Categories
Knowledge

Learning what not to do…

Ali Almossawi is a young metrics engineer at Mozilla. He collaborates with the MIT media lab. He has done something quite remarkable, uplifting and useful. (And isn’t that a good thing these days.)

He wrote a book called An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments. More than 500,000 people read the online version. Now there is a print version.

From Amazon
From Amazon

Here is the best part: he has published it online with open access. As in, you can look at without paying. Of course there is a donate button.

The reason I share this book is that it is a beautiful collection of bad arguments. It teaches. It entertains.

Mr Almossawi took his cue from Steven King’s On Writing, which, by the way, is one of my favorite writing books. Mr King instructs us that one of the best ways to improve as a writer is to read bad prose. Mr. Almossawi writes: “Reading about things that one should not do is actually a useful learning experience.”

As a learner, and persuader, and ‘writer,’ this sort of thing excites me. In fact, even at work in the electrophysiology lab, one of the tools I use in navigating to an arrhythmia focus is learning where it is not.

Good stuff.

Thanks Ali Almossawi.

JMM

h/t The Medical Skeptic @medskep — who is one of my favorite people to follow on Twitter.