Nonsense - Jamie Holmes - Part 3

Nonsense - Jamie Holmes

2017 Reading Challenge - Day 145

  May 25, 2017

Book 43 - Nonsense - The Power of Not Knowing
Jamie Holmes (2015)
 Part 3 - pages 111-154
Reading Time - 1 hour

One of the things the author does in this book is apply the notions to various real-life situations. So, for example, in the last section, he looked at the Waco, Texas standoff and how some people's discomfort with uncertainty ultimately led to a disaster. In this section, he takes a look at the medical profession. We, as patients, are uncomfortable with uncertainty. We want answers to our symptoms. What is wrong with us? Doctors, too, are uncomfortable with that... and often, before we have even finished reciting our list of symptoms, they have identified our "illness". But... there are also a lot of misdiagnoses out there. And extra testing doesn't always help... sometimes that can actually cloud the picture even more.

Another real life example is the hemline hassle. Back in the 1970s there was a push in the fashion industry to shift consumers from the mini-skirt to the midi (halfway between the knee and ankle). Some retailers, believing the predictions of the fashion industry, ordered tonnes of midis and... ended up losing their shirts. The consumers weren't ready to shift from the mini to the midi... and the fashion gurus were wrong. One thing we need to get is that ambivalence... a state of wanting and not wanting at the same times, is a more natural state of mind than we realize. We can't always resolve things by seeking more information.