“I don’t know”: Intellectual Humility and power imbalance when Dunning Kruger meets the Prisoner’s Dilemma

I am drawn to clickbait articles about self-improvement. Especially ones about being smart (their appeal is a suitable reminder to myself that I'm not, in case my head swells too much). This morning I was reading one such. It had all the classics of a genre which tends to be populated by smart-ish people trying … Continue reading “I don’t know”: Intellectual Humility and power imbalance when Dunning Kruger meets the Prisoner’s Dilemma

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You’ve Found a Niche: What Now?

Finding a niche is the key to maximising your impact in the world. But the fact it is a niche is also the biggest barrier to creating that impact. It may be that, as Peter Thiel says about start-ups in Zero to One, fields that would make the world better are not distributed in the … Continue reading You’ve Found a Niche: What Now?

Misunderstanding Excellence: relating the parts to the whole

My day job is with the University of Oxford, working in the administration. Two recent developments have shone a light on what in retrospect, is a fundamental truth about organisations that should have been obvious to me long since: The excellence of an organisation is not dependent on the excellence of its parts. There are … Continue reading Misunderstanding Excellence: relating the parts to the whole

Subjectivity and Friction

Subjectivity - what it means for a "person" (whatever that is) to be the direct, immediate, or ultimate (or a combination of all three) cause of their actions - is something I have been studying in earnest since I was a very wet behind the ears Masters student a quarter (eek!) of a century ago. … Continue reading Subjectivity and Friction

Convergence, Divergence, Vision, Strategy, Tactics, Behavioural Science, Game Theory and Coronavirus

Originally a twitter thread, I thought it might be useful to lay out more readably: There is a lot of criticism of behavioural science at the moment (because, largely, 1. of the people using it - & our memories of Cambridge Analytica; 2. It is highly impersonal & thus inappropriate when lives are involved). Much … Continue reading Convergence, Divergence, Vision, Strategy, Tactics, Behavioural Science, Game Theory and Coronavirus