The Gift Of Doubt-Malcom Gladwell on Albert O Hirschman

1. So is ignorance an impediment to progress or a precondition for it?
2.The entrepreneur takes risks but does not see himself as a risk-taker, because he operates under the useful delusion that what he’s attempting is not risky.
3. Hamlet shouldn’t have been frozen by his doubts; he should have been freed by them.
4.“to come to an understanding of reality in portions, admitting that the angle may be subjective.”
5. “Why are bananas bent?”
6. “Exit, Voice, and Loyalty,”
7. “Proving Hamlet wrong” was about the importance of acting in the face of doubt—but also of acting in the face of fear. Voice was courage.


http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2013/06/24/130624crbo_books_gladwell?currentPage=all

Bubbles in Research, Education and Healthcare

Few years back we witnessed the housing bubble coming to an end. Its effects are still being felt. The internet bubble in 2000-2001 led to the creation of infrastructure.Japanese are still to recover from the bubble which ended in 1989.  There have been numerous bubbles and busts in history documented. Also considered as business cycle this is considered by some as inevitable and also beneficial. The governments try their best to avoid this as it brings the survival of the fittest to a very crude form! We are yet to learn the art of growing without creating bubbles. Trade, economics and financial market have made their contribution and we need to be thankful to them. In the new era we will have to learn the art of creating mini bubbles from which survival is easier and the pain is short lived.
The latest making the rounds is education bubble and healthcare bubble  in US. It will be interesting to see if there is a bubble, and when it will burst. Can we anticipate the consequences of this bubble burst?
There are lot of countries in the world which would aspire to have a bubble in their education and healthcare sector!
Similarly can scientific research suffer from bubbles? The link is to an article which predicted something like that in 2010 http://chronicle.com/article/Will-the-Biomedical-Research/124981/ Bubbles predicted too early have limited impact on the behavior of people.
It is happening with respect to NIH funds. What will be the impact and when the impact will happen are questions which require more analysis and some speculative work. Does the nature of certain research demand that they have bubbles. Without the failures we would not have had our successes? How do i calculate the return on investment of Human Genome Project? What time frame should one be looking at?
Researchers do have fiscal responsibility. But how does one define it?

Similar thoughts can be expressed about healthcare. Solutions can be varied but difficult to implement as they require behavioral changes. Most behavioral changes happen because of pain or right incentives provided at the inflection point. What incentives can be provided to hospitals, doctors, pharmaceutical industry and patients to contain the so called emerging bubble?

The bubble in education will create bonded laborers new era. There are efforts to prevent this.

Why is it so difficult to learn from bubbles in other sectors? Why is it difficult to contain bubbles after having recognized their formation?
Does nature operate through bubbles?

"Unbridled growth in any sector acts as cancer to the ecosystem called life" Pruning either by nature or by humans, if they can, reduce malignant insults.