Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense

It’s better to prefer incompleteness over completeness; capacious imagination instead of futures that are too specific or neat; and experimentation and exploration over visions and blueprints. I’m sceptical of overly coherent utopias or the belief that societies follow simple logics. Instead, I see the work of imagination (and the life of real soci

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The Unaccountability Machine by Dan Davies is a fantastic book, which argues that people create these models because if you can reduce decision-making to an algorithm, or a formula, or a process, or a procedure, you avoid the risk of blame. Computer says no, effectively.

Instinctively, people love to codify things, and make them numerical, and turn ... See more

This is an observation about human rationality as much as it is about the epistemic conditions generated by life in what Jay Bolter has aptly termed the digital plentitude and which I usually call the Database. We are not as narrowly rational in our thinking as many would like to believe. Which is why conventional “solutions” to the problems associ... See more