The Abilene Paradox

by ChatGPT

Picture this: you and your friends are deciding where to go for dinner. You all end up at a restaurant that none of you really wanted to go to. How did that happen? Welcome to the Abilene Paradox!

The Abilene Paradox is like a quirky groupthink situation. It occurs when a group of people collectively decides on a course of action that none of them individually prefers because they mistakenly believe that others want it. Named after a story involving a family trip to Abilene, Texas, it illustrates how groups can end up doing things that no one really wants to do.

Contemporary Example: Imagine you and your colleagues at work are planning a team-building event. Nobody really wants to go paintballing, but everyone thinks that's what others want. So, you all reluctantly agree to it, and the day turns into a paint-splattered mess of unenthusiastic participants.

Consequences of the Abilene Paradox:

Inefficient Decision-Making: When people don't voice their true preferences, decisions are often inefficient, and resources are wasted on options that aren't ideal.

Frustration and Resentment: People end up doing something they didn't want to do, leading to frustration and resentment within the group.

Lack of Innovation: In an environment where people conform to what they perceive as the group's preference, innovative ideas and alternative solutions often get stifled.

Wasted Time and Resources: Pursuing decisions that no one really supports can result in wasted time, money, and effort.

Repetition of the Paradox: If the Abilene Paradox isn't recognized and addressed, it can become a recurring problem in group decision-making.

So, what's the takeaway here? Encourage open and honest communication within groups. Make it a safe space for people to express their true opinions without fear of judgment. This way, you can avoid falling into the Abilene Paradox trap and make decisions that truly align with everyone's preferences.

Historical Examples

1. The Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster (1986):

In one of the most tragic instances of the Abilene Paradox, NASA engineers had concerns about launching the Challenger space shuttle in cold weather. However, they believed that their superiors wanted to proceed. The result? A devastating disaster when the shuttle disintegrated shortly after liftoff, costing the lives of seven astronauts. The engineers had kept their concerns to themselves, assuming everyone else was on board with the launch, and this tragic event showcased the dire consequences of failing to speak up.

2. The Bay of Pigs Invasion (1961):

During the Cold War, the U.S. government approved a covert operation to overthrow Fidel Castro's regime in Cuba. Many experts within the government had reservations about the plan, but they remained silent, thinking that their colleagues supported it. The invasion was a fiasco, leading to embarrassment for the U.S. and the failure of the mission. The Abilene Paradox in action on a geopolitical scale.

3. The "New Coke" Debacle (1985):

Coca-Cola's decision to change its beloved formula and introduce "New Coke" is a classic business example of the Abilene Paradox. Company executives believed consumers wanted a new taste, even though there was no evidence to support this. They ended up with a public outcry and quickly had to bring back the original Coca-Cola. The lesson here: assuming what customers want without proper research can lead to costly blunders.

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After the Grenfell fire, the church got it right where the council failed

Giles Fraser in The Guardian

We are an “unsuccessful church”, the exhausted Rev Alan Everett told me, as I persuaded him to take a break and have some lunch. He meant that they only get 30 to 60 people in the pews on a Sunday morning and that it wasn’t one of those whizzy Alpha course churches beloved by London bishops and their growth spreadsheets. Next to us in the church’s sunny courtyard, an extended Muslim family talked openly about their escape from the fire. “Our lungs are full of smoke but at least, thank God, we are all alive.” A church worker told them where to find new shoes and clothes. It felt like a refugee camp. Perhaps it was a refugee camp. And hanging over the whole scene, Grenfell Tower, black and enormous. It stands as a biblical-scale condemnation to a whole society.

In the days after the fire, the church of St Clement’s, Notting Dale, became a hub for grieving families, generous donations of clothes and food – and camera-ready politicians. First Jeremy Corbyn came. Then a furtive Theresa May met a few residents in the church. Then Sadiq Khan was at mass on Sunday morning. I wanted to know from Everett how the church was able to respond so quickly in a way that the council didn’t. “I was woken up at 3am by a priest who lives in the tower, and so I came down to the church, opened the doors and turned the lights on,” he said. It all began from there. People started coming in out of the dark – often passersby looking to help. First they sorted out tea and coffee. By 7am, they had a fully stocked breakfast bar, with volunteers organising themselves into teams. Within hours, local restaurants were delivering food; clothes began to pile high in the church sanctuary – about 40 Transit vans’ worth, the vicar estimates. The place looked like a warehouse.

