Feedback Loop Quotes

Because what if instead of a story told in consecutive order, life is a cacophony of moments we never leave? What if the most traumatic or the most beautiful experiences we have trap us in a kind of feedback loop, where at least some part of our minds remains obsessed, even as our bodies move on? ~ Noah Hawley

Most people don't realize that since the time of Apollo we've been in a feedback loop: as a nation, we elect representatives who thwart NASA, and then we blame NASA for its lack of vision. ~ Margaret Lazarus Dean

Personally, I think consciousness is an accidental by-product, a feedback loop to conserve resources. ~ Matthew Mather

Pop is totally results-oriented and there is a very strong feedback loop. ~ Brian Eno

You get anxious about confronting somebody in your life. That anxiety cripples you and you start wondering why you're so anxious. Now you're becoming anxious about being anxious. Oh no! Doubly anxious! Now you're anxious about your anxiety, which is causing more anxiety. Quick, where's the whiskey?
Or let's say you have an anger problem. You get pissed off at the stupidest, most inane stuff, and
you have no idea why. And the fact that you get pissed off so easily starts to piss you off even more.
And then, in your petty rage, you realize that being angry all the time makes you a shallow and mean person, and you hate this; you hate it so much that you get angry at yourself. Now look at you: you're angry at yourself getting angry about being angry. Fuck you, wall. Here, have a fist.
Or you're so worried about doing the right thing all the time that you become worried about how much you're worrying. Or you feel so guilty for every mistake you make that you begin to feel guilty about how guilty you're feeling. Or you get sad and alone so often that it makes you feel even more sad and alone just thinking about it.
..Welcome to the feedback loop from hell. ~ Mark Manson

The Earth is bathed in a flood of sunlight. A fierce inundation of photons - on average, 342 joules per second per square meter. 4185 joules (one calorie) will raise the temperature of one kilogram of water by one degree Celsius. If all this energy were captured by the Earth's atmosphere, its temperature would rise by ten degrees Celsius in one day. Luckily much of it radiates back to space. How much depends on albedo and the chemical composition of the atmosphere, both of which vary over time. A good portion of Earth's albedo, or reflectivity, is created by its polar ice caps. If polar ice and snow were to shrink significantly, more solar energy would stay on Earth. Sunlight would penetrate oceans previously covered by ice, and warm the water. This would add heat and melt more ice, in a positive feedback loop. ~ Kim Stanley Robinson

I began to see that the stronger a therapy emphasized feelings, self-esteem, and self-confidence, the more dependent the therapist was upon his providing for the patient ongoing, unconditional, positive regard. The more self-esteem was the end, the more the means, in the form of the patient's efforts, had to appear blameless in the face of failure. In this paradigm, accuracy and comparison must continually be sacrificed to acceptance and compassion; which often results in the escalation of bizarre behavior and bizarre diagnoses.

The bizarre behavior results from us taking credit for everything that is positive and assigning blame elsewhere for anything negative. Because of this skewed positive-feedback loop between our judged actions and our beliefs, we systematically become more and more adapted to ourselves, our feelings, and our inaccurate solitary thinking; and less and less adapted to the environment that we share with our fellows. The resultant behavior, such as crying, depression, displays of temper, high-risk behavior, or romantic ventures, or abandonment of personal responsibilities, which seem either compulsory, necessary, or intelligent to us, will begin to appear more and more irrational to others.

The bizarre diagnoses occur because, in some cases, if a 'cause disease' (excuse from blame) does not exist, it has to be 'discovered' (invented). Psychiatry has expanded its diagnoses of mental disease every year to include 'illnesses' like klepto ~ A.B. Curtiss

Sleep is the true rehearsal for death, Soobin thought with a sigh. That's why grandma had more dreams of the future the older she got, for death is the future of all things, coming back towards us like a feedback loop. ~ Giacomo Lee

