Tuesday 25 September 2007

Good Not So Good

In our humble role of intellectual missionaries we are proud to bring you, the ignorant reader, the latest in our ever popular instalments of scientific knowledge, the most noble of all human disciplines, exalted as it is by its intrinsic intellectual rigour & vigour so sadly lacking in all other spheres of mental activity.

It has been revealed, which is to say proven, by a noted expert that good advice is next to useless, & is indeed in such close proximity to useless as to be one & the same. "There can be no doubt," said our scientific man, "that good advice is indeed next to useless, or to describe it with different words, not useful at all. In tests, various humans received various bits of expert advice designed to prove useful in the near-real situations in which they were to be placed, along with other humans who had been imparted placeboidal information of no practical benefit to the particular controlled situation, & it was unexpectedly found by our highly trained laboratory technicians that the latter uneducated agents performed as well, or indeed as badly, as the educated agents!"(We take the liberty of inserting an exclamation mark here, not to infer that our scientist showed intense excitement at this point, but that there was a slight dogmatic stress, somewhat unusual to his behavioural patterns, of which the reader would otherwise be unaware.)

"The good advice should," he went on, "have acted as a catalyst to ensure the higher efficiency of the educated subjects but this was not borne out by the results. We can but infer that good advice is of illusory worth."

A noted giver of good advice has said that similarly inclined persons as himself should not be too disheartened by the news as the pleasure in giving good advice is in the giving, & its practical worth is "irrelevant."

7 comments:

anaj said...

I've been trying to read your blog a couple of times now, but time and time again have failed to take it up against the harsh white on black. do you think you change your template, maybe?

Andrew said...

Oh no, an invitation into the dreaded realms of technical know-how. It is genuinely a bit of a miracle that I've figured out how to use a blog at all but I'll have a goanyway.

Anonymous said...

she's right - a white background gives a sense of expansion. My first blog was a beige background, to mimic an old book - but i felt it wasn't a good idea to try to make a blog look like a 100-year old book.

Neil Forsyth said...

Very droll, Andrew. I may use the experimental data presented by you in my place of work as my position requires me to give advice day in, day out and it is rather tiresome. Perhaps it will presuade some to leave me alone and fuck things up in their own inimitable way.

By the way, I concur with Anaj: the black is not very easy on the eye. Also, given that you are such a cheery, upbeat kinda guy it gives the wrong impression.

Andrew said...

Thanks, Neil. My hope with the piece was for it to provide the greatest amount of usefulness to the greatest amount of people. I'm getting used to the whiter shade of pale though I'm a little sorry to see, or not see, the end of the black. I'm pretty badly colour-blind, so I wonder if that has anything to do with the black working for me...

trailbee said...

Love that white background. Thanks.

Andrew said...

I suppose tis calmer on the mind all right.