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Tuesday, June 4, 2002 |
The F-Files: The Fallacies Are Out There
While working last night, a local radio jock came on, ranting about a park that's being put into an older neighborhood, claiming that "Madison is becoming too elitist for industry", and saying that Madisonians must prefer parks to jobs.Of course, there are gaping holes in his logic, starting with his implication that if a park is built, Madison will lose jobs. The average commute time here is up to 20 minutes: there are a lot of places a factory could be built within the locally acceptable commute radius, even if you live right where the park is being built.
This is an example of the "Black-or-White" fallacy: the assumption is that parks and jobs are mutually exclusive.
Our junior high school library had Stuart Chase's "Guide to Straight Thinking" and S. I. Hayakawa's "Language in Action", and reading these books left me basically unable to listen to most of what passes for talk radio these days. I recognize most forms of fallacy, but don't always know what to call it (as an adolescent, I lacked the patience to memorize terms like "Denying the Antecedent"). Last winter, I got curious about the things I'd neglected then, and found The Taxonomy of Logical Fallacies, which is an organized list of fallacies, with alternate names for them and explanations of how they work.
Strategic planning
There's a critique of strategic planning available at C|Net that's written by a McKinsey consultant. Worth reading, as strategic planning is lurking out there for most of us.
If your organization is heavily invested in the idea, you might find Henry Mintzberg's
