Recommended. A wide-lens view on more than fifty years of RCTs in the criminal legal space reveals a few common themes: most interventions don’t work,… Read More »Cascades, tides and shifting stars in social interventions: Megan Stevenson on cause, effect and the limits of RCTs
At the turn of the 20th century, the Swiss were plagued by strange, interlinked medical conditions, which existed elsewhere to a degree, but in Switzerland… Read More »Not long ago; or, Little by little (10): Switzerland’s iodine revolution
I hope this snippet makes you go and read the whole thing. In his Theory of the Leisure Class … Thorstein Veblen explains that “conspicuous… Read More »Splendour and Horror: Agnes Callard on shopping, Zola, and the birth of consumerism
Heisenberg prefaces Physics and Beyond with the note that “needless to say, conversations cannot be reconstructed literally after several decades….” [Niels Bohr, as recalled Heisenberg]:… Read More »Niels Bohr [via Werner Heisenberg] on breaking with Newton and the poetry of atoms
Lesslie Newbigin lived and worked in South India from 1936 to 1974, and originally wrote this in Tamil. Wherever and whenever we look at man,… Read More »Lesslie Newbigin on man’s contradictions
Not necessarily entirely true, but generative. Since culture is itself a poiesis, all of its participants are poietai—inventors, makers, artists, storytellers, mythologists. They are not,… Read More »James Carse on culture as art
The Heroic Vision Over shadowy spires and gleaming towers lay the ghostly darkness and silence that runs before dawn. Into a dim alley, one of… Read More »The Elucidated Brethren of the Ebon Night
… what you consider to be good working conditions may not be good for you. There are many illustrations of this point. For example, working… Read More »Richard Hamming on working with the door open
Excellent. Assumes no prior knowledge.
You can understand the relative importance of a system’s elements, interconnections, and purposes by imagining them changed one by one. Changing elements usually has the… Read More »Donella Meadows on systems thinking: elements, interconnections, purposes