[gladwell] Open Secrets — Malcolm Gladwell on Mysteries, Puzzles and Enron … ‘The national-security expert Gregory Treverton has famously made a distinction between puzzles and mysteries. Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts are a puzzle. We can’t find him because we don’t have enough information. The key to the puzzle will probably come from someone close to bin Laden, and until we can find that source bin Laden will remain at large. The problem of what would happen in Iraq after the toppling of Saddam Hussein was, by contrast, a mystery. It wasn’t a question that had a simple, factual answer. Mysteries require judgments and the assessment of uncertainty, and the hard part is not that we have too little information but that we have too much.’ [via Kottke]
Malcolm Gladwell on Mysteries, Puzzles and Enron.
This entry was posted on Sunday, January 21st, 2007 at 4:56 pm and is filed under Books, Malcolm Gladwell.
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