Michael Muntisov's Blog, page 3

The Art of Explanation

Explanations are relevant to many aspects of our lives. Think of business presentations, writing essays, interacting with your doctor, job interviews, writing emails, talking to your tradesman and the list goes on.

If done well, explanations can inform, get things done and save you and others lots of time. Good explainers are engaging not just informative. But it’s not so simple. We have all seen ineffective explanations, as well as being guilty of many ourselves.

BBC presenter Ros Atkin...

Writing for Busy Readers

We’re all busy people nowadays. We’re busy churning out reports or emails or text messages. And skimming through incoming messages we judge to be important while disregarding the rest.

We have all missed important messages or requests from time to time. Or failed to get the desired responses from our own messages. What’s the problem? It usually comes down to poor writing.

In response, authors Todd Rogers and Jessica Lanky-Fink of Harvard University have prepared some guidance to he...

Corporate Bullsh*t

Are we being deliberately confused or tricked by corporate narratives? Entrepreneur turned philanthropist Nick Hanauer and his co-authors think so. They argue that political or corporate elites resist reforms in order to preserve a skewed status quo that serves their interests.

In their book Corporate Bullsh*t, they present the Six Big Lies which form the foundations of “false stories, fake stories, but sometimes beguiling stories nonetheless – Soothing but toxic fairy tales” which are used t...

Found Audio

After a long and arduous process, the four-episode ‘found audio’ drama adaptation of Court of the Grandchildren has finally been published.

It is based on the Zoom reading by the Magnetic Theatre of the scripted stage adaptation.

You can listen to it on any of your favorite podcast apps or at this link.

Its called a ‘found audio’ drama because it is structured around a narrator who guides the audience through the story by playing ‘found audio’ extracts from hacked surveillance and archi...

History! Read it and weep!

History gifts us many lessons, but our direct life experiences, which span a mere seventy years or so, limits our capacity to learn them. Ray Dalio’s book The Changing World Order amply demonstrates what can be learnt by studying the last five hundred years and beyond. And those lessons provide guideposts for what we may see in the future if we care to look for them.

Ray Dalio is an investment manager whose motivation for this study came from his need to understand cycles that he personally h...

Our Fragile Moment

In his new book Our Fragile Moment, Professor Michael Mann goes back in time and examines all the critical climate-changing events in our planet’s history. He shows what lessons can be learned from each one, and more importantly what lessons can’t be drawn from these events.

One of the most important lessons is that climate impacts are not all neatly reversible. For example, if we start to lose an ice sheet because of excess atmospheric CO2 and warming, just dialling down the CO2 back to its ...

Ten ways to stop disinformation

In our social media age, misinformation can spread like wildfire creating an ecosystem of reality denial, where truth has become subordinate to ideology and feelings have more weight than evidence. What can we do about it?

Lee McIntyre, a research fellow at Boston University, has laid out a playbook on how to fight disinformation campaigns in his book On Disinformation: How to Fight for Truth and Protect Democracy

First, it’s worth distinguishing between misinformation and disinformation. ...

Climate Risk

Judith Curry’s book Climate Uncertainty and Risk aims to provide a framework for understanding the climate change ‘debate’. She argues that the climate change problem and its solution have been oversimplified; that understanding uncertainty can help in better assessing the risks; and that uncertainty and disagreement can be part of the decision-making process.

It is worth stating upfront that Ms Curry agrees that average global temperatures have increased since 1860, that carbon dioxide (CO2)...

A Call to Action

“Treating the world as if we intended to stay”, to quote Crispin Tickell, neatly summarises the growing recognition that we need to respond to the threats of climate change, over-population, and unsustainable exploitation of the planets resources. Can we, as the most advanced society ever to live on earth, manufacture a ‘soft landing’ in the face of these challenges?

Authors Mark Diesendorf and Rod Taylor think so. In their hopeful book, The Path to a Sustainable Civilisation, the authors set...

Earthshots

On 12 September 1962, US President John F Kennedy gave a famous speech in which he announced “We choose to go the Moon in this decade…not because it is easy, but because it is hard.” Indeed the goal was achieved in July 1969, when the Apollo 11 crew successfully landed on the Moon.

That audacious goal and the reasoning for a moonshot has now been borrowed by the US Biden Administration to define initiatives that can help mitigate the climate change threat. The Department of Energy (DoE) has l...