Listening to Everett, it struck me that “opening the doors and turning the lights on” was precisely the difference between the church and a local authority that had become arms’ length from its residents, continually dealing with local people only through intermediary organisations such as the locally much-hated Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation. The nicest thing I heard about the royal borough from local people was that it had outsourced its care for the poor as a cost efficiency. The worst, that it was deliberately running down its stock of social housing so that they could eventually bring in the developers.

Donations inside the church of St Clement’s, Notting Dale. Photograph: Matthew Barrett

In his Sunday morning sermon, Fr Robert Thompson, an assistant priest in the parish and also a local Labour councillor, channelled his anger. Contrasting the good communication of the local volunteers with the bad communication of the authorities, he said: “The people on the lowest incomes of this parish simply do not feel listened to, either this week or in previous years, by those in power. Worse than that, what the whole issue of the cladding and the lack of sprinklers may well highlight is that some people in our society have simply become excess and debris on our neoliberal, unregulated, individualistic, capitalist and consumerist society.” The churchy way of saying “I agree” with all this is “amen”. The church of St Clement was built and paid for in 1867 by Alfred Dalgarno, a philanthropist vicar with deep pockets and a compassion for the poor. Thompson is a councillor for the Dalgarno ward, named after him. “This parish was built pre-welfare state and it is going to be needed as we now enter the post-welfare state,” he told me, chillingly.

Of course, parishes like St Clement are only superficially unsuccessful. Its secularised charity arm, the Clement James centre, helps thousands of local people every year, into work, into university. That’s why the parish is so trusted locally. “We are called to share in the brokenness and the forgottenness of the people we serve,” the vicar explained. In poor parishes, the job is to keep the doors open and the lights on. And this being permanently present is no small thing. Not least because, as Christians believe, the light will always beckon people out of the darkness.

Teaching philosophy to children? It's a great idea

Studying philosophy cultivates doubt without helplessness, and confidence without hubris. I’ve watched children evolve to be more rational and open-minded because of it

• 
• • Michelle Sowey
  • theguardian.com, Wednesday 20 November 2013 22.23 GMT

'I quickly saw that kids, too, have the capacity to enquire philosophically from an early age'. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

Recently I’ve seen a spate of articles along the lines of "what philosophy can do for you", focusing on the high results that philosophy students score on standardised tests, the marketability of philosophical skills, and the impressive earning potential of philosophy graduates. I’ve even seen pitches like: "If you want to succeed in business, don’t get an MBA. Study philosophy instead." I find this strange, because career advancement and commercial success are the most peripheral of the benefits of philosophy.

In my university days, still uncertain of my future directions, I came across an unforgettable quote by Alex Pozdnyakov, a philosophy student on the other side of the world: “I have this strange phrase I use when people ask me why I chose philosophy. I tell them I wanted to become a professional human being.”

Perfect, I thought. That’s what I want to be.

Since then, training in various jobs has made me into various kinds of professional, but no training has shaped my humanity as deeply as philosophy has. No other discipline has inspired such wonder about the world, or furnished me with thinking tools so universally applicable to the puzzles that confront us as human beings.

When I started running philosophy workshops for primary school children, I quickly saw that kids, too, have the capacity to enquire philosophically from an early age. They’re nimble in playing with ideas and deft in building on each other’s arguments. They’re endlessly inquisitive, wondering about values (“What’s the most treasured object in the world?”), metaphysics (“Is the earth a coincidence?”), language (“If cavemen just went ‘ugh-ugh-ugh’, how did we learn to speak?”) and epistemology (“Since you can have dreams inside dreams, how can you know when you’re dreaming?”).

In small groups, they’ve discussed artificial intelligence, environmental ethics, interspecies communication and authenticity in art. They’ve contemplated the existence of free will, the limits of knowledge, the possibility of justice and countless other problems from the history of philosophical thought. By continually questioning, challenging and evaluating ideas, the children have been able to see for themselves why some arguments fail while others bear up under scrutiny.

