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One colleague told me about a time he’d argued with Steve but eventually backed down, even though he wasn’t convinced by Steve’s reasoning. When events subsequently proved my colleague right, Steve marched into his office and started yelling. “But this was your idea,” said my colleague. “Yes, and it was your job to convince me I was wrong,” Steve replied, “and you failed!” From then on, my colleague argued longer and more loudly, and he kept arguing until either he convinced Steve he was right or Steve convinced him he was wrong. Thus, Steve got it right by being willing to be wrong and by insisting that the people around him challenge him. There is no doubt that his style didn’t work for everyone. He hired people who were not afraid to argue with him, and then he pushed that fearlessness further.
The “tragedy of the commons,” as exposed by economists, is as follows—the commons being a collective property, say, a forest or fishing waters or your local public park. Collectively, farmers as a community prefer to avoid overgrazing, and fishermen overfishing—the entire resource becomes thus degraded. But every single individual farmer would personally gain from his own overgrazing or overfishing under, of course, the condition that others don’t. And that is what plagues socialism: people’s individual interests do not quite work well under collectivism. But it is a critical mistake to think that people can function only under a private property system.
Skin in the Game
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Planck's Principle:
"Science progresses one funeral at a time."
Scientists, being human, don't easily change their views, so science advances not when scientists win or lose arguments, but when they die so that younger scientists with more refined views can take their place.
My Peoples, the Time Has...
@G_S_Bhogal on Twitter
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