The playwright W.S. Gilbert once wrote: “Oh, wouldn’t the world seem dull and flat with nothing whatever to grumble at?” So true. But can we go too far in our grumbling? The poet Randall Jarrell thought so: “The people who live in a golden age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.” Also true. Some people are hard to satisfy. Idle complaint is a popular leisure activity. Are we too quick to complain about trivial dislikes? Have we created a culture of moaners and malcontents? Which complaints are good and which ones are bad? I look into these questions while reviewing Julian Baggini’s book Complaint. Read more.

A while ago, I wrote about Stephen Few’s book Information Dashboard Design. A lot has happened in the dashboard business since that book was published. Large enterprise-software companies have got into the act, promising executives a better way to better monitor their organisations. An abundance of bad designs arrived in the workplace. It’s time for a sequel to my original review. I have more to share: some reflections on a workshop I took from Mr Few, as well as some of my own observations on the state of the field. It’s an open question as to whether information dashboards are worth all of the trouble. Read more.

What does it mean to have keen foresight? How do we discipline the way we think about the future? Some people put their faith in forecasting numbers. The track record of the past is projected into the future to create a nice tidy estimate. But how accurate is that likely to be? In this comparative review, I look at the book Future Savvy which takes stock of foresight and forecasting. It itemises all of the things that can go wrong. I also look at a teaching tool that helps us think about how the pressing issues of today may play out in the future. Read more.

Managers have acquired the strange habit of talking about human knowledge as if it were a physical asset or resource. I can see where they’re coming from. Practical knowledge is certainly valuable. Talented experts can be one of the things that differentiate one organisation from another. Yet bad things happen when we treat knowledge as if it really is like an asset or resource. I’ve coined a new term for this flawed way of thinking: the lump of knowledge fallacy. I mentioned this fallacy when giving a speech last week. I promised to elaborate. In this essay, I describe the fallacy and why I think it’s such a problem. Read more.

Dialogue is a candid and free-flowing conversation aimed at creating something new. Arguments and counter-arguments are made. Issues are framed and reframed. Terms and concepts are clarified and refined. Assumptions are brought to the surface and scrutinised. Everyone listens actively and with respect. Constructive ideas are shared. People feel free to speak their minds without fear of repercussions. Egos and agendas are checked at the door. That’s dialogue. Or, better put, that’s the ideal of “genuine” dialogue. You can’t just sit back and expect such conversations to happen, especially when dwelling amongst the fierce partisans and ideologues. But don’t despair. There is a realistic model and set of conversational dynamics that can be encouraged. This information graphic describes dialogue for would-be participants and facilitators. Read more.

I don’t envy policy savvy politicians, particularly those in the United States. Every time one of them offers a substantive argument, opposition politicians and pundits have facile responses at the ready. And the most facile responses tend to be petty put-downs, knee-jerk dismissals, and outrageous distortions. These attacks are about discrediting people instead of scrutinising particular claims. They are about exaggerating any available vulnerability … or just making the vulnerability up. It amounts to nothing more than jeering and snarling. According to a new book by David Denby, these snarky attacks are eroding the quality of public discourse. It’s almost impossible to have a serious policy debate in some places without it degenerating into snide mud-slinging. To find out more about this rise of snarkiness, read the review.

The comedian Stephen Colbert coined the term truthiness for a claim that is deemed true because an audience just feels it to be true. As more people feel that claim to be true, the more true it is treated. This is, of course, just another word for pure ignorance. But Colbert’s parody hit a nerve because news outlets seem less interested in verifying the factual accuracy of claims than in selling a palatable script. This comparative review explores this issue by discussing two books about the erosion of journalistic standards and the rise of a new type of “infosphere”. Read more.

We think of people from other countries as being different from ourselves. Different societal cultures will lead to different modes of dress, manners of behaviour, and political attitudes. This raises further questions. Do people from different societies think differently at a very basic level? Is there something about culture that shapes what we notice and what we choose to focus on? Richard Nisbett has written a book comparing people from East Asia with people from the United States and other Western nations. He claims that there are major differences, indeed. This review will reflect upon what he has discovered. Read more.

