more services to choose from and to access to more innovation.

Types Of Cloud Computing: Multicloud and hybrid multicloud

Traditionally, security concerns have been the primary obstacle for organizations considering cloud services, particularly public cloud services. In response to demand, however, the security offered by cloud service providers is steadily outstripping on-premises security solutions.Some cloud security best practices include:<ul><li>Shared responsibility for security</li><li>Data encryption</li><li>User identity and access management</li><li>Collaborative management</li><li>Security and compliance monitoring</li></ul>

Cloud Security

With 25% of organizations planning to move all their applications to the cloud within the next year, it would seem that cloud computing use cases are limitless. <a href="https://www.ibm.com/cloud/learn/disaster-recovery-introduction">Disaster recovery</a> and business continuity:The cloud provides cost-effective redundancy to protect data against system failures and the physical distance required to recover data and applications in the event of a local outage or disaster. All of the major public cloud providers offer Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS).

Cloud Use Cases

Explore cloud computing and discover what it can bring to your enterprise.

What is Cloud Computing?

<ul>
<li>The traits that make us successful in our careers aren’t optimized for happiness.</li>
<li>Sacrificing the present for a better tomorrow, toiling hard with a single-minded focus isn’t exactly fun. Let’s face it, success and happiness are two different things.</li>
<li>Happiness is something that is only felt in the present moment, and meditation is a way to reach that mindset permanently.</li>
</ul>
Success is just one of the outcomes of the process of pursuing one’s goal.

Success And Happiness

If we are looking forward to a particular day when we will achieve our goal(s) and finally be happy, we are focused on the future.A better way is to set goals and work towards improving our lives, but also focus on today, on the now, the present moment, and try to live life.

The Default State Of Mind

We generally are in an unhealthy, unhappy state of mind due to overthinking, health issues, toxic relationships or job-related problems. Then we keep wondering where to find this elusive feeling of being happy.Before we focus on success, we need to take care of our present pain points: negative friends, bad relationships or stuff that causes stress and anxiety if we want to be happy in the now.

The Way We Are Now

What are some traits that make you successful at work? Those things will often not make you happy. That's why we need a different approach.

What Makes You Successful Won’t Make You Happy - Darius Foroux

You ought to read a ton of books, and only implement a fraction of the ideas, depending on what you have time for.<ul><li>Reading books is quite cheap. Kindle editions of popular books cost less than a nice meal. Libraries and borrowing books means you often don’t even need to pay that. Even the time spent reading a book is a fairly low investment. </li><li>Implementing ideas, in contrast, is often quite expensive. Implementing just one idea from a book can take more time, money, or effort than reading the book itself. Implementing all the ideas from a single book might take years.</li></ul>

Reading More Advice than You Actually Use

Problem Solving

A book you never explicitly try to implement can still add value. Perhaps not life-changing, but is has enough value to justify the relatively low cost invested in them.Most books won’t change your life. But then again, you don’t need a life-changing amount of money and time to consume them. If you pick good books, read them well, and think deeply about their implications, that’s enough to earn back their price tag (both in terms of money and hours spent).

Why Unused Books Still Have Value


It’s often the things you don’t do after reading a book that justify the investment cost. If a book steers you away from bad strategies which won’t work, that alone can make it worth reading.Read enough books about investing and you learn enough to steer away from some clearly bad habits on investing.

Good Books Limit Bad Choices

Read a good book, and you’ll start thinking about things in a different way.Sometimes that different pattern of thinking will result in some deliberate plans of action. Other times, they will merely adjust your thinking down a new direction you might not have considered before.

Books Change The Conversation In Your Head

You should be reading way more books than you have time to apply. Reading a book is cheap, implementing ideas is hard, reading too little creates waste.

Most Books Won't Change Your Life (But You Should Read Them Anyways) | Scott H Young

<ul>
<li>FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) is a collection of feelings and emotions that influence our thinking.</li>
<li>It was coined by Gene Amdahl, who worked at IBM and later founded his own company.</li>
<li>Business, media, politics and even some religions use FUD intentionally, as they understand its power and how vulnerable people are to it.</li>
<li>Marketers and salespeople often exploit these behaviour patterns in people and manipulate them by planting doubts and uncertainties about a competing product or service in their minds.</li>
</ul>

FUD: Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt

Various tech companies use fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) to control customer behaviour. They plant fake news, confusing press releases and benchmark tests to influence the decisions of prospective customers. 
Example: Announcing ‘vaporware’ products, something that isn’t even in existence, just to harm the sales of the existing products of competitors.