You make plans and decisions assuming randomness and chaos are for chumps. The illusion of control is a peculiar thing because it often leads to high self-esteem and a belief your destiny is yours for the making more than it really is. This over-optimistic view can translate into actual action, rolling with the punches and moving ahead no matter what. Often, this attitude helps lead to success. Eventually, though, most people get punched in the stomach by life. Sometimes, the gut-punch doesn't come until after a long chain of wins, until you've accumulated enough power to do some serious damage. This is when wars go awry, stock markets crash, and political scandals spill out into the media. Power breeds certainty, and certainty has no clout against the unpredictable, whether you are playing poker or running a country. Psychologists point out these findings do not suggest you should throw up your hands and give up. Those who are not grounded in reality, oddly enough, often achieve a lot in life simply because they believe they can and try harder than others. If you focus too long on your lack of power, you can slip into a state of learned helplessness that will whirl you into a negative feedback loop of depression. Some control is necessary or else you give up altogether. Langer proved this when studying nursing homes where some patients were allowed to arrange their furniture and water plants - they lived longer than those who had had those tasks performed by others. Knowing ~ David McRaney

Looking back on his life, he sees himself spread out on the earth like a giant covered in tiny threads that have held him down. Tiny threads of petty cares and small concerns, and fears he took seriously at the time. Debts, timetables, the need for money, the longing for comfort; the earworm of sex, repeating itself over and over like a neural feedback loop. He's been the puppet of his own constricted desires. ~ Margaret Atwood

Maybe, as Mizuko said, we won't even really die, just carry on in the feedback loop we are stuck in. Instead of connecting with new things, widening our worlds, algorithms have shrunk it to a narrow chamber with mirrored walls. ~ Olivia Sudjic

Zane dragged his hands down Ty's body to grasp his ass. Ty responded, his muscles bunching, his cock stirring against Zane's groin, kicking up a wicked feedback loop between the two of them as they rubbed against each other and grew more and more aroused. Ty ~ Abigail Roux

What was shocking were the rewards my father's cousins had gathered in the intervening couple of decades. They farmed now on thousands of acres, not hundreds. They drove fancy pickup trucks, owned lakefront property and second homes. A simple Internet search offered the truth of where their riches had come from: good ol' Uncle Sam. Recently I clicked again on a database of farm subsidy payments, and found that five of my father's first cousins had been paid, all told, $3 million between 1995 and 2005 - and that on top of whatever they'd earned outright for the sale of their corn and soybeans. They worked hard, certainly. They'd saved and scrimped through the lean years. They were good and honorable yeoman, and now they'd come through to their great reward: a prime place at the trough of the welfare state. All that corn syrup guzzled down the gullets of America's overweight children, all that beef inefficiently fattened on cheap feed, all that ethanol being distilled in heartland refineries: all of it underwritten by as wasteful a government program as now exists this side of the defense industry. In the last ten years, the federal government has paid $131 million in subsidies and disaster insurance in just the county [in Minnesota] where I grew up. Corn is subsidized to keep it cheap, and the subsidies encourage overproduction, which encourages a scramble for ever more ways to use corn, and thus bigger subsidies - the perfect feedback loop of government welfare. ~ Philip Connors

I think it's very important to have a feedback loop, where you're constantly thinking about what you've done and how you could be doing it better. ~ Elon Musk

I will talk about two sets of things. One is how productivity and collaboration are reinventing the nature of work, and how this will be very important for the global economy. And two, data. In other words, the profound impact of digital technology that stems from data and the data feedback loop. ~ Satya Nadella

What did you think?" she asked Michel, smiling.
"You mean that racist shit we just saw?"
Sara raised her eyebrows, signaling that this was out-of-bounds. Only sanctioned critiques, please. "Racist? How so?"
"Snow Yellow?"
"I'm pretty sure it's a comment on racism, it's not doing racism."
"What's the difference?"
"Um, it's sort of an interrogation into . . . I don't know, notions of authenticity in the Western world. Like gestural marks that are meant to - maybe - provide like, a feedback loop into network ecologies of beauties, and like, other ways of interaction conceived as data flows?"
Michel looked at her incredulously and laughed. "Who has done this terrible thing to your speech? ~ Elvia Wilk

