McFilter

Interesting Things on the Internet: January 16th 2017

• A Smuggling Operation: John Berger’s Theory of Art. I'd tried watching John Berger's Ways of Seeing before and not managed to get into it. This article, which came to my attention after Berger's passing, finally gave me a way in to understand things more.
• Ways of Seeing - John Berger's excellent series on appreciating art (and how it's not necessarily what the "art world" put forward)
• The Cybersyn Revolution. A good (more in-depth than you usually see) write-up of Stafford-Beer's Cybersyn project which aimed to use computing to help manage Chile's economy, back in the early 70s
• I was wrong (or: five things I learned from Hubbard in 2016) Interesting look at analysing data and thinking about risk.
• How Do Individual Contributors Get Stuck? A Primer. I tend to do 4 and 6 when I'm stuck with 1, 10 and 12, so much 12...
• The Hollow Men II: Some reflections on Westminster and Whitehall dysfunction. Extremely long, but really interesting (and depressing) article about how dysfunctional Westminster is. "Events are over-interpreted because journalists do not want to face the idea that they are usually spectators of over-promoted people floundering amid chaos"