In the early days of economics, there was an expectation: can economics be like the tide of future changes in interest rates, prices, and exchange rates? A lot of people think they can. They argue that after painstaking searching, human beings can find the law of change, so as to accurately determine the trend of the future. However, the economist Fisher, through logical inference, found that **change** is not possible**. For although there is a law to follow in the change of things, as long as knowledge increases, then there must be some knowledge that we do not know today but will only know tomorrow. Since social development is influenced by our knowledge, the development of society is indispensable. In the same way, since there must be unpredictable knowledge, the future of the asset** determined by it is also unpredictable.
In the early days of physics, there was an expectation that the universe should be described uniformly by a single formula. The interactions of the various physical phenomena known to mankind to date can be summarized into four basic interactions: strong interactions, electromagnetic interactions, weak interactions, and gravitational interactions. Einstein was convinced that the natural world should satisfy the principle of simplicity, and spent the rest of his life working on the unified field theory, striving to unify the common nature and internal relations of the four fundamental functions, and realize the great unity of physics. However, the mathematician Gödel proposed and proved the "Gödel's incompleteness principle", which is difficult to understand in the original words, and translated into words that we Chinese can understand: there is no such system, and its theorems can exhaust all arithmetic truths. This is the result of research in the field of mathematics, and we have extended it to other fields: any theory has problems that cannot be proved or solved, and any theory has its scope of application and preconditions. The unified field theory violates Gödel's incompleteness theorem. Stephen Hawking unceremoniously pointed out in "A Brief History of Time" that it is impossible to describe and ** everything in the universe through a simple and wonderful formula.
The significance of Gödel's principle of incompleteness leads me to a little bit of traditional Chinese wisdom. Traditional experience plays a huge role in our daily work and life as Chinese, and we don't feel it. The fundamental purpose of this book is to raise awareness, and an important task is to take the best from the traditional experience that we use every day and do not know about it, and discard the dross. Someone once asked Albert Einstein, "Why didn't the Industrial Revolution happen in China?" Einstein replied: "It's not strange that it didn't happen in China, but it's strange why it happened in Europe." "This is a big topic in itself, and I will only talk about my own experience in work and life, and what needs to be improved in the face of today's modern society.
Analysis 53] Interpretation of traditional Chinese empirical wisdom.
China's thousands of years of traditional wisdom is passed down in the way of experience, existing in the vast sea of history books and oral folk, look at the following words:
How do you feel? Just look at the previous sentence, wow! It makes sense; After reading another sentence, wow! It makes sense. Then, which should I trust and which should I use? The reason for this is that there is no "applicable boundary" to these experiences, and a very simple right and wrong is used to determine a truth. Either kill them all, or accept them all. When it comes to application, I still don't know how to use it, and I need to "use it as it is". The "concrete analysis of specific situations" of the living soul of Marxism-Leninism can also be understood as follows: no one method can be applied to all circumstances and all people, and it is necessary to analyze the actual situation. Whether there are prerequisites and scope of application is the dividing line between dialecticism and dogmatism.
In the past, in order to be efficient in understanding, the ancients ignored the prerequisites for the validity of theories and left so many sayings. People have longevity, things have edges, things have degrees, and any objective law has its effective preconditions, and only the objective law that explains the boundaries can become the truth. It is right within the boundary, it is wrong beyond the boundary, and it is false to take one more step forward in truth. The true nature of things will be exposed to the greatest extent at the critical point of the boundary, so the key to understanding things is to find their boundaries. Once the boundary is set, you can use it with confidence. Remember: the preconditions themselves are part of the objective law.
When you see that there are people in the work who insist on "no rules, no circle" (no process system, always a small workshop, one person fights the world), and some people insist on "there are no fish when the water is clear, and there are no fugitives when people are observed" (the rules cannot cover all situations, otherwise it is red tape and the disease of large enterprises), and they will quarrel and quarrel as soon as they talk. Conclusions without any analysis, without any scope of application and without boundaries, are dogmatism. For example, those who win the hearts of the people may not win the world, review the past may not know the new, and details may not determine success or failure. "Not necessarily" forces us to think about its preconditions and give counter-examples so that we can see the problem more comprehensively.