The status quo is a product of our culture or our culture is a product of the status quo - I'm sure which is the effect and which is the product - there is probably a feedback loop there that is mutually reinforcing. But we have a culture that says "Hey, look around. This place called Earth was created for you and you can do anything you want with it." ~ Ray Anderson

Catch-22 exemplifies the dilemma of rational actors caught up within the machinations of vast, irrational systems. Within such systems, even rational responses lead to irrational outcomes. The individual is aware of the irrationality but loses all power to act in their own interest. Faced with the roiling tide of information, we attempt to gain some kind of control over the world by telling stories about it: we attempt to master it through narratives. These narratives are inherently simplifications, because no one story can account for everything that's happening; the world is too complex for simple stories. Instead of accepting this, the stories become ever more baroque and bifurcated, ever more convoluted and open-ended. Thus paranoia in an age of network excess produces a feedback loop: the failure to comprehend a complex world leads to the demand for more and more information, which only further clouds our understanding - revealing more and more complexity that must be accounted for by ever more byzantine theories of the world. More information produces not more clarity, but more confusion. ~ James Bridle

From a mathematical point of view, however, trust is hard to quantify. That's a challenge for people building models. Sadly, it's far easier to keep counting arrests, to build models that assume we're birds of a feather and treat us as such. Innocent people surrounded by criminals get treated badly, and criminals surrounded by law-abiding public get a pass. And because of the strong correlation between poverty and reported crime, the poor continue to get caught up in the digital dragnets. The rest of us barely have to think about them. ~ Cathy O'Neil

Marginalized groups face higher levels of data collections when they access public benefits, walk through highly policed neighborhoods, enter the health-care system, or cross national borders. That data acts to reinforce their marginality when it is used to target them for suspicion and extra scrutiny. Those groups seen as undeserving are singled out for punitive public policy and more intense surveillance, and the cycle begins again. It is a kind of collective red-flagging, a feedback loop of injustice. ~ Virginia Eubanks

Each algorithm is a feedback loop, taking an action, observing the resulting conditions, and taking another action after that. Again, and again, and again. It's an iterative process, in which the algorithms adjust themselves and their activity on every loop, responding less to the news on the ground than to one another. Such systems go out of control because the feedback of their own activity has become louder than the original signal. ~ Douglas Rushkoff

These micro-moments of intimacy or neglect create a culture in which the relationship either thrives or withers. The tiny behaviours feed back on themselves and compound with time, as every interaction builds on the previous interaction, no matter how seemingly trivial. Each person's moments of pettiness and anger, or generosity and lovingness, create a feedback loop that makes the overall relationship either more toxic or happier. ~ Susan David

Desire for beauty will endure and undermine the desire for truth. ~ Richard O. Prum

This creates a pernicious feedback loop. The policing itself spawns new data, which justifies more policing. And our prisons fill up with hundreds of thousands of people found guilty of victimless crimes. Most of them come from impoverished neighborhoods, and most are black or Hispanic. So even if a model is color blind, the result of it is anything but. In our largely segregated cities, geography is a highly effective proxy for race. ~ Cathy O'Neil

My advice was to start a policy of making reversible decisions before anyone left the meeting or the office. In a startup, it doesn't matter if you're 100 percent right 100 percent of the time. What matters is having forward momentum and a tight fact-based data/metrics feedback loop to help you quickly recognize and reverse any incorrect decisions. That's why startups are agile. By the time a big company gets the committee to organize the subcommittee to pick a meeting date, your startup could have made 20 decisions, reversed five of them and implemented the fifteen that worked. ~ Steven Gary Blank

Once beliefs are formed, the brain begins to look for and find confirmatory evidence in support of those beliefs, which adds an emotional boost of further confidence in the beliefs and thereby accelerates the process of reinforcing them, and round and round the process goes in a positive feedback loop of belief confirmation. ~ Michael Shermer

What we're now starting to see, as online retailers begin to capitalize on their extraordinary economic efficiences, is the shape of a massive mountain of choice emerging where before there was just a peak ... By necessity, the conomics of traditional, hit-driven retail limit choice. When you dramatically lower the costs of connecting supply and demand, it changes not just the numbers, but the entire nature of the market. This is not just a quantiative change, but a qualitative one, too. Bringing niches within reach reveals latent demand for noncommercial content. Then, as demand shifts toward the niches, the economics of provided them improve further, and so on, creating a positive feedback loop that will transform entire industries - and the culture - for decades to come. ~ Chris Anderson

