All Life Is Problem Solving

Occasionally, articles appear comparing health care in the United States with health care in Canada or other wealthy western countries in terms of health outcomes. Yesterday, Nicholas Kristof, in an op-ed piece in the New York Times, compared the two countries’ health care system through the filter of the experience of a 59 year-old American […]

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If Progressives and Democrats are going to be successful in the future, they have to solve important problems of middle and working class people, such as stagnant real income, declining wealth, terrible and high risk (i.e. easily disappearing) health insurance, high quality education for all, including opportunities for everyone to get a college education, a […]

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I’ve always been a Democrat and a pretty progressive one at that. But since the Carter Administration, I’ve been pretty dismayed by the tendency of Democrats who have won the Presidency, or gained control of Congress, to give away their ability to produce solutions to problems that serve the interests of their constituencies by adopting […]

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I’ve been waiting for universal health care legislation since 1949. But, of course, the opponents of such legislation don’t want us to do anything “hasty,” and “jam” legislation through Congress. They want “careful consideration” of health care reform as if 60 years of proposals, studies, and deliberation were not enough. Representing the opponents of universal […]

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Perhaps mercifully, if you’re one of my members who like my KM posts but can’t stand my take on political issues, I’ve been pretty quiet lately about the wars, filibusters, the economy, torture, health care, energy policy, political strategy, or any of the other issues I get the urge to comment on. That’s because having […]

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Yesterday, I offered a high-level case for Federal Knowledge Management. But I did oversimplify things a bit, to keep my post short. The complication I didn’t want to introduce earlier is the idea that Knowledge Management already exists in every locale within the Federal Government, whether we think it does or not, and whether we […]

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The Federal Government really needs Knowledge Management. It needs Knowledge Management in many, if not most of its agencies. It needs Knowledge Management in its inter-agency teams. It needs Knowledge Management in the Congress. It needs Knowledge Management in the Judiciary. It needs Knowledge Management in the Federal Reserve System. And it needs Knowledge Management […]

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In past blogs, I’ve discussed Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan as a metaphor for systematic doubt and fallibilism as well the ideas of scalability, non-scalability, Extremistan, Mediocristan, the fallacy of silent evidence, confirmation error or platonic confirmation, epistemic arrogance, future blindness, the lottery-ticket fallacy, the ludic fallacy, Mandelbrodtian randomess and Gray Swans, the narrative […]

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Here’s more on ideas from Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s (NNT) The Black Swan, including discussions of Platonic folds, Platonicity, randomness as incomplete information, retrospective distortion, and the round-trip fallacy. Platonic Folds and Platonicity. NNT focuses a lot of attention on our tendency to view our concepts, models and representations as pure, sharp, crisp, abstract forms. A […]

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More on ideas from Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s (NNT) The Black Swan today, including discussions of the Lottery Ticket and Ludic fallacies, Mandelbrodtian Randomness, and Gray Swans, and the Narrative Fallacy. The Lottery Ticket Fallacy. One of the things NNT calls attention to is the possibility and advisability of living one’s life in such a way […]

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