ABC News: Could Docs Save Man with Bomb in Body?:
Making Light: “I don’t need to know the details.”:
I think there’s an idea here without a clear term to point to it: ideologies that require or encourage a kind of willful ignorance. Those can be cured, but only by breaking with the ideology.
Frex, a lot of economic determinists (Marxists and neoclassical economists) seem to have the idea that they don’t need to know much about the world to understand it, because their economic models give them the fundamental insights. I think the screwups in Iraq have largely been caused by very smart people whose ideology led them to think that they had grasped the essentials of the situation there, despite scary stuff like not knowing the difference between Shia and Sunni. I think there’s also a widespread idea in management that you should be able to manage things whose details you don’t understand all that well. (But that’s way outside my field or interests, so I may just be misunderstanding.)
The hard thing is, you *have* to have simplifying models — they’re what make a fiercely complex world usable. But your model can really screw you, by convincing you that you know the important stuff, even when you’re frightfully ignorant of the details. And people with very powerful or convincing models often get screwed in just this way, as they try to apply their powerful model from one situation into a different one. Even worse, some models’ strength is that they make for good rhetoric, and when tested against the real world, they fail horribly. But group decisionmaking is largely done through rhetoric — both national politics and internal politics of most groups. You can have disastrous ideas that win all the arguments, sound great, and reliably gain power — I’d say that the rhetoric about the Middle East being ripe for democracy, democracy leading to peace, etc., is a good example of that.
Science Fiction Writer Admits Unstoppable Killing Machine Based On Mother: Sure, you only think the Onion made it up.
Second Hand Songs: a cover songs database.
Why should God bless America? Because if we have people like this in the country, we need all the blessings we can get.
Related: Windows users 20% more interested in God than Mac users – Boing Boing:
Thoof has done some analysis of the data collected by their recommendation algorithm, and discovered some interesting differences between Mac users and Windows users. For example, it seems Windows users are 20% more interested in religion, but 6% less interested in intellectual property law.
Getting Things Done: David Allen on Managing Your Stuff with GTD – video – Lifehacker