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'There's No Good Way To Kill a Bad Idea' (qz.com)
The world is filled with bad, baseless, factually inaccurate ideas that refuse to die. From an article: Philosopher Russell Blackford, a lecturer at the University of Newcastle in Australia, tweeted about this phenomenon earlier this month: "The momentum behind bad ideas can be enormous -- they can plunge on, gathering force, long after receiving devastating criticism." If you've ever found yourself unable to halt someone else's idiotic plans once they were already in motion, you're not alone. Whether you're a politician trying to make congress see sense or simply a manager trying to halt an atrocious team-building plan, there's simply no foolproof way to kill a terrible idea. Blackford blames the momentum behind bad ideas on cascade effects. Yes, individuals are prone to making poor decisions for emotional or biased reasons (known as "cognitive heuristics") and this irrationality is part of the problem. But there's also a broader sociological issue, in that others' opinions carry a huge amount of weight in influencing our views. A cultural consensus -- even without proper evidence -- can form pretty quickly. If one person convinces a second, says Blackford, then a third person will be far more likely to agree with the majority view. This effect exponentially increases with each person who agrees with the others. "We soon have a sociological effect whereby everyone knows that, say, a certain movie is very good or very bad, even though everyone might have 'known' the exact opposite if only a few early voices had been different," says Blackford.
This concept is also know as "escalation of commitment", where you feel you're welded to an idea and backing down will cause you to look bad. It's especially common in groupthink scenarios.
The Challenger disaster is one that comes to mind almost immediately. Plenty of people thought the launch was a bad idea, but groupthink set in and the launch proceeded.
...ideas you think are bad aren't really bad?
If you can't kill a "bad idea", that suggest that there are people who believe it to be a "good idea".
This whole exercise presumes that he is the one in possession of the Truth and that all others are idiots.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
The unkillable idea owes its invulnerability in large part to two phenomena: the sunk cost fallacy, and the Abilene paradox.
In short, once a group of people have agreed (even very reluctantly) on a course of action and expended resources in pursuit of the goal, nobody wants to openly admit it was a bad idea to begin with, and everyone will fight to defend it.
Maybe in that scenario. I wasn't there so I can't comment further.
But I have been in situations where my peers put on a lot of pressure.
You either fall in line with the group or you are an 'idiot'. Management does take its cues from underlings - it just sucks when you are not the underling they listen to.
The challenger case was an example of several different sorts of broken thinking:
1) Concerns engineers had over the design were not passed along to the contractor.
2) Evidence of O-ring erosion was not passed to NASA upper management.
3) The contractor identified O-ring erosion as a major problem and put into work a redesign. Shuttles were not grounded because this was considered an "acceptable flight risk."
4) We really need to get this launch going, we can't afford more delays. "I am appalled, appalled by your recommendation [to scrub the launch]. My God, Thiokol, when do you want me to launch, next April?"
5) Management ignored the express objections of engineering. They thought if the primary O-ring failed, the secondary O-ring would be sufficient, despite that being mere theory. It was a "criticality 1 component," and NASA regs forbid the reliance on a backup for a Criticality 1 component.
6) For unknown reasons, the contractor's management reversed itself the night before and recommended launch despite the temps and ice. NASA did not ask why. A chief engineer at the contracting company told his wife that night that the Space Shuttle Challenger would blow up.
The Shuttle disaster is the perfect example of reasonable, well-supported arguments being unable to penetrate the group-think of bad decisions, because other factors (launch delays, etc) were allowed to override a known flight risk.
And in fact, it *does* power the planet. It's only our narrow focus on things that are literally "accounted for" in our economy that makes it appear otherwise. If we had to replace all the things that sunlight does for us with our non-renewable energy sources they wouldn't even come close, but that all happens off the books so it's invisible.
Now I worked for environmental organizations in the years of transition from crying indian environmentalism to "sustainability" based environmentalism, and I always had a problem with the new framing: non-sustainability is by definition a self-correcting problem.
So if we survive as a society, that society will eventually be powered by (and limited by) solar energy. The problem isn't non-sustainability per se, but the predictable costs of running unprepared into the limits of the processes we depend on.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
There you go. Either use some transliteration system or learn a proper language.
Me neither. If you want pictures (for people who can't read, perhaps) there's png.
Ovid didn't need unicode, and neither did Shakespeare.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."