FUD Usage In Tech Companies

Customers are often pushed towards a particular product due to marketers amplifying the FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) state.
<ol>
<li>They claim the product is backwards compatible, or is fully compatible with a variety of hardware, implying that the competitor's product isn’t.</li>
<li>They claim that their product requires minimal training of employees.</li>
<li>They try to sell the worth of the product by claiming that millions of customers use it.</li>
<li>They try to hasten the decision by giving limited time discount offers.</li>
<li>They play the ‘limited stocks’ game or suggest how others have benefited from the same.</li>
</ol>

Amplifying The FUD

Instilling fear, uncertainty and doubt in the minds of people isn’t new. Governments and political groups have been fearmongering for centuries.
Most mainstream media carries a certain narrative or agenda in their news reporting, promoting the feelings of FUD in readers in order to coax them into buying the publication, clicking the article link, or simply believing the propaganda.

FUD: Propaganda Tool

Spread intentionally and unintentionally, FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) techniques are quite common. Some of the most utilized techniques to create or amplify FUD among people are:
<ol>
<li>Making negative statements about a rival.</li>
<li>Pushing the narrative on possible negative results, while exaggerating the impact or likelihood of the same.</li>
<li>Amplifying people's existing negative emotions.</li>
<li>Confusing them through lots of information.</li>
<li>Questioning their beliefs.</li>
<li>Attacking their source of information.</li>
</ol>

How FUD Is Created And Used

FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) techniques use various belief patterns and cognitive biases already present in people.
<ol>
<li>Authority Bias: People are already conditioned to believe authority figures.</li>
<li>Bandwagon Effect: People often do what others are doing.</li>
<li>Slippery Slope Argument: Suggesting that a certain action can set off extreme results, pushing us towards the wrong path.</li>
<li>Appeal To Emotions: Most manipulators appeal to our fears, exploiting our emotions for their gain.</li>
<li>Reverse Psychology: Indirectly coaxing people to do the opposite.</li>
</ol>

Common Biases And Belief Patterns

“Uncertainty always creates doubt and doubt creates fear.”

We first need to identify the various fears, uncertainties and doubts (FUD) we have in ourselves, trying to resolve them when we know what they are and from where they are coming from.
One can deploy the principle of cui bono, asking yourself ‘who benefits?’ from this FUD being created in you. Likewise, various cognitive biases can be dissected.
Keep in mind that people often believe what they hear, and only object towards something wrong if they have full knowledge of the same and can therefore identify the error.

How To Deal With FUD

<ol>
<li>Be clear and objective about your product or service and what the features are.</li>
<li>Answer common questions through a collection of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs).</li>
<li>Offer demos so that customers can themselves make up their minds about your service or product.</li>
<li>Having customer testimonials and a good website also helps in reducing FUD, also known as the halo effect.</li>
</ol>

Reducing FUD In Other People

FUD: Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt - Effectiviology

It is often unhelpful to hear that the perfect routine is the one you can stick to to help you reach your goals. As everyone is different in personality, constraints, and preferences, the ideal method will differ.
Instead of outlining an exact routine, look at the essential parts of a routine, and season them as you desire.

The best routine for studying

<ol>
<li>Instructions can be in the form of lessons, books, or tutoring. They are useful to avoid wasting time with trial-and-error.</li>
<li>Retrieval involves deliberately remembering the knowledge, not just passively reviewing it.</li>
<li>Spacing is repeated reviews, spread out over time. It forms part of a regular routine where you cover old knowledge along with new.</li>
<li>Understanding. The goal of learning is for ideas to make sense. Explain the concept to yourself. When you get stuck, find a textbook or teacher to help you.</li>
<li>Feedback. You don't have to get feedback from other people. When you can get accurate feedback that doesn't need another person, go there first.</li>
</ol>

The ingredient of the perfect studying routine

To perfect your studying routine, look at your current routine, and see what's missing. For example:
<ul>
<li>An amateur painter will grow faster if they add instruction to their existing knowledge.</li>
<li>Learning history by reading a lot: Why not write an essay or converse with other history buffs?</li>
<li>You work correctly through a course, but don't space your learning: A ten-minute pop-quiz on previous topics can help you remember and save hours later.</li>
</ul>

Fixing your current studying routine

The perfect studying routine has five ingredients: instruction, retrieval, spacing, understanding and feedback. Which one might you be missing?

