In the practical, objective, scientific method world of observation, testing and refined decision making that most of us are tied to, it is sometimes easy to dismiss the emotional elements as fluff, irrelevant, and to be avoided. But any objective reasoning, especially in the public sector, invariably requires an element ...
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Beliefs are funny things. For instance I’ve always believed that ‘Eleanor’ by The Turtles is one of the finest lyrical masterpieces in Rock & Roll history, but most of my friends believe that I’m nuts. Clearly, I need new friends – ones with better judgement…but I digress. Three ...
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Realizing that everything that happens online is just going to be different, we need to understand what works better and under what circumstances. Read more...
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With due respect to the previous article and its suggestions for convincing people to mask up, most people don’t understand numbers very well. People who routinely work with numbers like numbers a lot, but for most other people, numbers need to be explained in context and with relevance. Data and ...
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There’s an old saying that You do not need a parachute to skydive, you only need a parachute to skydive twice, which I think relates nicely to the face mask debate. Science says wearing face masks in public will prevent a lot of coronavirus illness and death and many of ...
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We’ve talked a lot here about risk assessment – the science of measuring the bad things that happen and the magnitude of harm – vs. risk communication, the art of helping people understand and act (or not) on the science and the math of risks. Some risks are high probability ...
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I’m quite sure that you’ll agree that 2020 is one for the books. 20-20 hindsight may be forever ruined as a positive reference. But on top of everything else going on, this may end up being known as the year of apology. There are a lot of obvious and not ...
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Regardless of how smart or “woke” we think that we might be, the facts are that humans are driven by emotion first and logic second. And our emotional brains push us to be biased in lots of interesting ways. We’re inclined to think we’re smarter than we are, that people ...
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We’re not on the same page. People in the U.S. aren’t even in the same library, it seems. Having or facilitating conversations between people who differ so dramatically in their views feels like an insurmountable task but there are better and worse ways to approach them so consider this. Read ...
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I suspect you know someone who doesn’t buy into the COVID-19 issue as that big of a deal or they actually believe that it’s some kind of manufactured hoax. You’ll hear statements like, It’s just like the flu, in fact the flu’s killed more people so far ...
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