Thursday, April 16, 2020

Best Practice


One of my favourite essays to regularly reread is Scott Alexander’s “I can tolerate anything except the outgroup”. It reminds me of how some of our biggest fights are with the people we most agree with. Because we care so much about the same issues. We understand the same nuance that other people don’t even see. An advantage of being a Global Citizen is the natural social experiment that goes on. We get to see Best Practice at play in a variety of contexts. Our issues, but not our issues. What if we changed this aspect? What if we keep that aspect the same? A strong temptation in any research is to provide Public Relations and Legal Arguments for pre-existing beliefs. Numbers and words to pad our gut feel. Looking far from home is often an easier way to unpack issues that are too close to see. Then, like Bruce Lee, we can take what is useful, discard what is not, and add what is uniquely our own.

Too Close




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