Whatever “expert” opinion means in this context, it does not mean an accurate opinion.
Cass Sunstein, regarding a case-study on doctors’ opinions as a reflection of expert biases; Statistics, Not Experts, December 2000. He goes on to say:
What we are suggesting here is that because individual experts are distinctly prone to error, it would be far better to begin the process with reliable evidence rather than particular recollection.
All media are active metaphors in their power to translate experience into new forms.
—Marshall Mcluhan, Understanding Media
The city’s water system was put in place by William Mulholland, the self-taught engineer who built the Los Angeles Aqueduct, the revolutionary, gravity-flow system of pipes and channels that carries water from mountains and valleys more than 200 miles away.
Doesn’t this detail in some way explain this statement?
The number of breaks – 36 during the first three weeks of September – isn’t unusual for a city the size of Los Angeles, said James McDaniel, senior assistant general manager with the Department of Water and Power. Rather it’s the severity of the breaks, including one that created a sinkhole so big it nearly swallowed a fire truck.
Google organized our memory. Real-time search organizes our consciousness.
The web is full of pophets…I’m not a prophet, I’m an editor
—David Remnick at a CUNY discussion
innovation isn’t something that innovators do — innovation is what customers adopt. And a supply-side definition of innovation guarantees the kind of self deception that you’ve described, because it is the market that determines whether something is innovative or not, and whether something is adopted or not.
And then there is an important critical next step. Just because an innovation is adopted doesn’t mean that it’s a successful business innovation. The challenge for business is not just to get customers and clients to adopt innovation, it’s to get them to pay a premium for the innovation.
—Michael Schrage interviewed in Ubiquity of the ACM…he goes on to say:
Business schools are like pathologists: we do our best work with dead patients.
what looks like a stupid and counterproductive choice from the outside makes perfect sense from within the internal economy of the organization
The other book I’m interested in doing is about innovation as an act of persuasion: it’s not just act of creation, it’s an act of persuasion, and I’m very interested in the role of demos as a medium of persuasion in getting individuals and institutions to explore or commit to innovation.
Ubiquity Volume 7 Issue 08 February 28- March 6, 2006)
From an earlier interview in Ubiquity
the real story of American innovation is the folks who adopted these inventions and thereby transformed them from mere inventions to full-scale innovations? Who are the great customers?
there are a lot of business people who confuse changes in technology with changes in their business,
—Michael Schrage: Ubiquity, Volume 5, Issue 39, Dec. 8 – 14, 2004
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