Excerpts from a freewheeling Twitter conversation with James Altucher. There are a few gems there.
Tag: Measurement
Frederick Taylor & the quantified self [Article]
Nicholas Carr writes that the principles of ‘scientific management’ as counseled by Taylor have gone from being applicable to manufacturing workers to the office workers, & steadfastly resulting in narrowing of the realm of human possibility:
One thing that Taylor’s system aided was the mechanization of factory work. Once you had turned the jobs of human workers into numbers, it turned out, you also had a good template for replacing those workers with machines. It seems that the new Taylorism might accomplish something similar for knowledge work. It provides the specs for software applications that can take over the jobs of even highly educated professionals.
How do you map a life? [Article]
Ordering the events of a life over a timeline is how social media & the CV do this. Cathy Haines, writing in the School of Life, wonders
So what if we tried an experiment and mapped our life as we really experience it to be: a map without measurements? One that gives space to events according to their significance rather than their length in clock-time?
Measurement destroys myths, says Hans Rosling [Video}
“It’s only by measuring can we cross the river of myths” – watch Hans Rosling predict the levels of child mortality & children per women in a more recent video.