The New New Left

The ABC’s Drum site has picked up my riffs on the sorry state of federal politics in Australia and the need for a new 21st century political party that isn’t shackled to unions or religion. It’s an issue I’ve been thinking about for quite some time – well before this Read more…

When ‘Best Practice’ isn’t Best

Like any other journalist, I get a torrent of press releases every day. Certain words and phrases feature prominently. Too prominently, too often. This post is not specifically about those words and phrases, it’s about how these words and phrases have come to be so numbingly banal. The phrase is ‘best practice’, and this post is a cautionary tale of when ‘best practice’ actually leads to failed practice, and why.

It seems as though ‘best practice’ would, by definition, always be the best way to do something. But sometimes it’s not. This is because some problems aren’t conducive to the creation of one ‘best practice’, but instead need to constantly adapt to a changing set of background conditions.

There are, broadly, three types of problems in this world: those with static background conditions; those with changing background conditions; and those where the background conditions change in response to your actions. ‘Best practice’ only works well for the first of these problems, less so for the second, and often fails entirely in the third.

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Why Variety is the Spice of Life When it Comes to Our Evolved Moral Sense

Here’s the riff (developed from the paper I delivered at the recent AAP conference): because the success* of behavioural strategies – including moral strategies – depends on the environmental conditions in which the agent is situated, and because that environment includes the strategies employed by other agents, it pays to Mix It Up A Bit in terms of the strategies employed by the population.

As a result, you’d expect to see a diversity – or a ‘pluralism’ or ‘polymorphism’ – of strategies employed in a population. Some will be ‘nice’, some will be ‘suspicious’. That’s what I call Lesser Moral Diversity. Some will be ‘nice’, some ‘suspicious’, some ‘nasty’. That’s what I call Greater Moral Diversity. Details below:

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