I will explain this by reading a passage by Alessandro Manzoni from The Betrothed. Here it is. With ideas donna Prassede behaved as they say one must do with friends: she had few; but to those few, she was very fond. Among the few, there were by misfortune many of the crooked ones; and they […]

One of the main, as well as ordinary, aspects of my work, is to define the boundaries of situations before determining the actions to be taken. When I am dealing with many, sometimes too many people, offering the same interpretation of a given situation, my mind goes to this excerpt from Konrad Lorenz, taken from […]

Listen to what Ennio Flaiano wrote in 1969 in Il Corriere della Sera about stupidity: Stupidity has made enormous progress. It is a Sun that cannot be watched fixedly. Thanks to the media, it is not even the same anymore, it feeds on other myths, it sells itself a lot, it has made fun of […]

More and more often we encounter situations in which we need to call on experts, that is, people with knowledge and experience in a specific topic, superior to the ones we can rely on as an individual, group or organization. In my experience, ascertaining whether we are actually in the presence of an expert in […]

How often it happened to you to buy things that you did not need? Or to buy from one person rather than another without the quality of what you were about to buy playing a crucial role? Much more than you imagine, I bet. In this post, I want to focus on a mechanism that […]

Politicians, economists, witch doctors of various kinds, and people often focused on catching the spotlight with their predictions of the future. But is it really possible to know what the future holds for us? We have always tried to answer the question with astrology, and other forms of superstition by appealing to so-called experts, refusing […]

I don’t think I need to add something. Do you?

The New Year usually opens with best wishes and the hope that the future will be more generous with us than in the past. However, I believe that simply wishing for a benevolent chance is not enough to guarantee a better future. For this reason, this year I decided to help Lady Luck by identifying […]

Who is Procrustes? And for what reason should you (quickly…) get off of his bed? Procrustes is a character recorded in Greek mythology as living on Mount Corydalle, along the sacred road linking Eleusis and Athens, who offered hospitality to pilgrims: a generous dinner was followed by a rest on a bed that he wished […]

Today I want to talk to you about a test that might be useful in assessing your knowledge on a specific matter. It is a short test that I learned to take on two important occasions: whenever I am about to face a task that is new to me, at least partially; when I want […]