Mending
the lock
Index of links to ideas in the online text of The Paradox of Progress
Stories
Mending
the lock
'This
poor old thing has nearly had it' - the significance of double meaning
'The
sun has gone in - I always called her my sunshine' - the power of analogy
'It's
progress, isn't it' - call-out to a new block of sheltered flats
'I
think he's dead, doctor' - the farmer at the end of the long road
'Tell me what to STOP doing...' -
on being told to measure the height of every adult patient every three years.
'Do
you do anything else with your time?'
And the follow-on
‘OK,
tell me something you read in the BMJ this week…’
‘My Daddy has just collapsed, please come.’
'with God's help, and Dr Wilson...'
Ideas
MOLWA - the Ministry of Leaving Well
Alone
The
Law of Multiple Returns
The
Ocean of Congruity
Memory
Boxes
Stone-checks
Rules for Rules (Table)
The New Culture (Table)
Themes
We have no way of counting up
the contents of our minds
Everything
in life is relative
The
power of analogy
In
life education - for understanding - is more important than
training - for performance.
Learning takes place not through a process akin to photographing data,
but by the fine-tuning of a personal synthesis
Definition
of a generalist (thanks to Karl Popper) A generalist never says something is of no
interest to him
Nature favours the
generalist Eight explanations :
We
have broken the feedback loop
Over-regulation
The
insanity - i.e. imbalance - of the 'corporate mind of society'.
The difficulty of writing a
computer program to give advice on drinking
Specialisation is a cop-out from Life
Three
reasons why the specialist view of life is super-distorted:
Exclusion
Large
numbers
Retrospect
'Coincidences'
as a clue to understanding the true size of the experience recorded in our minds
Some
doctors must be allowed to choose not to video-record their patient's
consultations
Conclusions
The crux of the paradox
The
answer is not exactly under our noses, but an inch or two above and behind our
noses
Conclusion
- the balanced way forward
Page last modified 14 Nov 2006