The Perfect Studying Routine | Scott H Young

<ol>
<li>Start small: Get comfortable to let go of the need to be perfect from the beginning.</li>
<li>Try an outside perspective: We're usually hard on ourselves, but not nearly as harsh with other people.</li>
<li>Make a commitment to work on a project for a set period of time: Once the time is up, you're done, whether the project is perfect or not.</li>
<li>Put all your perfectionistic tendencies towards areas that are truly important to you.</li>
</ol>

Let go of the need to be perfect

“Perfect” and “productive” aren’t the same thing; perfectionism is actually counterproductive.
Just because society is placing a higher value on perfection doesn’t mean you’re actually getting more done.

“Done” is always better than “Perfect”

<ul>
<li>Self-oriented: when people are highly critical of themselves.</li>
<li>Other-oriented: when people are highly critical of others.</li>
<li>Socially-prescribed: when people think others expect them to be perfect and then pressure themselves to be perfect in order to meet those expectations.</li>
</ul>

3 types of perfectionism

<ul>
<li>Competitive work environments: If you work in a culture that demands perfection, you’ll probably start demanding perfection.</li>
<li>Pride and personality: Some persons have personalities that are naturally susceptible to perfectionism.</li>
<li>Fear of failure: People identify with their failure. They will strive for perfection as self-preservation.</li>
</ul>

What causes perfectionism

People who are concerned about perfection often have a hard time getting started.
They’re stressed about doing things perfectly, they feel paralyzed to get started, and their work suffers. This can also stop them from trying new things, taking risks, and can suppress their ability to innovate.

Perfectionism and procrastination

We live in an era of overachievement, and in this era flaunting those achievements (we're looking at you, social media) is totally the norm. Because pretty much everyone's achievements are on full display at all times, it can be easy to get caught up in the idea that "perfect is the new black," and if you want to be successful in today's hyper-competitive culture, you need to be perfect, too.

How To Be Your Most Productive Self: Let Go Of Being Perfect

<ul>
<li>Writing a book summary helps you remember what you read months, or even years, after reading.</li>
<li>It helps you connect main concepts from other books, giving you a deeper level of understanding.</li>
<li>Lastly, it helps you improve your own writing.</li>
</ul>

Reasons for writing a book summary

Writing a book summary consists of three steps.
<ol>
<li>Take notes while you read.</li>
<li>Write the main takeaways in your own words.</li>
<li>Continue to summarise over time (progressive summarization.)</li>
</ol>

Steps for writing a book summary

<ul>
<li>If you read a printed book, highlight important quotes, ideas, or questions. Write the page number on the first blank page.</li>
<li>If you're reading a Kindle book, use Kindle's "notes" and "highlights" to collect important takeaways.</li>
<li>Highlight the book's chapter headings as you're reading. For books, where each chapter builds on the last, it will be easier to get an overview of your notes and highlights.</li>
</ul>

Take notes while you read

<ul>
<li>If you're reading a print or hardcover book, write your notes and highlights into a word processor or note-taking app.</li>
<li>If you're reading a Kindle book, add your notes, then export your notes and highlights. Copy them into a preferred word processor or note-taking app. Remove all the irrelevant markings, like "Read more at location {NUMBER]", "Add a note".</li>
<li>Now, rewrite each highlight in your own words.</li>
<li>If you highlighted chapter headings, change them into subheadings.</li>
</ul>

Write the key ideas in your own words

Use progressive summarization to distil the ideas: Summarise your notes, then summarise that summary, then summarise that summary.
There are five layers to progressive summarization.
<ol>
<li>The book's notes and highlights are unedited and lack context.</li>
<li>Solve the context problem by summarising the book in your own words.</li>
<li>Highlight the key takeaways that are not context-specific.</li>
<li>Bold small instructions that tell you what to do.</li>
<li>Remix and combine ideas to create content. It is best done over time.</li>
</ol>

Continue to summarise over time

Read this article to learn how to write a book summary that will help you remember what you read months, even years, after reading.

Bite-sized knowledge
to upgrade
your career

Charlie
@cha_

Hempel’s Ravens Paradox | Platonic Realms

How your engineering team can get more from incident reviews

How to compete with a larger company - Center for Simplified Strategic Planning

What is Cloud Computing?

What Makes You Successful Won’t Make You Happy - Darius Foroux

Bite-sized knowledgeto upgradeyour career

Charlie @cha_

Hempel’s Ravens Paradox | Platonic Realms

How your engineering team can get more from incident reviews

How to compete with a larger company - Center for Simplified Strategic Planning

What is Cloud Computing?

What Makes You Successful Won’t Make You Happy - Darius Foroux

Bite-sized knowledge
to upgrade
your career

Charlie
@cha_