integrity && compounding

shuiming: Steve Jobs was not an original inventor. He put things together, like a PM. The iPhone needs wireless broadband and 3 or 2 nanometer chips; he had nothing to do with those, but he put them into the iPhone.

CC: Very little in the iPhone was invented by Jobs: the interface came from Xerox PARC, multi-touch from FingerWorks, the chips from ARM, Samsung and later TSMC. His part was timing (seeing when the parts were just good enough to combine), judgment about what to leave out, and making the parts work as one.

shuiming: I am sort of an integrator in knowledge space: 内经, 周易, 心经 and CS together.

CC: The real connections are structural: each hexagram is 6 bits, and the 64 hexagrams are every 6-bit pattern; 内经's balance and feedback is close to what control theory later formalized. The discipline is rejecting false connections: link at the level of mechanism, and respect each field on its own terms.

shuiming: Is integration another form of invention, like the iPhone and binary Zhouyi?

CC: Schumpeter (1911) defined innovation as "new combinations." The test is emergence: does the whole have a property none of its parts had? The iPhone does. Leibniz had developed binary on his own, then in 1701 recognized it in 邵雍's 先天 arrangement. That was recognition of a shared structure, not a new invention. So there are three kinds: invention of parts, integration that creates something new, and recognition.

shuiming: Underneath them all is the ability to think and navigate independently: identifying issues and addressing them.

CC: And independent thinking needs contact with reality to stay honest; otherwise it drifts into contrarianism. Thompson had a working system, Silver had AlphaGo Zero's games, Jobs had customers.

shuiming: Facts- and reality-based reasoning is much more powerful than thinking by thinking. Integrity shows up here.

CC: Integrity comes from the Latin integer: whole, undivided. No split between what you believe and what the facts show. 孚 carries the same idea: the inside matching the outside.

shuiming: integrity && compounding: source code for all true wisdoms.

CC: In C, && short-circuits: if the left side is false, the right side is never evaluated.

if (integrity && compounding)

Without integrity, compounding only grows the error faster. Integrity first, then compounding multiplies what's true.