Studying philosophy cultivates doubt without helplessness, and confidence without hubris. I’ve watched kids evolve to be more rational, sceptical and open-minded, and I’ve seen them interact in more fair-minded and collaborative ways. As one 10-year-old said, “I’ve started to actually solve arguments and problems with philosophy. And it works better than violence or anything else.”

Over 400 years ago, the French writer Michel de Montaigne asked: “Since philosophy is the art which teaches us how to live, and since children need to learn it as much as we do at other ages, why do we not instruct them in it?” We urgently need to ask ourselves the same question today.

The central place of Theory of Knowledge in the International Baccalaureate (a globally recognised high school diploma) reflects a worldwide appreciation for the importance of philosophy – a discipline that underpins all other academic disciplines. A growing international movement is inviting young children to philosophise in primary schools in the USA, the UK and elsewhere – but Australia is lagging.

Although philosophy features on the high school curriculum in most Australian states, only a very few primary schools dedicate class time to broad philosophical enquiry or to the explicit teaching of critical and creative thinking.

If it were more widely embraced, the practice of philosophical enquiry in primary schools could make schooling a lot more meaningful and engaging for students. It would certainly promote the development of reasoned argument and higher-order thinking – skills which underlie learning in most other domains (including literacy and numeracy) and which are essential for responsible civic engagement.

By setting children on a path of philosophical enquiry early in life, we could offer them irreplaceable gifts: an awareness of life’s moral, aesthetic and political dimensions; the capacity to articulate thoughts clearly and evaluate them honestly; and the confidence to exercise independent judgement and self-correction. What’s more, an early introduction to philosophical dialogue would foster a greater respect for diversity and a deeper empathy for the experiences of others, as well as a crucial understanding of how to use reason to resolve disagreements.

The benefits to students would be there for the taking, if only philosophy educators in Australia could access appropriate funding and institutional support. Such support is provided by charitable organisations like the Philosophy Foundation in the UK and theSquire Foundation in the USA, which lead the way in embedding philosophy in primary school curricula. Unless funding is made available here to pay expert philosophy practitioners or to provide classroom teachers with rigorous training, our kids are condemned to forgo the many rich rewards that philosophy promises – or to suffer from the variable level of professionalism that characterises many volunteer-run educational programs.

Here’s something to think about on World Philosophy Day: while academic achievement, career advancement and financial success are no trifling things, they’re simply visible husks that may grow around a philosophical life. The hidden kernel is made of freedom, clarity of thought, and a professional mastery of what it means to be human. These are qualities we should seek for all our children, no matter what they grow up to become.

Free access to British scientific research within two years

Radical shakeup of academic publishing will allow papers to be put online and be accessed by universities, firms and individuals

• Ian Sample, science correspondent
• guardian.co.uk, Sunday 15 July 2012 19.53 BST

Professor Dame Janet Finch's recommendations on open access publishing prompted the government's decision.

 

The government is to unveil controversial plans to make publicly funded scientific research immediately available for anyone to read for free by 2014, in the most radical shakeup of academic publishing since the invention of the internet.

Under the scheme, research papers that describe work paid for by the British taxpayer will be free online for universities, companies and individuals to use for any purpose, wherever they are in the world.

In an interview with the Guardian before Monday's announcement David Willetts, the universities and science minister, said he expected a full transformation to the open approach over the next two years.

The move reflects a groundswell of support for "open access" publishing among academics who have long protested that journal publishers make large profits by locking research behind online paywalls. "If the taxpayer has paid for this research to happen, that work shouldn't be put behind a paywall before a British citizen can read it," Willetts said.

"This will take time to build up, but within a couple of years we should see this fully feeding through."

He said he thought there would be "massive" economic benefits to making research open to everyone.
Though many academics will welcome the announcement, some scientists contacted by the Guardian were dismayed that the cost of the transition, which could reach £50m a year, must be covered by the existing science budget and that no new money would be found to fund the process. That could lead to less research and fewer valuable papers being published.

British universities now pay around £200m a year in subscription fees to journal publishers, but under the new scheme, authors will pay "article processing charges" (APCs) to have their papers peer reviewed, edited and made freely available online. The typical APC is around £2,000 per article.