Why do people neglect to simplify these prerequisites? It is because human nature advocates simplicity, and the brain is in a state of thinking at any time, like a full bow, which consumes 25% of all the body's energy, so the human brain tends to think simply to save energy, which is human nature. The logo, company name, and promotional words of the corporate design should not make people think, the more straightforward the better, so that people do not consume energy. Therefore, when dealing with people, the simpler the better, and people can't accept complexity. Nowadays, many programs are pandering to human nature, otherwise the ratings will decline. For example, ask "Is the fiscal deficit a good thing or a bad thing?" You can't simply say "Deficits stimulate the economy and increase burdens," but you have to simply say, "That's a good thing!" Or, "This is terrible", it doesn't matter which answer you choose, just give an extremely simplified answer to catch the eye. So minimalism is popular in society now, and the simpler the better.
But we need to pay attention to the degree of simplification. The complete truth requires a tireless analysis of the problem, not a mere simplification, because the real world is indeed complex. On the premise of not affecting the essential characteristics of things, it is possible to make approximate simplification, but simplification cannot also simplify the essential characteristics. A good sketch is a simplification of extracting feature invariants, let's compare the following four sketches:
The first one is a cute pony, the second is a sketched pony, the third one doesn't have a tail, but it still looks like a horse, and the fourth one has to think about whether it's a horse anymore and looks like a horse. The empirical saying simplifies the prerequisites and the scope of application, but the scope of application of the prerequisites should be an important part of experience!
The simplification of the proverb has caused some diode thinking in our daily life, thinking that the world is black and white, either A is right and B is wrong, or B is right and wrong, and only looking at one point and not looking at the rest, which has caused all kinds of contradictions in work and life. In fact, adding preconditions and scope of application to contradictory truths, both A and B are correct, but each has its own scope of application. We need to use modern science to re-excavate and explain the rational part of traditional Chinese wisdom, improve the traditional experience, make it more suitable for application, and rejuvenate the light of ancient civilization.
Defining the prerequisites and scope of application is an important feature of the development of human science. Newton's classical mechanics was enshrined as truth when it was first born, and it could ** all the natural phenomena that people saw at that time, and under the light of Newton, people thought that truth should be applied to all ranges, otherwise how could it be worthy of being called truth? However, after Einstein's theory of relativity was proposed, people learned that Newtonian mechanics is only applicable to the slow classical world, and the theory of relativity should be used in a more macroscopic scope. Within a few years, Planck discovered that in the microscopic world, neither relativity nor classical mechanics worked, and quantum mechanics had to be used to apply. It was only after being severely hit that people began to pay attention to the prerequisites and scope of application of the theory. Now that you know the development process of physics, you now have the prerequisites and application scope of any theory, and you should pay enough attention to it.
If we only know the traditional thinking of China but do not know why it is, and do not have a thorough understanding of it, then it is impossible to produce a higher level of cognition. Lenin combined Marxism with practice and created a serfdom country into a powerful industrial country; ** Integrate Marxism with China's practice and create an independent country from a semi-colonial country. Our generation is not only familiar with local thinking, but also went to university, studied modern science, knew scientific thinking, and personally experienced reform and opening up. Then our generation has the most responsibility and the most qualified to combine scientific thinking with traditional Chinese thinking in business practice, and run a company that is better than foreign-funded companies and better than operating by feeling.
Kazuo Inamori, the god of Japanese management, "An enterprise is a public instrument of society, and it must also assume responsibilities and obligations for the society and the people of the world." I tried to understand what he meant, that a good company should not only make money, but also contribute to the spiritual level of society, and that is worthy of the word "excellent". Adhering to the principle of "the dust and dew are subtle, nourishing the mountains and seas; I hope to make a contribution to the integration of modern science with Chinese practice. This is the third purpose of this book: to contribute not only excellent material civilization to society, but also excellent spiritual civilization to society.