Sherwood.dean

Tom Brady is an elite athlete. Few have even approached the stats he had playing football. And Catherine Walker, NSTA Science Teacher of the Year, is an elite, because her pedagogy and understanding give her the ability to create better outcomes for her students. There’s a hospital for special surgery, but all surgery is special if it’s surgery on someone you care about, so we seek out an elite doctor because outcomes matter.

Our culture prizes performance, we spend a lot of time ranking and measuring output. Fans of a team are rooting for their side to win, because identity is easily hooked into performance.

But this is not at all related to elitism. Elitism is a barrier, where we use a label to decide who gets to contribute and who is offered dignity. A law firm that only hires from a few law schools is elitist–they have no data to confirm that these recruits are more likely to contribute than others, they’re simply artificially limiting the pool they draw from.

Opening our filters and seeking a diversity of experience undermines elitist insecurity and creates the possibility for even better solutions and connection.

Elitism also shows up when elites who are arguably very good at something believe that this means that they’re also good at everything.

The scientific method isn’t elitist, nor is a stopwatch used to record the 100 meter dash. Seeking coherent arguments, logical approaches and a contribution that leads to better outcomes isn’t elitist, in fact, it’s precisely the opposite.

We can celebrate elite performance without being elitist. In fact, it’s the best way to do so.

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I was in a train station a few years ago and all the women were dressed like it was the eighties. Went back to my farm and emerged a year later to see all the men had developed mustaches as a kind of reflexive mating response.

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I learned today that the etymological roots of the word anatomy mean cutting up.

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Okay, occasionally they are autobiographical.

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Do you want to do EVERYTHING right or do you want to have FRIENDSHIP?

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A car cut me off on the highway the other day. The car was going nearly 100 mph.

Was the car a new Porsche 911 GT3 or a used Toyota Camry?

The thing is, there are more than 1,000 times as many Camrys on the road. But our instinct is to pick the vivid and distinctive answer.

The per capita crime rate in rural areas is often dramatically (sometimes five or ten times) higher than it is in most cities.

On the other hand, Alaska has far more millionaires per capita than most people would guess. That’s because we underestimate the population, not because there’s a particularly large number of millionaires.

More people might lead to more instances, but what matters isn’t the absolute number, it’s the percentage. New York is an incredibly safe place to live.

We’re simply not naturally attuned to dividing what we notice by the chances we’ll see it… stories resonate without regard for the denominator.

Flying across the country is dramatically safer than driving there, but intuitively, it feels like the opposite must be true. And peer-reviewed medicine is far more likely to cure an illness than an anecdote will.

The average TikTok or Facebook post is seen by just a few people, even though it feels like the ones we’re seeing are seen by a lot of people.

Reality is lumpy, and taking a moment to think about the source of our story helps us get clear about what’s actually happening.

Marketing is generally about action. Marketers seek to create the conditions for a change to happen, for people to accomplish their goals and to satisfy their needs.

But since 1950, some marketers have worked in a different direction. To sow confusion and doubt, and most of all, to seek delay.

In 1954, facing the real threat of peer-reviewed and clear evidence that smoking caused lung cancer, the cigarette industry startled pundits by acknowledging the research and then calling for more research.

“More research” is a brilliant (if evil) tactic. It resonates with people who embrace science (since it calls for more) and it also works for people who want the status quo to remain untouched (because it calls for later).

We’ve seen this playbook used again and again. In the face of reality, big companies simply stall. And they’ve discovered that when the problem is chronic, nuanced and complex, they can stall for a very long time.

Because we choose to not understand. We’d prefer to pretend that we can wait. We accept that maybe, more research will pleasantly surprise us.

As long as people don’t understand, the stalling works.

Spending more than a year working as a volunteer with hundreds of other people on The Carbon Almanac gave me a chance to really understand what is happening to our climate. Not just to the weather (10 days in a row over 119 degrees in Phoenix)… to the climate. To see that the best time to act was thirty years ago, but now is all we have left.

It’s easy to be confused, but it’s not that difficult to understand. It’s all in the almanac.

The new CEO of Shell just announced that the company is redoubling its efforts to produce ever more fossil fuels. Because there’s money to be made in the short-run. And because the public doesn’t see.

Until we understand, it’s difficult to make change happen.

The good news is that understanding is within our reach.

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Statistically, SOMEONE must've done this by accident by now.