Tensions between academics and the larger publishing companies have risen steeply in recent months as researchers have baulked at journal subscription charges their libraries were asked to pay.

More than 12,000 academics have boycotted the Dutch publisher Elsevier, in part of a broader campaign against the industry that has been called the "academic spring".

The government's decision is outlined in a formal response to recommendations made in a major report into open access publishing led by Professor Dame Janet Finch, a sociologist at Manchester University. Willetts said the government accepted all the proposals, except for a specific point on VAT that was under consideration at the Treasury.

Further impetus to open access is expected in coming days or weeks when the Higher Education Funding Council for England emphasises the need for research articles to be freely available when they are submitted for the Research Excellence Framework, which is used to determine how much research funding universities receive.

The Finch report strongly recommended so-called "gold" open access, which ensures the financial security of the journal publishers by essentially swapping their revenue from library budgets to science budgets. One alternative favoured by many academics, called "green" open access, allows researchers to make their papers freely available online after they have been accepted by journals. It is likely this would be fatal for publishers and also Britain's learned societies, which survive through selling journal subscriptions.

"There is a genuine value in academic publishing which has to be reflected and we think that is the case for gold open access, which includes APCs," Willetts told the Guardian. "There is a transitional cost to go through, but it's overall of benefit to our research community and there's general acceptance it's the right thing to do.

"We accept that some of this cost will fall on the ring-fenced science budget, which is £4.6bn. In Finch's highest estimation that will be 1% of the science budget going to pay for gold open access, at least before we get to a new steady state, when we hope competition will bring down author charges and universities will make savings as they don't have to pay so much in journal subscriptions," he added.

"The real economic impact is we are throwing open, to academics, researchers, businesses and lay people, all the high quality research that is publicly funded. I think there's a massive net economic benefit here way beyond any £50m from the science budget," Willetts said.

In making such a concerted move towards open access before other countries, Britain will be giving its research away free while still paying for access to articles from other countries.

Willetts said he hoped the EU would soon take the same path when it announced the next tranche of Horizon 2020 grants, which are available for projects that run from 2014. The US already makes research funded by its National Institutes of Health open access, and is expected to make more of its publicly funded research freely available online.

Professor Adam Tickell, pro-vice chancellor of research and knowledge transfer at Birmingham University, and a member of the Finch working group, said he was glad the government had endorsed the recommendations, but warned there was a danger of Britain losing research projects in the uncertain transition to open access publishing.

"If the EU and the US go in for open access in a big way, then we'll move into this open access world with no doubt at all, and I strongly believe that in a decade that's where we'll be. But it's the period of transition that's the worry. The UK publishes only 6% of global research, and the rest will remain behind a paywall, so we'll still have to pay for a subscription," Tickell said.

"I am very concerned that there are not any additional funds to pay for the transition, because the costs will fall disproportionately on the research intensive universities. There isn't the fat in the system that we can easily pay for that." The costs would lead to "a reduction in research grants, or an effective charge on our income" he said.

Another consequence of the shift could be a "rationing" of research papers from universities as competition for funds to publish papers intensifies. This could be harmful, Tickell said. For example, a study that finds no beneficial effect of a drug might be seen as negative results and go unpublished, he said.

Stevan Harnad, professor of electronics and computer science at Southampton University, said the government was facing an expensive bill in supporting gold open access over the green open access model.

He said UK universities and research funders had been leading the world in the movement towards "green" open access that requires researchers to self-archive their journal articles on the web, and make them free for all.

"The Finch committee's recommendations look superficially as if they are supporting open access, but in reality they are strongly biased in favour of the interests of the publishing industry over the interests of UK research," he said.

"Instead of recommending that the UK build on its historic lead in providing cost-free green open access, the committee has recommended spending a great deal of extra money — scarce research money — to pay publishers for "gold open access publishing. If the Finch committee recommendations are heeded, as David Willetts now proposes, the UK will lose both its global lead in open access and a great deal of public money — and worldwide open access will be set back at least a decade," he said.

Will Western Liberal Values Hold Up During Difficult Times?

Millions of Asians - including Chinese, Indians, Filipinos, Sri Lankans, Pakistanis - and others from different corners of the world have made the West their home. What are the likely social and psychological consequences for us "others" in these hard times?