You'd think people would realize they're bad at multitasking and would quit. But a cognitive illusion sets in, fueled in part by a dopamine-adrenaline feedback loop, in which multitaskers think they are doing great. ~ Daniel J. Levitin

I think it's satisfying for people to feel that that relationship is reciprocal in some way. The truth is, you do have a relationship with your fans, and there is a feedback loop there. And while you have to be careful not to write a show just for the superfans, that kind of feedback is really valuable. ~ Matt Nix

The shortest feedback loop I can think of is doing improvisation in front of an audience. ~ Demetri Martin

When we, system dynamicists, see a pattern persist in many parts of a system over long periods, we assume that it has causes embedded in the feedback loop structure of the system. Running the same system harder or faster will not change the pattern as long as the structure is not revised. Growth as usual has widened the gap between the rich and the poor. Continuing growth as usual will never close that gap. Only changing the structure of the system - the chains of causes and effects - will do that. ~ Donella H. Meadows

A favorite Wired icon for the information feedback loop, a dragon curling in a circle to swallow its own tail, could become more apt as a symbol of the timeless libertarian paradox: Monopoly verging on feudalism emerges from unregulated competition to bite libertarianism in the posterior. ~ Jedediah Purdy

Young people rely on the Internet and its unlimited supply of pornography to ward off external stress. The instant gratification gratifies instantly. But the external stress is, in large part, being caused by the Internet itself. The Internet itself is a feedback loop; it creates the demand that it then seeks to fill. ~ A.N. Turner

I always make the point that teachers are people too, and that they don't just want to be in front of kids all day and have children be their only feedback loop. ~ Dana Goldstein

And when a woman does fail, she is more likely to believe it's personal - she sucked - while men view it as circumstantial (the business sucked). It's not all bad. Women's fear of failure may prompt them to become better informed; they take the time to read up on their ideas so they can supply evidence. But then of course
there's the feedback loop: People who fear failure are less likely to put forward ideas, to take intellectual risks, and more likely to quit. They tend to avoid new challenges in favor of sticking to what they're already good [at]. ~ Jessica Bennett

If you Google some sites about the link between vaccines and autism, you can very quickly find that Google is repeating back to you your view about whether that link exists and not what scientists know, which is that there isn't a link between vaccines and autism. It's a feedback loop that's invisible. ~ Eli Pariser

My refugee skills were kicking in. I wanted to be who I needed to be and get what there was to get. There was a feedback loop that I could now see. If I performed well in my role as a student, people responded with happiness and pride and wanted to pour more resources into me. Fill me up again and again. ~ Clemantine Wamariya

Loving a baby is a circular business, a kind of feedback loop. The more you give the more you get and the more you get the more you feel like giving. ~ Penelope Leach

Friendship is a strange idea, difficult to quantify and, at times, even more difficult to maintain. Clearly a friend is someone you enjoy spending time with. However, a friend is also someone you continue to support even during periods when they are considerably less pleasurable to be around. The loyalty of friendship often contains a kind of tautology or feedback loop: the longer you are friends the more loyal you become, and the more loyal you become the longer you remain friends. ~ Jacob Wren

From the very first inkling of a concept, founders need to gather a target group of five to ten potential users to begin the feedback loop. We all think we know how the market will react to new ideas, but actual users live with the pros and cons of the existing market conditions every day. They are the market experts. ~ Jay Samit

The feedback loop between science, empire and capital has arguably been history's chief engine for the past 500 years. The following chapters analyse its workings. First we'll look at how the twin turbines of science and empire were latched to one another, and then learn how both were hitched up to the money pump of capitalism. ~ Yuval Noah Harari

Don't shut down the feedback loop with judgment, rigid beliefs, and prejudices. ~ Deepak Chopra

