About the book
Well, I have to admit that the book was never published. Like most of my projects I can just about manage the creation stage but fail dismally at delivery. But the website, written in 2016, exists and that’s the main content anyway. My next plan is to create TikTok and Youtube video out of it, and if you have arrived here via that route then it would have succeeded.
Much has changed since I put this site together. US politics and AI make some of it look naive. But human nature is human nature. It changes on evolutionary timescales so writing about it is still relevant. A decade or two is nothing. So I’ll drop this commentary now and, if you read on, it will be what I originally wrote …
Our common-sense views of human nature, and many of our institutions, are based on outdated and misguided assumptions about human nature and we are only now beginning to put together a bigger and more accurate picture.
Many authors and commentators have written and talked on this and related themes in the last few years – questioning conventional views of human motivation and presenting new evidence about how people perceive, interpret, remember and use information to make decisions and choices.
Daniel Khaneman has accumulated much scientific evidence to suggest that traditional economic theory is seriously flawed,
Daniel Pink questions whether financial incentives are effective in the modern workplace and proposes new models of motivation, and
Daniel Goleman has brought to our attention the importance of emotional intelligence in running organisations.
And that’s just the Daniels!
Thomas Piketty highlights disturbing finding about increasing inequality,
David Eagleman has illustrated the connections between our brains and our behaviour,
Steven Pinker has helped clarify how we use the tern ‘free-will, and
Ray Kurzweil predicts that by 2029 we will know all we need to know to build machines that are at least as capable as humans.
And so the list goes on. In this book I try to pull together a picture of our contemporary understandings about human nature (in the UK at least) and look at its implications for the way we design our organisations and structures in society.
The book will be published in 2020 and will consist of a selection of the best blog posts including any comments and contributions. I will start to give the blog publicity in 2019 once I have a sufficiently coherent body of work.
More background about the book (including our mistaken assumptions)
Leave a Reply