One of the defining features of Western democracies is said to be its liberal values. What it essentially means for people like us is that our presence is for the most part not considered a big deal. If the economist Benjamin Friedman is right, however, liberal values thrive and indeed depend on continued economic growth and prosperity of citizens.

"Economic growth - meaning a rising standard of living for a clear majority of citizens - more often than not fosters greater opportunity, tolerance of diversity, social mobility, commitment to fairness and dedication to democracy." In contrast, when there is economic decline, the "moral character" of citizens takes a hit.

They become less tolerant, less open and less generous towards the have-nots. Friedman contends that "merely being rich is no bar to a society’s retreat into rigidity and intolerance once enough of its citizens lose the sense that they are getting ahead".

In other words, a society's values are fickle. The future prospect of citizens largely determines the values they hold at any point of time. Economic growth matters more for a society's ‘moral character' than the country's overall wealth.

Clearly, the truth is more complex than what the stylized version of Friedman's thesis suggests. Any values that we hold do not change quickly. We let go of our old values and acquire new ones only over time.

But what if some kinds of values - in this case liberal values - are prone to easy abandonment because they never developed deep roots in ways we thought they did?

With no end to bad economic news, how many Europeans and Americans will retain or abandon liberal values? If more of the latter, which members of society are likely to become victims of growing intolerance and injustice?

The so-called "undeserving poor" certainly. Additionally, the victims are also likely to be from among what Canadians label as "visible minorities".

From this perspective, for the millions of visible minorities who live in the West, the hard times of today may be the beginning of worse to come. They face the prospect of greater discrimination in the economic and social spheres or more.

Are we then headed for an era of growing illiberalism in the liberal democracies of the West so far as "others" - whether the poor or visible minorities - are concerned? Are the foundations of liberal democracies really so shallow?

Some of us may recall Fareed Zakaria's seminal article in Foreign Affairs (1997) in which he drew attention to growing illiberalism in new democracies - countries which held reasonably free and fair elections without subscribing to constitutional liberalism. For Zakaria, "liberal constitutionalism" - that "tradition, deep in Western history that seeks to protect an individual's autonomy and dignity against coercion, whatever the source - state, church or society" - separates Western democracies from the rest.

The larger issue may well be whether the celebrated liberal values of Western societies - which together with constitutional and other legal provisions, provide the bedrock of liberal democracy - are really dependent on the continued prosperity of a majority of its citizens or whether they have replaced or compete with older traditions.

Perhaps Zakaria is right about the part where the "tradition" to protect individual autonomy and dignity - by which one should understand the referent to be all individuals irrespective of class or race - against coercion has developed deep roots among a large majority. If that is true, then liberal values may well hold their own in hard times.

What if, however, we overestimated the nature and extent to which liberal values have penetrated these societies without sufficient consideration to ethnic or other differences so that we became blind to its fragile bases?

If Friedman is right, then Western democracies face a challenge from within where "tradition" may not be of much help. Economic stagnation and decline will likely have immoral consequences because the same countries have other traditions too. The laundry list of these other traditions is long and well-known - racism, colonialism, slavery et cetera - and their existence shows up in the public spaces of "civilized" countries in the form of anti-immigrant rallies and demonstrations.

Under current conditions, the social fabric of many Western societies is strained to an extent not experienced at least since the times of the Great Depression. In Europe, as high rates of unemployment become endemic, a shrinking base of taxpayers is expected to support welfare handouts to not only the fair sons and daughters of the soil but dark-skinned others as well. Both in the US and Europe, there has been broad resentment against welfare for the undeserving poor (read African-Americans and Latinos) at least since the Ronald Reagan/Margaret Thatcher years.

The news about "others" from Europe - whether in Germany, the Netherlands or the United Kingdom - is not pretty. It remains to be seen how many American states will follow Alabama's lead in pushing for harsh anti-immigrant laws, invoking uncertainty, fear and worse.

I don't know about other liberal folks but I do wonder about my "moral character" holding up in hard times.

Pushkar is a Montreal-based researcher affiliated with the Institute for the Study of International Development (ISID), McGill University.