CORRECTION to my comment below.  The Globe article was dated 02/28/04.  It can be found in the Globe online archives under the author, Walter V. Robinson.

Ms. Goodman,

It saddens me that this remarkable bit of insight into our culture will go unheard and unheeded.

We seem to be driven by an almost pathological desire for quantity, at the expense of quality.  More is always best.  More for Less is even better.

The drug craze of our time is methamphetamines, commonly referred to as speed.  In the past, recreation drug use was about slowing down, spiritual insight, sensuality, or just plain ole having a good time.

Now it’s about speeding up and doing More.

Peace,
Bob
Lick Skillet, AL

Ruth Ginsburg’s sleepy all her life, mostly since she was “pushed” into the U.S. Supreme Court ! Don’t blame her, just blame on the pushers !

Tell me timing isn’t important in the news business.

I’m a retired airline pilot turned investigative journalist. Three years ago while surfing the Internet for information about George W.’s missing (AWOL) National Guard service,  I found a falsified White House biography that claimed he had flown ANG jets almost SIX years when the actual time was 27 months. 

Why the subterfuge?  There was only one reason I could think of—to make Texas Governor Bush competitive with his 2000 primary GOP opponent, Arizona Senator John McCain, who—not coincidentally—spent five and a half years as a POW in North Vietnam during the same period.   

Of all places, Bush’s bogus bio had been inadvertently published in January 2001 on a State Department website for the whole world to see.  Everyone but the sleepwalking press, that is.

To validate my discovery, I called the Boston Globe.  Impressed, it ran the story the next morning, on 02/28/07, under the headline, “Bush Bio on Web Inflates Guard Service,” and gave me credit as the source. 

Unfortunately, the Globe published my scoop on a Saturday and it died that same day when no other U.S. newspaper or media outlet carried the story.  As the saying goes, timing is everything.

Hugh E. Scott, editor of www,King-George.biz—the only website with hardcopy proof of White House corruption (Bush’s bogus bio).

Sometimes journalists get the facts wrong by accident, and sometimes they are manipulated to report false or misleading information.

Sometimes reporters have a somewhat adversarial relationship with subjects, and sometimes they are willing partners in disseminating information being fed to them ... information that may be truthful, false, or some mixture of both.

Consumers of news and other open-source information and intelligence should always be skeptical and double-check their sources. The results of not doing this can be very destructive.

As Goodman’s article indicates, time is an important element ... though waiting too long for truths to emerge can also create problems.

These factors are looked at in:

“Society of Professional Journalists’ Award to Judith Miller Helps Cover-Up?”

American Chronicle
October 27, 2005

http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/viewArticle.asp?articleID=3287

“As many as 15 percent of all diagnoses are wrong.”
This has got to be a typo or a BAD joke. More like 75% are wrong! Apparently, it’s even too much for doctors to read a medicinal insert before prescribing.

My family and friends have been misdiagnosed/misprescribed all our lives: From nonexistent nephritis, kidney stone as appendicitis, a ruptured biceps tendon that the tow truck driver could see but not the ER doc, my brother had nonexistent schizophrenia and leukemia; improper anesthesia caused woes, two uncles had lethal cancers that were missed, another friend was bipolar but misdiagnosed/misprescribed for decades then misprescribed again even after proper diagnosis, the list goes on and on.

I listened to one doctor lie about her diagnosis and treatment over speakerphone to a crisis counselor before he rushed us off to yet another ER due to anti-depressant induced psychosis!

Healthcare admits the accidental killing of over 100,000 Americans each year. My bet is the real number is triple that especially having known healthcare workers and hearing their stories. The family turmoil and financial loss medical mistakes cause is incalculable. It’s why I’ve been to a doctor only once in over 25 years and I didn’t go back for a follow up.

Any business that admits to ‘practicing’ deserves minimum wage until they’re done practicing. What a nightmare of a mess.

It was a great comfort to read Ellen Goodman writing so perceptively on a topic that has occupied me for the last several years, which I like to call the state of the world that the Internet has made.  It was even more comforting to see her doing it from a pulpit that commands so much more authority than my own meager blogging efforts.  The one comment I would make is to address what I call the how-did-we-get-into-this-mess question, which Neustadt and May analyzed so well in their book, THINKING IN TIME, about decision-making in times of crisis.

Heuristic thinking is very much a product of the progress artificial intelligence (AI) made in moving from the research laboratory to the “real world.”  It is an interesting note of history that one of the first “successful” steps in that direction was in the area of medical diagnosis.  Now it is important to remember that the AI technology would not have emerged had the researchers not been able to recognize the heuristic element in medical diagnosis and see how that element could then be rendered in software, but the result was the formation of a culture that believed that heuristics were all that you needed.  One of the worst parts of that result was the extent to which it reflected back on the practices of the medical community itself.  There were, of course, plenty of researchers demonstrating that, in just about any discipline, expertise was not a simple matter of heuristics;  but they did not stem the growth of a cottage industry based on translating heuristics into software.

There was another factor that encouraged that growth, though, which was a long-standing preference in the business world for EFFICIENCY over EFFECTIVENESS.  The reason was simple:  You can always MEASURE efficiency.  Evaluating effectiveness requires much more human judgment and often entails considerable disagreement.  Software can do wonders for efficiency, but effectiveness will always be a matter of the mind sitting behind the computer terminal.  Nevertheless, the world of work has been gulped down and masticated to a pulp by the obsession with efficiency.  Health care is now an industry where doctors have to “process” their patients, rather than care for them.  Public education has a long history of obsession with efficiency that goes all the way back to the early days of Taylor-style efficiency experts with their stopwatches.  Now, thanks to the blogosphere, journalists are as much under the efficiency gun as is the kid who takes your order at McDonald’s.

I was once at a trade show at which I heard one of the “knowledge management” gurus talking about the need to “process more knowledge more efficiently.”  All I could think of was how little this guy knew about knowledge.  However, I would recast the proposition that “the enemy of thinking is speed.”  The point that this guru was missing was that you cannot have knowledge without REFLECTION.  RSS can now pour all sorts of sources (even credible and reliable ones) onto your screen at a prodigious rate;  but, if you do not reflect on what those sources are asserting, you are no wiser that you would have been had you never seen all that stuff.  So, the bottom line is that “the world the Internet has made” is a world in which doctors can no longer reflect on their patients’ conditions, teachers can no longer reflect on their students’ progress, and journalists can no longer reflect on what they read.  Good luck, world!

Excellent article. But it should have been written sooner!