Help me, hivemind! I have three related questions about your experiences of email:
1) What piece of email behaviour most annoys you?
(EG Sending pdfs and saying "please see attached document" instead of just putting it in the email.)
2) What fresh hell - some new, terrible fad - have you seen with respect to email?
(EG "Just re-sending this to get it to the top of your inbox.")
3) Have you seen any pieces of email ettiquette that made you think, "ah, yes, that's the way to do it"?
(EG Moving someone to bcc, and saying you're doing it, to acknowledge that they should no longer be copied in to an irrelevant exchange.)
Thoughts welcome! (I'm about to join a meeting so will not respond immediately...)

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More from @TimHarford

17 Mar
Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics

The THREAD OF THREADS (please spread the word)

RULE ZERO
*Indiscriminate doubt is at least as dangerous as indiscriminate belief.*

Image
RULE TWO
*Ponder Your Personal Experience*

Image
Read 13 tweets
16 Mar
Ten Rules for Thinking Differently About Numbers

FREE BONUS GOLDEN RULE
*Be Curious*

If you wanted to reduce the advice in "The Data Detective" / "How To Make The World Add Up" to a bumper sticker (although, please don't) this would be a strong candidate.
I argued back at Rule Zero that indiscriminate doubt was as harmful as indiscriminate belief. It's all too easy to let scepticism curdle into cynicism.
In fact many propagandists rely on it. They don't need you to believe them; they just need you to disbelieve everything else.
Read 9 tweets
16 Mar
It's a very cool hyrdraulic computer. But you buried the lede.

This guy is Bill Phillips, and if you don't know who Bill Phillips is, buckle in...
Phillips grew up in a rural part of New Zealand. Long bike ride / train ride to school. As a boy, he made a kind of music stand on his handelabrs and used to cycle to school with textbooks propped on it. Not a complete success.
More successful was when as a teenager (14, IIRC) he renovated a neighbour's abandoned truck. Insert your own metaphor about restarting economies after all hope is lost here.
Read 10 tweets
15 Mar
Ten Rules for Thinking Different About Numbers

RULE TEN
*Keep An Open Mind*

In his heyday, Irving Fisher was perhaps the most famous economist on the planet. Image
If remembered at all today, it is for one statement, days before the great Wall Street Crash: "Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau."

The thing about Irving Fisher, however, is that he's not alone. John Maynard Keynes made much the same error.
Keynes, however, died rich - while Fisher was ruined by his mistake.
What explains the difference? Well, to reduce to the length of a tweet: John Maynard Keynes changed his mind, and Fisher did not.
Read 8 tweets
12 Mar
Ten Rules for Thinking Differently About Numbers

RULE NINE
*Remember Misinformation Can Be Beautiful Too*

I love dazzle camouflage - century-old solution to the problem of camouflaging a ship with a smokestack on an ever-changing sea from u-boats...
The use of dazzling patterns broke up the outlines of the ship, making it hard for periscope operators peering through a tiny 'scope to discern speed and direction. Slow-moving torpedoes would then miss.
Modern dataviz reminds me of dazzle camouflage. Beautiful, yes - but often they misdirect, intentionally or unintentionally.
Read 7 tweets
12 Mar
Has the clock of economic history started to run backwards? ft.com/content/c2659b…
Adam Smith famously attributed the "wealth of nations" to the increasing division of labour. People specialised in narrower, more refined tasks, giving us three advantages...
Specialisation boosts output, said Smith, because
1) We perfect our skills;
2) We avoid the distraction of task-switching;
3) We use, and even invent, specialised equipment.

But modern office work fits uneasily into this picture.
Read 10 tweets

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