Tag Archives: ideas

Articles I Like: The Law of Unintended Consequences: Shakespeare, Cobra Breeding, and a Tower in Pisa

The PolyBlog
March 4 2018

This is another article from Farnam Street, and I confess up until a few days ago, I’d never heard of them. Run by a guy named Shane Parrish, he’s based here in Ottawa. Some really fascinating stuff on there, with decent curation and a lot of links. This article highlights that:

Not all of our grand schemes turn out like we planned. In fact, sometimes things go horribly awry. In this article, we tackle unintended consequences and how to minimize them in our own decision making.

The Law of Unintended Consequences: Shakespeare, Cobra Breeding, and a Tower in Pisa | Farnam Street

You might think that the article is going to be about train wreck ideas or the butterfly effect causing tsunamis.… Read the rest

Articles I Like: Mental Models – The Best Way to Make Intelligent Decisions (113 Models Explained)

The PolyBlog
March 3 2018

If you’re interested in goals and theory the way I am, then an article about “cross-training for the mind” and different ways of thinking in various disciplines is like catnip. When I saw the article, and that it was going to work through 113 different mental models, I couldn’t NOT click on that bait. In fact, their goal in the article is based on the following:

The overarching goal is to build a powerful “tree” of the mind with strong and deep roots, a massive trunk, and lots of sturdy branches. We use this tree to hang the “leaves” of experience we acquire, directly and vicariously, throughout our lifetimes: the scenarios, decisions, problems, and solutions arising in any human life.

… Read the rest

Articles I Like: Dread accompanies me through life

The PolyBlog
February 24 2018

Firefox has this little feature when you pull up its built-in home page with a search engine box — just below the box is your recently viewed webpages, nothing unusual there, but between the search and history are three articles that Firefox thinks might be of interest to you. I have no idea if they are actually using an algorithm of the web history and past searches, or just curating interesting stories, but I often find one or more of the stories worthy of clicking. I figured initially that it was just clickbait, but most of the time, when I’ve actually clicked, the article has been worth the click.… Read the rest

A horror-filled business case…

The PolyBlog
August 25 2016

Back in January of this year, Joe Castaldo published an article through Canadian Business magazine. It has a relatively innocuous title — “The Last Days of Target” — but the sub-title gives you a hint of the content…”The untold tale of Target Canada’s difficult birth, tough life and brutal death”. I didn’t see the article at the time, and I’m not even sure I would have clicked if I had. After all, wasn’t the demise of Target relatively straight-forward?

It seemed so to the casual observer. Towers, K-mart, Woolco, Zellers…all of them went down-market, bottomed out, and couldn’t make it work.… Read the rest

TED talks about Education by Ken Robinson

The PolyBlog
March 30 2011

The videos below are two of the TED talks by Ken Robinson (2006 and 2010), who focuses on education systems. The first is about creativity, and how it is as important as literacy, but whereas we learn literacy, we tend to “unlearn” creativity.

The second one looks at how education systems tend to be like manufacturing enterprises, assembly line entities that go linearly from kindergarten to higher education. His talk argues for a different way of looking at it, more like a fine-dining restaurant than McEducation. The quote from Lincoln alone is probably worth the price of watching. Enjoy…