Unsought Input

What do you do When you find out you are wrong?

Not just wrong about one thing, or a little bit wrong. What do you do when you find out you are very wrong, and consistently wrong, and there are really big consequences?

President Bush, after three years, seems to finally realize he has been wrong. Well, not really. But he has finally acknowledged the big consequences part. Part of the problem has been that he has only gotten advice from those willing to tell him what he wants to hear. So the formation of the Iraq Study Group was a good thing, right? Finally, some independent experts would weight in, and tell the President some things he wouldn’t like to hear.

Except they weren’t really experts. And their advice has little to do with Iraq. And Bush isn’t really listening anyway.

So how do we win the war in Iraq? Maybe, just maybe, it wouldn’t hurt to ask the real experts - the military people actually in Iraq. In fact, one of our troops has given us a PowerPoint presentation. That’s right, it’s even in the preferred format of upper management everywhere. Seriously, go there right now and watch the presentation, it’s only 18 slides.

(more…)

I was reading something on Slashdot about HP dumping Board member George Keyworth for leaking things to the press. The issue wasn’t that he was dumped, it was that pretexting was used to get his phone records.

This being Slashdot, the idea that all CEOs and politicians are sociopaths quickly came up. This is how it supposedly works: no normal human being would be willing to cut jobs, sell out their colleagues, keep saying what people want to hear with no guilt from lying, and otherwise do the things that lands you on top of the corporate ladder or in Congress. In order to be successful at those things, you have to lack empathy with others – hence, you’re a sociopath. Very intelligent sociopaths can be surprisingly charismatic – they learn can learn, and exploit, social graces even if they don’t feel bound to them.

(more…)