"I am not an optimist.... I'm a very serious 'possibilist'... someone who neither hopes without reason, nor fears without reason... I see all this progress, and it fills me with conviction and hope that further progress is possible. This is not optimistic. It is having a clear and reasonable idea about how things are. It is having a worldview that is constructive and useful." --Hans Rosling

-

 























































































We have much more work to do. But how can we do that work best if we do not know what has worked already? How can we achieve more success if we don't even have a clear idea of what success we have already managed? 




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Big 21st-Century Ideas the World is Counting on You to Know (Share More in the Comments!)

-
In a lecture I attended last year my  professor prefaced a discussion of game theory with "and the concept of a prisoner's dilemma is one of those things I am confident saying you are not an educated person in any meaningful sense if you have never taken the trouble to understand or learn it. The idea that we can map out the conditions under which cooperators will defect given individual incentives, even despite the fact that the collective incentive can be to cooperate for a higher payoff, is so fundamental to understanding the problems of the 21st century (like Climate Change) that I think it's only fair that we set our bar/expectations for the educated person high enough that they would know this enough to be able to act on it."   This got me thinking: what else would a list of things every 21st Century person should know include?  Pick any discipline you want, but try to meet my criteria. Here's mine! (A list like this is bound to sound opinionated and self-co
Read more

The Trump Era saw vicious political polarization. Has it cooled off under Biden?

-
  Here is an objective, documented fact: Republicans believe that there were two invasions of the Capital in January. The riot was a horrible debacle, to be sure, but if they’re being consistent, it’s a minor peccadillo compared to the second violation of that hallowed national sanctum: the moment Joseph R. Biden stole onto its steps to be sworn as our 46th president. According to  an NPR/PBS public opinion survey , just 24% of Republicans accept the results of the 2020 presidential election, with the majority of those remaining believing high members of the other party to have conspired to steal it in the single greatest act of political fraud in history. That is, almost half of the voting population believes that the United States is no longer politically legitimate, democracy has surrendered to an elaborate swindle, and the White House has been burglarized by the current administration. Surely this would be worse than any riot, if it were true. If anything, if people believed this,
Read more