Rapid Idea Improvement

Rapid Idea Improvement

By Bart VanderhaegenBusiness
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Rapid Idea Improvement episodes

  • Episode 86 - On politics and election systems: First Past The Post (FPTP) or Proportional Representation ?

    Can you compare the effect of 2 different election systems in any given democracy ?

    It's hard ! You cannot do controlled experiments like in science: too many different influences at play when comparing any 2 countries with different election systems.

    However, you can compare the effect of election systems on 1 key thing that matters: how do they influence the growth of knowledge (i.e. the growth of knowledge that solves the political problems in a country)

    14 min
  • Episode 85 - Popper’s concept of what a problem is

    According to Karl Popper: a problem is a conflict between ideas

    Think = solving problems = growing knowledge (knowledge containing less and less conflicts)

    Thinking is not : finding more arguments for your case, that is static. Knowledge doesn’t grow when you do that

    So Popper was after the growth of knowledge all the way

    • Our knowledge is never final, never confirmed, and given our fallibility we can always improve and grow our knowledge

      • Naive falsification: "throwing out knowledge when it is falsified" is the exact opposite ... so cannot have been the aim of Popper

      13 min
    • Episode 83 - 4 critiques to the idea of “goal setting” in companies

      A little upfront warning. In a good Popperian sense: a critique is aimed at improving something, not at throwing it out. I am not suggesting to NOT set goals.

      Anyway here are the 4 critiques

      1. The future is unpredictable
        1. Setting a goal is kinda predicting
        2. Sticking to the goal is counterproductive
          1. People spend time energy and ideas trying to pursue something that in the end will have to be changed once it’s really really clear that it cannot be obtained
          2. The goal doesn’t contain the ideas you need to make progress
            1. The goal doesn’t contain the info on how to make progress
            2. Example: I want to loose 10 pounds.
              1. Nothing in that statement tells me how to approach and what to do and why
              2. A goal tends to distract attention from making real progress now
                1. It is much easier to disagree about something in the future than about something in the present (many more options, far less testable, also less concrete)
                2. The goal should serve as a means to criticise what you are doing now
                3. What you want to do now (and how and why) is much more important, and there should the focus be on. Goals can be used as criticism
                4. Goals sometimes serve as religions that allow to forget about the question “what to do next?”. As long as we can indulge in the beauty of our long term destination, that seems to serve as a temporary relief. However, temporary reliefs are not what we are after, we are after figuring out what to do next (and how and why)
                  5. 12 min
                5. Episode 82 - The asymmetry in how knowledge can grow

                  There is an asymmetry in how knowledge can grow: you can not push for it to grow faster but you can perfectly "prevent" it from growing (trough bad philosophy mainly)

                  So you can NOT *directly* influence the actual growth, but you can easily and directly influence preventing it from growing

                  10 min

                About Rapid Idea Improvement

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                A podcast about the theory of knowledge applied to all fields that interest me (management, economics, physics, ...). My attempt at understanding & applying the ideas of Karl Popper (and his…