Theft at the Public Till
"unless you are aware of them [these disturbing habits], they will sabotage understanding. They afflict our ability to see the things we have always seen but have never really seen. They obscure our path to learning, and by just recognizing them, we can disarm their potential to mislead us." Remember our government officials are human. This list affects each of them perhaps even more than it affects each of us. "The disease of familiarity. Familiarity breeds confusion. Those ad- dicted are the experts in the world who, so bogged down by their own knowledge, regularly miss the key points as they try to explain what they know. You ask them the time, and they will tell you how to build a clock. We have all had teachers who we have said are extraordinarily bright, yet we cannot understand what they are saying. They fail to provide the doorknob or the threshold into each thought so you can grapple with the learning connections along the journey." "Looking good is being good. The disease of looking good is confusing anesthetics with performance. A piece of information performs when it successfully communicates an idea, not when it is delivered in a pleasing manner. Information without communication is no information at all. It is an extremely common, insidious malady among graphic designers and architects to confuse looking good with being good. The cure obviously is to ask how something performs." "The uh-huh syndrome. This occurs when our fear of looking stupid outweighs our desire to understand. The manifestations are involuntary head nodding and repeating uh-huh, uh-huh, pretending to a knowledge that we do not have. Rather than admit we don't understand the principle of quantum mechanics, we nod our heads as if we were intimately familiar with the subject, desperately trying to give the impression that we under- stand terms or allusions that are in reality incomprehensible to us. This only prevents us from learning and exacerbates our suspicion that everyone else knows more than we do." "Chinese-dinner memory dysfunction. This is characterized by total memory loss one hour after learning something. This has been caused by the educational system's emphasis on short-term memory. The cramming
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