Reflection...

My dad  is a great proponent for education - but he always warned us:

"The more education people have, it seems the less common sense they have."

Does he have a point? How might this impact our pursuit of knowledge management solutions?

[Cathy O. Frampton]

My wife would certainly agree with your father after living with me all these years. :)

As to how that might relate to KM, I suspect that KM efforts will eventually help reinforce the notion of multiple intelligences and their relevance to organizational success. In the short term, KM efforts are likely to shift the balance toward those people in organizations who are most facile with the written word. That might become a problem if you couple it with the observation that a great deal of power in organizations flows to those most facile with the spoken word. 

Senior management is generally an oral culture and KM is a literate culture. An area for unexpected conflict and, to be hoped, eventual reconciliation

3:39:44 PM •  • comment  

Odds Are Stacked When Science Tries to Debate Pseudoscience. Opponents of the scientific method try very hard to appear in debates with scientists. Merely being on the same stage represents a victory. By Lawrence M. Krauss. [New York Times: Science]

Well worth reading on a number of levels. Two snippets worth noting:

Science is not fair. All ideas are not treated equally. Only those that have satisfied the test of experiment or can be tested by experiment have any currency. Beautiful ideas, elegant ideas and even sacrosanct notions are not immune from termination by the chilling knife edge of experimental data.

...

Science is not a democratic process. It does not proceed by majority rule and it does not accept notions that have already been disproven by experiment.

The curious thing is that science and democracy get along so well that we often fail to appreciate how different they are at root.

One particular problem this raises is that we don't see the limits on the possible that science takes for granted. We see the miracles and believe that anything is possible.  Worse, the worldviews are so deeply embedded that the two cultures often can't even recognize that they aren't communicating. For a legislator, to whom everything is negotiable, hearing a scientist claim something as impossible sounds like no more than an opening position for a debate. To a scientist, it is a claim that debate is irrelevant because we've moved outside the boundaries of science.

Based on the amount of nonsense trying to pass itself off as science and the general credence it is granted by the media and the general public, I'm not confident about our ability as a culture to learn to think with discipline.  This is not a good time to rely on lazy thinking.

9:43:20 AM •  • comment