2,837 karma · joined June 23, 2010
On another end of it, there's the recognition that what often starts off as efficient or economical in one context will form a cultural symbiosis with that context, carrying it around for decades or centuries to follow. That's why Cooper Black might remind you of cheerful commercialism from the 70s, but it also explains how seeing Eurostyle on a fried chicken menu will give you a very specific idea about how much you'll be paying and what the condiments will be like.
In between, there's "crazy lizard brain stuff" like the Bouba/kiki effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect
At thirty minutes a pop these meetings come out to 25 hours. That does not strike me as “a lot of hours” given that this is talking to everyone who works in your department. Put another way is like a sanity check on the biggest and most important category of your department’s budget, at roughly 1% of your annual time.
I object to using the notion of a "6X difference in murderer density" among Black men as a reason why police are justified in racial profiling.
But I also object to the extremely smug and faux-engineer-rationality of "This does not appear to be racism [...] It looks more like math."
If we're expecting Uncle Bob to be just some guy on Twitter I would write him off as a simple fool. If we're expecting Uncle Bob to be a thought leader in a consequential professional field requiring deep analysis and sound judgement, that's something else.
Whether an image is decorative or not is a complex question that probably hinges on a lot of modernist ideology about the role of ornament[1].
A more functional approach is ask why the image is there. If it’s setting a mood, describe the image with words that evoke that mood.
In my case, the image was an illustration that I’d written off as not interesting to a blind person. But in putting forth the effort to “read” the image I realized it depicted our target demographic using our product in a fantasy setting, which is much more fun to describe than it appeared at first glance.
Technically true, but man oh man do we have a ways to go before the war on drugs is mitigated[1]. Based on the trend of the last ~10 years, we're due to reach 1980 levels of prison population in the 23rd century[2].
[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._incarceration_r... [2] https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/u-s-prison-po... (eye-balling Table 1)
I feel like this has less to do with this one article specifically and more that Gallup/HBR skew these studies towards kinds of work where these numbers easy to observe, or are at least amenable to some kind of measurement. The GE study article[1] seems to support it's claim with a performance/cost engineering outcome, some business process metric whose value is left unspecified, and some sort of vague organizational change.
I'm curious if there are more rigorous or at least modest methods behind these kinds of numbers. Obviously HBR isn't going to delve into the model for their casual article, but I assume that academics at Harvard Business School do?
[1] https://hbr.org/2015/08/ges-real-time-performance-developmen...
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To see a 2x2 of order-chaos and legible-illegible as applied to brands, check out the K-Hole Brand Anxiety Matrix: http://khole.net/issues/03/
If you can find someone who needs something for their business or organization, you'll learn a lot of this by working backwards from what they need and building it. So I would suggest the opposite: the smaller the organization the more you can jump around and set up the basics of all these things.
In software we can put a few shapes on a screen in just the right context and people will believe there's an operation as sophisticated as the wite-out bottle factory behind it.
There is also a line of criticism that the institutions of fine art (education, galleries, museums, grants, etc) have, in the last few decades, distorted their previous value system of beauty (complex as it is) to focus on more conceptual and academic issues. If you’re interested in hearing this analysis in detail, check out The Invisible Dragon by Rich Hickey.