Monthly Archives: March 2012

There is no more popular topic in modern culture than the virtue of failure. In blogs, on prime-time television, and wherever people gather online or in person, the modern social norm is to celebrate failure and to proclaim once again, … Continue reading →

With the rise of mass production in the late nineteenth century, productivity gurus zeroed in on the use of time as the key to getting maximum output out of the labor force. Scientific management, sometimes called Taylorism, had two key components. One … Continue reading →

For two overlapping research projects, I have been reading a book by Andy Warhol in which he makes an interesting speculation about the success of someone with whom he worked: Years later I figured out why he was such a successful … Continue reading →

In standard scientific and social-scientific methodology for testing hypotheses, there are two classical sorts of errors scientists try to minimize. These two types of errors have interesting parallels in human logic, as people try to reason clearly from observations to … Continue reading →