In the Rob Reiner film The Princess Bride, the swashbuckling buffoon Inigo Montoya has a favourite word: inconceivable. He uses the term all of the time. He uses the term every time something unexpected happens. “Inconceivable!” he bellows after a minor set-back. Then one of his comrades gets fed up and yells, “You keep using that word! I do not think it means what you think it means!” Many of us are like Inigo Montoya. We use complicated terms without specifying a precise meaning and, therefore, leave ourselves open to criticism. Defining terms clearly is crucial for reasoning and communication. Yet there is relatively little advice about how to craft definitions for the technical terms we use. This tutorial attempts to fill that gap. Read more.

The phrase “death by Powerpoint” entered the language as boring slideware presentations became the norm for workplace communications. You know the symptoms: bullet-point lists of cryptic word-bundles; cheesy clipart; busy diagrams full of labeled shapes and unlabeled arrows; presenters who turn their backs on the audience to read the slides out loud. These are all slideware presentation techniques we’ve come to loath. There is a better way. Slideware presentations shouldn’t be the communication method of first resort. When using slideware, however, there are a number of effective public-speaking and design techniques that can make a presentation, dare I say, engaging. I review three books aimed at improving the way we present. Read more

Several times a year, I see a news report that ranks countries according to some big policy issue. The report asks: how does your country rate when it comes to quality of living? Or respect for human rights? Or investor risk? These are complicated areas that are understood differently by various schools of thought. Yet, the answer reported in the media is usually simple and tidy. In fact, its often a single number that summarizes everything. That’s what composite and aggregate governance indicators are: ratings that purportedly tell you everything that you need to know. As with any statistic, however, the real story is in the details. According to a recently released book, these indicators are full of error and bias and are routinely misused. Read more.

People are trying to tell you something but the message isn’t getting through. Why is that? Is it because of the prevalence of euphemism and jargon? What about exaggeration, hyperbole, and marketing-speak? Perhaps the way that sentences are crafted isn’t very logical. Or perhaps the way something is expressed is so dry and abstract that you can’t make yourself care enough to pay attention. In the workplace and public square, messages aren’t being understood. Meanings aren’t clear. You may even be part of the problem, lapsing into bad habits of communication because its easy and safe to do so. In this review essay, I argue that plain language can help us out of this predicament. Read more.

The sad truth is the workplace is full of bullshit: deceptive, phony, and distracting messages that attempt to persuade. What is the antidote? Candor? Truth-telling? Straight-talk? Samuel Culbert has written a new book that helps us think through the issue and sort out the terms. I wish I could say he’s hit the target. Here’s my appraisal of the good and the bad bits. Read more.

When the stakes are high and you don’t know what’s going on, what are you going to turn to? Rumours, of course. Sadly, we rely more and more on rumours to fill the information vacuum. News organisations are peddling more of the stuff. Cocktail parties revel in the stuff. Workplace conversations at the proverbial water-cooler are preoccupied with the stuff. But is this part of a healthy information diet? What distortions and vulnerabilities result. Find out in this review of the book Rumor Psychology. Read more.

The simple act of labeling something affects the way people perceive that thing. The way people label things and order them into classes affects the way people view whole areas of experience. There is an ongoing debate about how we label and order things in our online age: a top-down approach moderated by experts or a bottom-up approach decided by publics. I’ve addressed this topic before but here is more food for thought. Read more.

We’re all in the business of finding needles in haystacks these days. The problem is that the haystacks are growing exponentially because technology makes it easy to create and publish information. How do you find what you’re looking for? How do you discover something useful that you didn’t even know existed? How do you do all of this with minimal effort? Peter Morville sheds some light on these questions with his new book Ambient Findability. Read more.

An information dashboard is a single screen of information that keeps your finger on the pulse of a machine, organisation, or other practical domain. Assuming that you can automatically gather information that is germane to decision-making, a question remains about how to display it all on the screen. This is tricky because even large monitors have a very low “information resolution” compared to a single sheet of paper. Stephen Few has written a book offering design advice about how to shoehorn all the important facts onto a single screen. This advice is useful to anyone who wants to communicate dense information via computers. Read more.

