i-TFTD #147

Time for one of those "slightly different tone of thought-provokers"...

#147-1. If you can't dazzle them with your brilliance, baffle them with your bullshit.

-Anon

#147-2. The more time you spend in reporting on what you are doing, the less time you have to do anything. Stability is achieved when you spend all of your time reporting on the nothing you are doing.

-Cohn’s Law

#147-3. It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

-Upton Sinclair

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One reason that Scott Adams’s Dilbert is so popular is that the kind of things mentioned above are fairly commonly seen in the corporate world.

I often see cynical views propagated as useful, practical tips. To take a non-corporate example, it seems that some driving school instructors in Mumbai actually suggest to learners that they must drive in the rightmost lane (thus preventing the progress of others in this fastest lane) because then they (the learners) only have to worry about taking care of vehicles on their left side!

Richard Dawkins coined the word "meme" in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, to mean "a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation", where he also described how ideas or songs, especially mistaken ones, spread amongst people. The concept of computer virus was not known at the time but meme is similar to an idea virus. We need to spread good concepts (a virus-killing virus?) in a similar, self-replicating manner.