On Improving Communication

“The mistake is to think that communications will solve the problems of communication, that better wiring will eliminate the ghosts.”
—John Durham Peters

“The mistake is to think that communications will solve the problems of communication, that better wiring will eliminate the ghosts.”
—John Durham Peters
I recently heard Dan Sulmasy give an ethics talk at a conference. Like me, Dan is a general internist. In his talk, he quoted a former President of the Society of General Internal Medicine and I thought I’d pass the quote along. That former President was Nicole Lurie, who now works for the federal government…
I came across an interesting quote in the New Yorker recently, reflecting on the US banking system. It reads: The power and the growth of power of our financial oligarchs comes from wielding the savings and credit capital of others. The fetters which bind the people are forged from the people’s own gold. Pretty timely thoughts,…
Interesting picture on the Vox website from Sarah Kliff, showing an increase in the number of health insurance companies planning to compete on the exchanges next year: So much for the rumors that Obamacare will quickly kill the health insurance industry. (Click here to view comments)
David Brooks is a pretty solidly moderate conservative, and one who is a big fan of behavioral science. But that doesn’t mean he can see beyond his own biases, especially when describing the differences between conservatives and liberals. He was particularly offensive on May 7, in an article titled “Beyond the Fence,” in which he discusses…
Behavioral economists have written a lot about sunk costs. The idea is pretty simple: once people have invested in an effort – in time or money – they stick with that effort longer than is otherwise justified. They don’t want to feel like they’ve wasted their investment, so they continue to invest even when pulling…
In many ways, Jeremy Bentham was all about equality. As the father of utilitarianism, he believed that all social policy should be designed to maximize the happiness and pleasures of humans’ experience while minimizing the pains and miseries. And in espousing this theory of justice, he didn’t distinguish between upper class and lower class and…