The Wrong Answer
Why technical wizardry is too often just a way for us to avoid thinking about problems
A decade or so ago I was in Delhi on assignment for a client who mistakenly thought the future of software development lay in the hands of inexperienced programmers whose cultural norms prohibit causal thinking. One Saturday afternoon, as I perused the Times of India, I read an article by a senior Indian medical doctor who was trying to raise the alarm about obesity trends in the country.
In summary, the good doctor correctly pointed out that an increasingly Western lifestyle (e.g. indolent) combined with ready access to cheap calories meant that India, as elsewhere, was suffering from a catastrophic rise in obesity. Unfortunately, his recommended solution was nowhere near as well-grounded as his analysis. The doctor’s call to action was: the recruitment and training of hundreds of thousands of cardiovascular specialists and oncologists to deal with the upcoming deluge of heart attacks, strokes, Type II diabetes, and cancers that inevitably result from excess weight.
Today we see precisely the same kind of thinking in the West with so many of our technologically-oriented fixations.
Just like the Indian doctor cited above, we don’t stop to consider the situation from the perspective of possible…
