Interesting Links for 26-03-2014

[andrewducker]

• Fair bosses pay the price of burnout
  (tags: management )
• Labour's economic policies are almost identical to the Coalition
  (tags: politics uk economics )
• Jimmy Wales responds to a petition about changing Wikipedia to be friendlier to "holistic healing".
  (tags: scepticism wikipedia )
• My inner pedant is 85% under control. How about you?
  (tags:

Comments

My inner pedant is 85% under control. How about you?

[cartesiandaemon]

I disagreed that several of the questions were wrong at all. Does that make me more pedantic or less pedantic? :)

Re: My inner pedant is 85% under control. How about you?

[naath]

Oh, good. I'm not alone.

Re: My inner pedant is 85% under control. How about you?

[alitheapipkin]

Me three!

It compared me to a school teacher for being 27 % under control. I don't know whether that is intended as an insult or not but since I know some lovely ones, I'll take it as a compliment.

Jimmy Wales responds to a petition about changing Wikipedia to be friendlier to "holistic healing"

[cartesiandaemon]

And also, wikipedia, despite many flaws in portraying points of view neutrally, does a reasonable job at presenting that there *is* a minority viewpoint. In cases where the scientific consensus *is* out of date, there's often *some* sort of section on "these people disagree and here's why, even though the scientific consensus isn't convinced".

And I think that's important too, although I'm obviously very very glad alternative medicine is not presented as uncritically positively as better than conventinal medicine.

Radical Islam Website Readers May Be Prosecuted

[cartesiandaemon]

Although I can't find what they actually said. If someone is deliberately reading articles about "how to murder people", that might well be indicative of some sort of ACTUAL crime (not made-up-anti-terror-crime). But if someone in the MET is using that as an excuse to bully people out of reading any Islamist magazine, that's obviously a ridiculous encroaching on freedom of speech :(

[notlosers]

Re: burnout and fair practices, I wonder if it would be possible to build a framework / company culture such that managers didn't have to be watching out for it the whole time, and the effort was spread throughout the organization. That said, I'd argue that it's pretty core to what a manager should be.

[andrewducker]

I suspect it would be a lot easier if the organisation as a whole valued fairness, openness and honesty.

[drdoug]

I'm very much of Kinsey's view (apocryphal) that "the only unnatural sex act is that which one cannot perform".

On the other hand, though, I'm also okay with the view that all things that humans do are, ipso facto, artificial and unnatural. (Or at least, those things that are in principle open to voluntary control. I'm not sure that it makes sense to describe, say, the Krebs cycle in metabolism as unnatural when it happens in humans.)

I don't advise trying to hold both these points of view at once, though, unless you are an experienced mental contortionist and accustomed to such intellectual perversity.