Mark Fisher picks up some fairly grim examples of bureaucratic bullying in the public sector and the abuse of targets and surveys. Just reading the absurd form-filling required if a student arrives late to a lecture makes me want to weep.
And it’s good to this example of Sussex students boycotting the National Student Survey as a sop to genuine consultation and a trojan horse to justify cuts. Far too much money gets wasted on this kind of shallow quantitative research.
I think that business suffers from the tyranny of the explicit. Its desire for measurability and proof makes it focus on the explicit element of
Jonah Lehrer suggests thinking can often serve to confuse us. He reports research where students had to rate different jams. They managed to come out
Towards the end of this RSA Animate video, psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist quotes Einstein: The intuitive mind is a sacred gift, and the rational mind is
Following up on yesterday’s post, a second of our tyranny coatpegs it the Tyranny of the Explicit. Viv talks about it here and it’s something
Chris Corrigan has a good post on how complicated models masked the complexity of the financial system – and made the perpetrators very rich at
Maria Popova spots this great comment from John Steinbeck. If there is a magic in story writing and I am convinced there is, no one
Andrew Sullivan quotes Christian Wiman: I don’t think you can spend your whole life questioning whether language can represent reality. At some point, you have
Good post from Mind Hacks: When giving reasons leads to worse decisions Hat tip; @IdeaFestival
I stumbled on this crude graphic that I blogged back in 2004. I was making a point about a specific piece of marketing jargon, “brand
Yesterday I recorded a conversation with Viv McWaters and Roland Harwood on the theme of The Tyranny of the Explicit. We explore how the need
Tony Goodson has an interesting take on the success of the Olympics in Athens: Did the Athens Olympics go well? You bet they did. Was there a big stink and
Shocking research from the Onion has this as throwaway ending: In 2002, Fultz’s team shook the academic world by conclusively proving the existence of both bad ideas during brainstorming and
I’m in Sydney where I’ve just hosted a little gathering with Matt Moore which we called Walking and Talking. We wanted to host something informal where we wouldn’t feel under
I liked this: Buyacredit.com. Three British teenagers crowdsource the funding of a film of a little know Jules Verne novel. Hat tip: Neil Perkin’s recent slideshare.
