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In Defense of Mess
When Nobel Laureate and University of Chicago economics professor Robert Fogel found his desk becoming massively piled he simply installed a second desk behind him that now competes in towering clutter with the first.
That is from A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder, by Eric Abramson and David Freedman, an intriguing defense of...um...mess. Here is my previous post on this topic.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on January 3, 2007 at 01:01 PM in Science | Permalink
Comments
In "Buckaroo Banzai," the inside of the alien invaders' spaceship is not the gleaming white standard in sci-fe movies, but an unholy mess because the aliens are so smart that they can remember exactly where they dropped things. In real life, the smartest executive at my old marketing research firm had a desk just like that, completely covered in stacks of papers, from which he could instantly locate whatever he needed. That kind of random access search is great if you have a 200 IQ, but I don't.
Posted by: Steve Sailer at Jan 3, 2007 5:01:45 PM
I listened to the review and interview of this on NPR last week, and from the intro, I thought it made a lot of sense, but during the interview, the author featured (I forget which one) seemed to throw out all balance.
People who are simply messy tend to NOT get things done, while people who obsess over neatness, likewise, get less done.
But the featured author really went past the whole idea of having any balance. He said something to the effect of making your kids clean up after themselves made for poor parent-child relationships.
Truly messy people lose their keys, forget to pick up the needed suit from the cleaners and are often late. They leave swimming pool gates open where small children can just waltz right through. A messy Valujet mechanic caused a lot of people to nose dive into the Everglades. Et cetera.
Posted by: Ray G at Jan 3, 2007 9:34:47 PM
Dave Freedman was the one. Here's the address. It's a decent listen. . .
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6691239
I've always thought of organization along the lines of 'situational awareness' as they call it in aviation circles. A high degree of SA does require an exceptional IQ, and even then, some order is needed.
Otherwise, a mess is just an accident waiting to happen.
Speaking of aviation, think of the "creatively messy" mechanic working on the airplane you'll be flying on next.
Posted by: Ray G at Jan 3, 2007 10:23:47 PM
I don't get the thing about not wanting to live by the ocean (from your earlier post). The ocean is expansive space and if space is good and calming and organizing, it should be spacially comforting. Too much city is a bit of a clutter. Or am I missing something about your spacial-awareness?
Posted by: liberty at Jan 4, 2007 12:45:34 PM
As an instrument-rated land and sea pilot, I can whole-heartedly agree with the idea that there are some places where you don't want messiness. In the cockpit, I'm a checklist guy. And while it may have not come out in that particular NPR segment, I (and my co-author) have consistently emphasized throughout A Perfect Mess and in most interviews that the idea of the benefits of mess is all about balance, and finding the right level and type of mess, not about being very messy, or about being messy in all ways in all situations. And by the way, in our survey, very neat people reported spending more time looking for things than fairly messy people--and if you think about it, it makes sense. Also by the way, plenty of aviation accidents occur when a pilot isn't able to step outside the checklist and think creatively about what's going on--and the copilot is too mindful of his or her place as 2nd in command.
Posted by: Dave Freedman at Jan 10, 2007 8:16:31 PM
Posted by: laptop battery at Oct 22, 2008 9:19:18 PM