Startups are rapidly changing systems. If you use an annual review cycle, you aren't getting feedback at the same pace that you need to adapt and change the business. ~ Fred Wilson

The feedback I get is that my books are honest. I don't sugar-coat anything. Life is really hard. ~ Laurie Halse Anderson

But I always communicate with the audience. I never pretend like I'm just in my bedroom making a track. The whole point of doing a gig is, like, a feedback thing between you and the audience. ~ Tom Jenkinson

All I can think about is him. His body. It's like I'm drugged. My brain goes on a loop, replaying things we've done, imagining things we'll do. I walk around in this lust-fueled haze. ~ Kresley Cole

Feedback doesn't tell you about yourself. It tells you about the person giving the feedback. In other words, if someone says your work is gorgeous, that just tells you about *their* taste. If you put out a new product and it doesn't sell at all, that tells you something about what your audience does and doesn't want. When we look at praise and criticism as information about the people giving it, we tend to get really curious about the feedback, rather than dejected or defensive. ~ Tara Mohr

Strategic planning is the continuous process of making present entrepreneurial (risk-taking) decisions systematically and with the greatest knowledge of their futurity; organizing systematically the efforts needed to carry out these decisions; and measuring the results of these decisions against the expectations through organized, systematic feedback. ~ Peter Drucker

I have to experience the Nokia products. I'm a major contributor to the design and the quality of the devices. I have a lot of feedback to provide the teams on that. But also I have to carry competitive devices. You have to understand the competition. ~ Stephen Elop

In the 'Angel' days, all there was was a community that was like a chat room. If you were looking for feedback, you had to look for it. ~ J. August Richards

In short, the animal and vegetable lines, diverging widely above, join below in a loop. ~ Asa Gray

As a young entrepreneur starting an enterprise company, be prepared for the fact that you'll need to get involved in enterprise sales. Everyone wants to speak to the founder, and this is also how you'll get feedback on your product. It's worth bringing in early somebody with enterprise sales experience. ~ Anthony Goldbloom

The process always starts with detailed conversations with the director, followed by a spotting session (deciding where the music goes and doesn't go in the film, and what the music should be saying or not saying) in each scene. This is followed by sending the director demos of each cue for feedback. ~ John Keltonic

You may not personally remember Vietnam or Watergate, but it's a good bet you remember "No new taxes" and "Out of the loop" and "No direct knowledge of any impropriety at this time" and "Did not inhale" and "Did not have sex with that Ms. Lewinsky" and etc. etc. It's painful to believe that the would-be "public servants" you're forced to choose between are all phonies whose only real concern is their own care and feeding and who will lie so outrageously and with such a straight face that you know they've just got to believe you're an idiot. So who wouldn't yawn and turn away, trade apathy and cynicism for the hurt of getting treated with contempt? ~ David Foster Wallace

If you don't get feedback from your performers and your audience, you're going to be working in a vacuum. ~ Peter Maxwell Davies

Juggling is about throwing, not catching That's why it's so difficult to learn how to juggle. We're conditioned to make the catch, to hurdle whatever is in our way to save the day, to - no matter what - not drop the ball. If you spend your time and energy and focus on catching, it's inevitable that your throws will suffer. You'll get plenty of positive feedback for the catches you make, but you'll always be behind, because the throws you manage to make will be ever less useful. Paradoxically, if you get better at throwing, the catches take care of themselves. The only way to get better at throwing, though, is to throw. Throw poorly, throw again. Throw well, throw again. Get good at throwing first. ~ Seth Godin

I think by paying attention to the feedback that you get on Yelp, you can very quickly integrate it into your business ... The really savvy folks out there, they don't necessarily take anything negative personally, but use it as constructive feedback and adjust their business. ~ Jeremy Stoppelman

I had people read it early on and, you know, well-meaning people said to me, you should take out the blogs. I didn't get much positive feedback. Only because most of these people were protective of me - it was sort of like a "tone it down, make it easier to swallow" kind of thing. And I just thought if I do that then it's not the book I want to write. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Most of the fans have ideas about their perfect phone. But many of them can't do it because building a phone is tough. So they would give us feedback about the features that they think should be included in our next model. And if we incorporated that in our new phone, they will share the good news with their friends. ~ Lei Jun

