Emergent Futures Tumblelog

This is the Tumblelog of Paul Higgins and Sandy Teagle - Futurists from Melbourne and Brisbane in Australia. Go to Emergent Futures to see more or follow on Twitter at FuturistPaul . If you right click on the pictures, titles or links in these posts you will be able to go to the original story on the web. If you click on comments for each post you can either read what others have said or add your own comment via Disqus. If you click on the date of a post it will take you to a single post view where you can copy the web link if you want to send it to someone else. If you click on the tags it will take you to other stories from Emergent Futures with the same tag.

April 23rd 2012

Reblogged from climateadaptation|76 notes |# Comments

via the thoroughly enjoyable list of Cognitive Biases. (via climateadaptation)

Posted at 2:50am and tagged with: cognitive, blindspots,.

“
Irrational escalation” – the phenomenon where people justify increased investment in a decision, based on the cumulative prior investment, despite new evidence suggesting that the decision was probably wrong.
”

March 12th 2012

Reblogged from courtenaybird|34 notes |# Comments

Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst | We Are Social (via courtenaybird)

Posted at 8:20am and tagged with: work, social media, collaboration, blindspots,.

“
Everyone’s talking about the importance of engaging employees, and the Facebook generation and collaboration tools. All of that is garbage… collaboration is a culture. It’s not a set of tools.
”

November 26th 2011

'We're blind to our blindness. We have very little idea of how little we know. We're not designed to'

Reblogged from futuramb|49 notes |# Comments

futuramb:

In this article in The Independent Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman is talking about his new book.

Leaders and entrepreneurs are particularly optimistic. There’s plenty of evidence for that. They wouldn’t be doing what they’re doing if they didn’t have a sense that they could control their environment, and if they were not quite sanguine about their chances of success. Leaders are selected for their optimism. I have no interest in my financial adviser or in my surgeon being an optimist. On the other hand, if you have a football team that believes they can win, they are going to do better.

[…]

We’re blind to our blindness. We have very little idea of how little we know. We’re not designed to know how little we know. Most of the time, [trying to judge the validity of our own judgements] is not worth doing. But when the stakes are high, my guess is that asking for the advice of other people is better than criticising yourself, because other people are more likely – if they’re intelligent and knowledgeable – to understand your motives and your needs.

This is one of the best arguments for engaging in scenario thinking together with other people in order to reperceive the situation and recalibrate your current mental map.

Posted at 7:03pm and tagged with: cogmitive, blindspots,.

November 3rd 2011

Daniel Kahneman: How cognitive illusions blind us to reason | Science | The Observer

Reblogged from futuramb|65 notes |# Comments

Why do investors, both amateur and professional, stubbornly believe that they can do better than the market, contrary to an economic theory that most of them accept, and contrary to what they could learn from a dispassionate evaluation of their personal experience? The most potent psychological cause of the illusion is certainly that the people who pick stocks are exercising high-level skills. They consult economic data and forecasts, they examine income statements and balance sheets, they evaluate the quality of top management, and they assess the competition. All this is serious work that requires extensive training. Unfortunately, skill in evaluating the business prospects of a firm is not sufficient for successful stock trading, where the key question is whether the information about the firm is already incorporated in the price of its stock. Traders apparently lack the skill to answer this crucial question, but they appear to be ignorant of their ignorance.

Posted at 6:07pm and tagged with: cognitive, Blindspots,.