Archive of things to do with 'ignorance'

• 04.04.08 Let that be a lesson:

  Two children, one of them in a red cap, it might have been a girl, were kicking a beach ball up in the air, back and forth. It would go up quickly, weaving side to side like an inflatable buoy against the mottled blue backdrop of the sky. It would complete the curve, drifting down slowly.

  They ran up and down on either side of a green asphalt tennis court with a saggy, torn net. For all the attention they paid one another, they might have been side by side or miles apart – they were watching the ball. The surface showed a map of the world in bright, unhealthy color. The surface was divided into twelve longitudinally, like long cantaloupe slices. The sea was pointillist blue.

  
  Tags: writing, politics, illustration, ignorance, fiction.
• 03.25.08 Emergent ignorance:

  Most people at work spend most of their time avoiding the work, or trying to slough it off or reduce it. Little attention is spent on their duties or the overall performance of the work. They chat, they space out, they steal office supplies, or spend time on their personal business or recreation, there’s a general tendency to avoid resopnsibility. Many people don’t know some of the basic procedures, aren’t interested to know, want to keep employed and get occasional praise but not much beyond that. And then there’s this as well, there are others who are struggling for power, or trying to shame others or to take work away or spending time attempting to appear better to those in power, and to keep others from that same attention. But it’s the mystery of emergence. Somehow out of all the chaos and competition and contradiction and difficulty and waste, inefficiency, and couterproduction, the overall work done by the department is good, is reliable, is fast; it’s expanding its scope and doing better by all measures all the time.

  
  Tags: work, management, ambition, structure, emergence, ignorance.