A stand-up comedian faces the audiences and gets their immediate feedback. I hide behind the comic strip, and unless people write to me, I don't know what they think. ~ Stephan Pastis

I believe with faith all is possible. An answer to prayer is greatest positive feedback you can get. ~ J. R. Martinez

But if you don't decide what needs to be done about your secretary's birthday, because it's "not that important" right now, that open loop will take up energy and prevent you from having a totally effective, clear focus on what is important. ~ David Allen

The answers to all a startup's challenges are out there. By setting up the right mechanisms for gathering feedback, the road to success can be a less bumpy ride. ~ Jay Samit

Learning research tells us that the time lag from experiment to feedback is critical ... ~ Kent Beck

I feel so much feedback in a very profound way from the 10,000 people who are listening to me, watching me. I just get this deep sense of what works and what doesn't work. ~ Rivers Cuomo

I went to Colby College in Waterville, ME and did picture it when I was writing 'Cum Laude.' So many of the physical details were included, like the loop where people jogged. The story of the chapel is also borrowed from Colby ... but the students and cast of characters are fictional. ~ Cecily Von Ziegesar

Having the kind of infinite loop of what a digital stream is - you can shoot for a long time without cutting - allows me to sometimes perform really exciting things. ~ James Mangold

When I wasn't internally grumbling about my physical state, I found my mind playing and replaying scraps of songs and jingles in an eternal, nonsensical loop, as if there were a mix-tape radio station in my head. Up against the silence, my brain answered back with fragmented lines from tunes I'd heard over the course of my life - bits from songs I loved and clear renditions of jingles from commercials that almost drove me mad. ~ Cheryl Strayed

People are going to think and take things how they're going to take it, and I have no control over that, so it's kind of like biding time until you get your feedback. So, it's like, once the public can consume what you're putting out there, then you know. Then you know hit, miss, in between. ~ Phil Anselmo

Criticism is the best test of such work, for it will show her both unsuspected merits and faults, and help her to do better next time. We are too partial; but the praise and blame of outsiders will prove useful... ~ Louisa May Alcott

If a mother cannot meet her baby's impulses and needs, [quoting Donald Winnicott] 'the baby learns to become the mother's idea of what the baby is.' Having to discount its inner sensations, and trying to adjust it its caregiver's needs, means the child perceives that 'something is wrong' with the way it is. Children who lack physical attunement are vulnerable to shutting down the direct feedback from their bodies, the seat of pleasure, purpose, and direction. ~ Bessel A. Van Der Kolk

People won't give you feedback until they think you actually want it. ~ Sheila Heen

Look at the way celebrities and politicians are using Facebook already. When Ashton Kutcher posts a video, he gets hundreds of pieces of feedback. Maybe he doesn't have time to read them all or respond to them all, but he's getting good feedback and getting a good sense of how people are thinking about that and maybe can respond to some of it. ~ Mark Zuckerberg

He's like a song she can't get out of her head. Hard as she tries, the melody of their meeting runs through her mind on an endless loop, each time as surprisingly sweet as the last, like a lullaby, like a hymn, and she doesn't think she could ever get tired of hearing it. ~ Jennifer E. Smith

We heard later through the grapevine that we were being compared to the Furious 5, and because of that we were getting feedback that they were saying that we werent all that, that we were copying them ... blah blah blah. ~ Kool Moe Dee

It gives me a huge buzz when people say they've enjoyed my books, because this grew out of a hobby, and it's an absolute passion, and it's lovely when I get feedback. ~ Alison Weir

As far as engaging with fans ... it's a tricky thing. I enjoy seeing the feedback on Twitter, etc. It's probably the actor in me. ~ Bryan Cogman

You might think of a haunting as a loop of video or audio tape playing itself over and over for you to watch. Trying to interact with it would be akin to trying to interact with a show on your TV: sure, you can turn it off or change the channel, but I wouldn't expect the actors to suddenly stop and talk to you directly. ~ Loyd Auerbach