A picture doesn’t really equal a thousand words; on average, a picture equals a little less than a hundred. Nonetheless, when you add a picture to an explanation, the intended audience is better able to comprehend. This is the premise of the info-graphic, such as the fancy diagrams that adorn the pages of science magazines. A few weeks ago, the best known designer of business info-graphics, Dave Gray, piloted his first visual thinking workshop. I was there to hoover up Gray’s lessons. Read on to find out what I discovered. Read review

Over the last year, I’ve stumbled upon three projects that reconstruct the past by scrounging around for empirical data in the unlikeliest places. All of these projects involve a great deal of ingenuity. And they’re about fish. Find out what a bit of researcher cleverness can tell us about marine ecologies and the fishing industry. Read more

“Some things are better left unsaid,” so say nervous groups of people harbouring an inconvenient, embarrassing, or worrisome truth. Revealing such open secrets can pose a number of difficulties for investigators, not least of which is coping with the backlash of an angry horde. Revelation is nonetheless necessary because of the ways in which open secrets can skew our perceptions of reality. In his latest book, The Elephant in the Room, Eviatar Zerubavel describes these secrets in great detail and analyzes the social dynamics that sustain them. Read review

Have the social sciences become stagnant? Are they even sciences? What can be done to make them more science-like? These questions have preoccupied scholars for quite some time. In fact, these are typical test questions for graduate students taking university research methodology courses. Three articles have just been published that offer some new insight. Let’s take a look at the latest round of this debate. Read debate

It’s funny how smart people often fall for superficially appealing ideas … and fall for them again and again. Such fad surfing is unfortunately common within our institutions. Joel Best wants to figure out why. His new book breaks down the anatomy of a fad and explains how they evolve. In so doing, he shows us why some of the smartest among us embrace them with such regularity. Read review

Alternative medical practitioners make all sorts of claims about the effectiveness of their treatments. They might even point to evidence that a treatment indeed does some good. Does that mean the treatment is a success? No, it does not. Many elaborate witch-doctor rituals have been found to have a medical benefit because people believe in the rituals. That’s what is meant by placebo. So what do we know about these mysterious cases of mind over body? As Dylan Evans’ new book shows, we have only begun to understand this medical phenomenon. Read review

Almost every time I browse through a news-stand or watch television, I am struck by how shamelessly some people make wacky claims. I am also alarmed by how the purveyors of nutty beliefs and perpetuators of modern myths are taking the offensive: sceptics and scientists are now the ones being branded as parochial and narrow-minded. The forces of Counter-Enlightenment have become mainstream. How bad is the situation? As Francis Wheen shows, the situation is pretty bad indeed. Read review

We come across deceptive, phoney, and exaggerated claims everyday: in political statements, marketing messages, casual conversations, and work documents. More often than not, we tune these claims out because we think we know better. Despite this indifference, or perhaps because of it, these claims continue to proliferate. To put it bluntly: we are drowning in bullshit. But what is this particular type of nonsense? Why do we encounter so much of it? Find out in this comparative review. Read review

Randomness is everywhere. With the help of a little probability theory, however, we can make some sense of the rare events, coincidences, luck, indeterminacy, and uncertainty. We can even use probability theory to get into all sorts of mischief. Jeffrey Rosenthal’s new book offers the layperson a crash course in seeing things from this “probability perspective”. Read review

Renouned sceptic Michael Shermer has released a collection of previously published articles. For the most part, these articles are about the “fuzzy shadowland” between those things which can be confirmed by scientific inquiry and those things which can not. Read review

Carl Rollyson has written an intriguing book about the much-maligned craft of writing a biography. Modern culture celebrates self-disclosure and scurrilous revelation. So “dishy” hatchet-jobs sell well as one of the few lucrative niches in publishing. Either that or flattering hagiographies pander to the cult of personality among those who are obsessed with celebrity. Is there a role for the serious and thoughtful biography? Read about Rollyson’s reflections on the nature of biographical research and writing. Read review