About Chris Dick

Chris rides on his digital sway-backed donkey tilting his lance, quixotically at all sorts of causes -- some hopeless, some perhaps -- not. I enjoy your feedback. Long live rational debate.
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What Leadership Is

By |2020-08-02T12:48:08-04:00June 1st, 2020|Categories: Society|Tags: , , , , |

What Leadership Is From Lincoln to Trump During the height of the Civil War, cemetery construction was, of course, brisk. Some committee members charged with planning and location-finding for these proliferating grave sites approached Lincoln for some advice about a particular site. He said to them, "Put it where I can see it from the windows of my summer home. Thus, will I be reminded what my decisions cost." Can you imagine the Great Denier -- Donald Trump -- acting like the Great Emancipator? Two photographs of [...]

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The Future of Work

By |2020-07-23T13:28:36-04:00May 10th, 2020|Categories: Society|Tags: , , , , , , |

The Future of Work - Part 1 Universal Basic Income In 1915 there were 22 million horses in the United States and most of them had jobs.  By 1960, there were 3 million horses in the U.S. bred mostly for the recreational pleasures of their human masters. Are we headed towards a future that sees large segments of the human workforce  permanently displaced like their former equine partners?  A future where workers do not migrate from one dying sector of the economy to a new and upcoming sector that needs the displaced [...]

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A Tale of Two Lawns

By |2020-05-07T07:53:18-04:00May 7th, 2020|Categories: Ourselves|Tags: , , |

A Tale of Two Lawns Aristotle Made Me Not Do It On my morning walk today I found myself stopping and staring at two lawns, and it made me think of Aristotle. (Please stifle your barbed witticisms, I already know I’m odd.) The two lawns were side-by-side -- one was your conventional, vigorously clipped piece of grass, its neighbour had been allowed to go completely wild, and was a tangle of dandelions, grasses gone to seed, various healthy weeds and the occasional wild flower and leftover random tulip. The wild lawn was rather off [...]

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The Importance of Evidence

By |2020-05-05T14:25:30-04:00May 5th, 2020|Categories: Ourselves|Tags: , , , , , |

The Importance of Evidence And Bayesian Inference I continue to be preoccupied with the question of evidence -- what constitutes evidence that actually supports the many, oh so many, opinions we throw out into the world either digitally or over a glass of wine with friends.  This link will take you to one of the more useful TED talks I have watched in some time. It touches on bayesian inference; but before you run screaming from your computer,the concepts explained here require no great statistical fluency and are remarkably useful. Why are anecdotes not [...]

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