Aesthetic Intelligence

“The medical establishment has become a major threat to health.” If you don’t trust Ivan Illich (Medical Nemesis, 1982) you’d better trust WSJ:

“Medical mistakes kill enough people each week to fill four jumbo jets. But these mistakes go largely unnoticed by the world at large, and the medical community rarely learns from them. The same preventable mistakes are made over and over again, and patients are left in the dark about which hospitals have significantly better (or worse) safety records than their peers.[…] Some 20% to 30% of all medications, tests and procedures are unnecessary, according to research done by medical specialists, surveying their own fields.”
(How to Stop Hospitals From Killing Us, Marty Makary, online Wall Street Journal, September 21st 2010)

Still not enough? This comes directly from World Health Organisation’s expert Atul Gawande:

“The robots increased surgical costs massively and have so far improved results only modestly for a few operations, compared with standard laparoscopy. Nonetheless, hospitals in the United States and abroad have spent billions of dollars on them. […] Without question, technology can increase our capabilities. But there is much that technology cannot do: deal with unpredictable, manage uncertainty, construct a soaring building, performing a lifesaving operation. In many ways, technology has complicated these matters. It has added yet another element of complexity to the systems we depend on and given us entirely new kinds of failure to contend with.”
(The checklist manifesto, Atul Gawande, 2009)

And fot the italian readers, here is a great book on the topic:

“Never mistake activity for achievement” says John Wooden.

John Wooden is a man who sees the difference between hurry and purpose, but many managers don’t. Managers are always so busy, trying to look like someone who’s striving to getting things done. But things do not necessary like to be done. Despite manager’s hurry, things tend to go their own way. Disable hurry to enable achievement.
By the way, this is John Wooden (clipped from his TED):

Blind people can’t ride a car. Who says that?

(Thanks to Prof. Giampietro Gobo for the clip suggestion)

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Henry Ford’s popular statement is one hundred years old. What would people answer today? It seems Avis thinks personal mobility in the near future will no longer be linked to private ownership of a vehicle. Thus Avis a few days ago bought Zipcar, a car-sharing service that, Avis thinks, is worth half a billion dollars, as The Wall Street Journal reported here.

Disable car possession to enable sharing – otherwise it will not be possible anymore to drive a vehicle any farther than your garage.

If we assume success is the opposite of failure we can blame our failures as the main obstacles on our road to achievements. Paradoxically, the only way to succeed is by failures: the popular path trial-error-learning has been so popular for 4.2 billions years and it ends to be the only path followed by life on earth in order to evolve. Life never succedes: life simply tries, experiments, uses errors to learn and mistakes to improve. Because it is not obsessed by success, life keeps succeeding – life never forgets that any success belongs to the past and is hooked on death. If we care about our own staying alive we shouldn’t care about success. Success and evolution are one the opposite of the other: we should disable the former to seek for the latter.
(This is what Theodora can whisper you if you pay particular attention to her for a sufficient amount of time. Theodora lives with her daughter in Paris, Jardin des Plants)

Why should we look for employment? Why should we reduce the complexity of work to the childish routines of hetero-designed jobs?

If you are looking for life, disable employment.

If you love sport you may find professional sport disgusting. Football fans became hooligans, television replaced tradition (not only in Wimbledon), cycling is a world wide pharmacy. And athletes are show business stars. Sport lovers should encourage themselves and their idols to disable cheating and to read thursday’s New York Times sport section headline, commented by Scott Simon here.