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One possible mechanism by which strong leadership could be more effective is that inaction and uncoordinated action can be less effective than any coordinated d
by hansvm 7y ago
One possible mechanism by which strong leadership could be more effective is that inaction and uncoordinated action can be less effective than any coordinated decision, regardless of whether that decision happened to be optimal.
I don't know how often this happens in a pandemic or in a political setting, but as an example from software engineering bikeshedding seems somewhat common -- it probably doesn't matter whether curly braces get a new line, but there's probably a benefit to only doing it one way in a codebase. Not that strong leadership is the only path to resolution either, even accepting that some cohesive decision needs to be made, but it does solve that class of problems.
- cycomanic 7y agoStrong leadership and science are orthogonal dimensions. You can have strong leadership that makes decisions based on evidence and scientific arguments, or not. I would argue the first is always better than the second. Again in the current crisis the decisions based on scientific evidence (pandemic models developed previously) was to act early and quickly with lots of testing. Most countries did not follow this, but I would say this had nothing to do with what the "scientific approach" was. Somehow people here conflate scientific with need to wait/establish all information. However in the end science is a method to establish truth/knowledge about the world around us. It can guide our decisions, but it's not a decision making method.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]