Category: Ethics
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TED Talk: What frogs in hot water can teach us about thinking again
This one is a nutshell for Adam Grant’s newest book, Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know. I loved the book. I encourage everyone to read it. I’ve long strived for confident humility. I love that he names this talk after the myth of the frog in a slowly boiling pot. Frogs…
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Whoever smelt it deals with it
In my opinion, the person who discovers a problem deals with the problem. A law enforcement officer sees someone aim a gun at another. The LEO is off duty or out of jurisdiction. Societal expectation is the LEO will intervene. The same applies to me being an employee. If I discover a problem, then it is…
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TED Talk: Let’s try emotional correctness
Sally Kohn gets an unbelievable amount of hate mail for doing her job: being a liberal pundit on Fox News. Political persuasion begins with emotional correctness: the respect and compassion we show one another. Our challenge is to find the compassion for others that we want them to have for us. That is emotional correctness.…
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Slackers and IT
Go read “Science Fiction Is for Slackers.” As a rule, science fiction may be the laziest of all genres, not because the stories themselves are too facile—they can be just as sophisticated and challenging as those of any other genre—but because they often revel in easy solutions: Why walk when you can warp? Why talk…
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The Share-Based Economy
Not even sure how this came up, but someone explained to me how it infuriated him that because the Boy Scouts of America decided not to accept homosexual scout leaders Walt Disney stopped sponsoring them. It was not right for Disney to do that. First, I asked if it would be right for some other…
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TED Talk: Dan Ariely on our buggy moral code
From the TED’s About This Talk: Behavioral economist Dan Ariely studies the bugs in our moral code: the hidden reasons we think it’s OK to cheat or steal (sometimes). Clever studies help make his point that we’re predictably irrational — and can be influenced in ways we can’t grasp. When I ran across Dan Ariely’s…
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GRE Cheating
Reuters had an interesting article on Chinese students gaming the GRE by setting up networks to share questions. Basically those who take the test post the questions online. Blogs and SEO ensures those seeking the questions can find them. Because ETS takes forever to ensure each question properly measures what it should, the questions are…
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Moral Operating System
“We have stronger opinions about [iPhone vs. Android] than we do the moral frameworks to guide our decisions.” To be fair the choices were selected to be ones most people would have to have taken a Philosophy major to understand, Kant versus Mill. There are other moral guides like Jesus, Aquinas, Richard Dawkins, Mohammed, Pope…