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BUY MY BOOK OK

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It's remarkable how much nicer the world is when you imagine all bad actions are made in pursuit of higher ends.

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Tolkien ends up in Heaven but is secretly disappointed Valhalla wasn't available.

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This is the saddest bonus panel I ever drew.

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Be careful not to join the SMBC patreon, because it's got inappropriate-

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Electromagnetic sewage is the alternative title for SMBC.

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All examples from the book Noise, by Kahneman, Sibony, and Sunstein, which I'm enjoying right now.

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Informative. The higher viral load has now been widely reported (and explains why it is more transmissible), but I hadn't seen the point about the incubation period before: an average of four days, instead of six.

After all, the marketplace is scalable, independent, self-funding, convenient and persistent.

Except there are problems that the market hasn’t solved, and probably can’t. A century into this worldwide experiment, the market hasn’t solved mass education, it’s made obesity and health problems worse, and it has dumped an enormous amount of long-term toxic waste into the world where we all live.

Patient capital can work wonders, but networked economies are becoming ever more impatient in their race for basis points and shortcuts.

When we hand a chronic problem over to the market, it might be because we can’t bear to look at it or take responsibility for the hard work and sacrifice it will take to solve it.

If the market can solve a problem, it’s a bargain. Markets are effective listening devices and resilient and often self-coordinating. But expecting the market to solve every problem isn’t useful.

Sometimes, the specific tools of the open market aren’t aligned with the problem at hand. Externalities, patience and incentives are all worth considering before we decide the problem will solve itself.

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The balloon has two dollars in it.

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Google is not your friend, it’s a tool.

It’s been 2,702 days since they shut down Google Reader and people still remember.

Or consider that Google can shut you out of all their services with no recourse or appeal possible. All your data, photos, calendars, emails… gone.

But yes, you can back up your data. Do it today…

Visit this page to start the process. It’s free. Hopefully, you’ll never need it. Press a few buttons and back up your data to a cloud service so that it’s in two places–This should happen automatically, but since it doesn’t, it’s worth doing.

The internet was originally designed as a resilience machine, designed to heal itself and work around interruptions. And the essence of it was a distributed, peer-to-peer network that worked precisely because it was open. As data is hoarded, manipulated and monetized, that original intent has been turned upside down.

Resilient systems don’t have to trend toward monopoly. In fact, it’s better when they don’t. And don’t forget to backup your data.

[PS the post from earlier today was skewed by homonyms. Thanks to alert readers for pointing it out… sorry about missing it, but the metaphor is still worth thinking about.]

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Nature doesn't exactly want you dead, but it certainly doesn't want you alive.

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Why do educated people too often fall for foolish scams and conspiracy theories?

The problem is that no one taught us to understand. Instead, we are pushed to simply to memorize. To be educated enough to do well on the test, and then to forget what we were taught, because we never actually learned it.

Understanding opens the door to insight and to comfort with the data. Understanding is the platform we need to go to the next level… memorizing is a fragile house of cards, with no foundation. And the compliance mindset of “will this be on the test?” simply sets us up to believe the next thing that we’re supposed to learn.

We now have a chance to turn this fall’s back-to-school (in the Northern Hemisphere) into self-directed, project-based learning instead of a rush toward compliance and butts in chairs and pencils on tests. Shipping the project, proving it works and then doing it again. Learning by doing. Self-direction unlocks our ability to contribute for a lifetime, whereas preparing for the test ensures that we will always be at the mercy of the person who is giving the test. People are not entitled to their own facts–and understanding helps us discover the ones that matter.

From the age of five, many kids are capable of self-directed, project-based learning if we’re willing to turn off the TV and accept that the process won’t immediately lead to sought-after standardized test results. We can create a pattern of teaching people to be curious because curiosity is an engine for learning… it is less predictable but far more powerful than the current alternative: Creating a desire to get it over with combined with the ability to believe whatever the person in power tells us to believe.

Learning opens the door to the future we’d like to live in.

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My generation's codpiece is yelling at strangers on twitter.

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Radiation therapy often is used to treat cancer patients. Now, doctors have shown that radiation therapy -- aimed directly at the heart -- can be used to treat patients with a life-threatening heart rhythm. They treated five patients with irregular heart rhythms, called ventricular tachycardia, who had not responded to standard treatments. The therapy resulted in a dramatic reduction in the number of ventricular tachycardia episodes.