Discussing his style of interviewing all officers who entered the Naval Reactors program.
The Rickover Effect (1992)
Context: They all have excellent resumes... So what I’m trying to find out is how they will behave under pressure. Will they lie, or bluff, or panic, or wilt? Or will they continue to function with some modicum of competence and integrity?
“A good means to discovery is to take away certain parts of a system to find out how the rest behaves.”
As quoted in A Dictionary of Scientific Quotations (1991) edited by Alan Lindsay Mackay, p. 154
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Georg Christoph Lichtenberg 137
German scientist, satirist 1742–1799Related quotes
Source: The systems view of the world (1996), p. 85-86 as cited in: Sherryl Stalinski (2005, p. 23).
At the other extreme is a set of parts that are completely unrelated: that is, a change in each part depends only on that part alone. The variation in the set is the physical sum of the variations of the parts. Such behavior is called independent or physical summativity.
Source: Definition of System, 1956, p. 23
SGU, Podcast #253, May 19th, 2010 http://www.theskepticsguide.org/podcast/sgu/253
The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, Podcast, 2010s
Kurt Koffka (1931), self-cited in: Kurt Koffka. Principles of Gestalt Psychology, 1935, p. 22