Category: psychology
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Bribing Employees to Quit
One of those ‘Why didn’t I think of that?’ moments. An ingenuous—yet obvious—business practice from Zappos.com (a start-up company given funding by the infamous Sequoia Capital venture capital firm)… bribe your employees to quit so only the truly committed and enthusiastic are left. More at Harvard Business’ Why Zappos Pays New Employees to Quit—And You…
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The Meaning of Life. No, Seriously!
This is what started it all. By bringing some interesting philosophical questions to the table, this discussion got me seriously thinking about what impact not following a structured and continuous personal and professional development plan can have on both my quality of life and that of the world directly around me. The FAQ on the…
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Suing in the Name of God
Soon it’s going to be illegal to see into the future; contact the deceased; and find out what’s inside closed envelopes. Well, probably… New laws are about to criminalise clairvoyants who fail to note on their advertisements that their services ‘are not subject to scientific proof’. Obviously, I’d like to think that the more intelligent…
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The Placebo Effect – Once More With Feeling
I’ve just written a post on one of my favourite topics; the placebo effect. Triggered by the article Placebo is not what you think, it touches on the use of placebos by medical professionals (currently a banned practice) and the informed use of placebos by heroin addicts. Strangely enough, in the latter case the use…
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Aristotle’s Moral Virtues and Vices
In Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, moral virtues and their extremes are discussed. That is to say, personal characteristics and the extremes thereof. These extremes – or vices – are two of the three pillars of virtue, the third of which is The Golden Mean, or the Virtuous Mean. This mean is the position on the ‘scale’…
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CIA Guide to Optimised Thinking
Complex situations are – by their very nature – difficult to understand. Compound this with the fact that in any given situation we’re all going to have cognitive biases that make us view situations differently and inaccurately, and you’re going to have a bit of a mess when it comes to thinking about and analysing…
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Ethical Impulses & The Moral Instinct
Evolution has endowed us with ethical impulses. Do we know what to do with them? In Steven Pinker’s New York Times article, The Moral Instinct, this question is raised and discussed as he takes us on a guided tour of ‘moral psychology‘ – a recently invigorated field. The starting point for appreciating that there is…
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Overestimating Threats Against Children
Bruce Schneier recently wrote about the MySpace ‘safeguards’ being put in place to protect minors. His very succinct closing comments are a must-read. …there isn’t really any problem with child predators — just a tiny handful of highly publicized stories — on MySpace. It’s just security theatre against a movie-plot threat. But we humans have…