Matthew Syed

Matthew Philip Syed (born 2 November 1970) is an English writer, radio presenter and former table tennis player. Quotes Black Box Thinking (2015) Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes — But Some Do (London: John Murray, 2015) It is partly because we are so willing to blame others for their mistakes that we are so keen to conceal our own. Pt. 1, ch. 1 Learning from failure has the status of a cliché. But it turns out that, for reasons both prosaic and profound, a failure to learn from mistakes has been one of the single greatest obstacles to human progress. Pt. 1, ch. 1 All airplanes must carry two black boxes, one of which records instructions sent to all on-board electronic systems. The other is a cockpit voice recorder, enabling investigators to get into the minds of the pilots in the moments leading up to an accident. Instead of concealing failure, or skirting around it, aviation has a system where failure is data rich. . . . Mistakes are not stigmatized, but regarded as learning opportunities. The interested parties are given every reason to cooperate, since the evidence compiled by the accident investigation branch is inadmissible in court proceedings. . . . In the aftermath of the investigation the report is made available to everyone. Airlines have a legal responsibility to implement the recommendations. Every pilot in the world has free access to the data. This practice enables everyone . . . to learn from the mistake. Pt. 1, ch. 2 Most closed loops exist because people deny failure or try to spin it. With pseudosciences the problem is more structural. They have been designed, wittingly or otherwise, to make failure impossible. That is why, to their adherents, they are so mesmerizing. They are compatible with everything that happens. But that also means they cannot learn from anything. Pt. 1, ch. 3 Angela Merkel was the True Extremist of our Age (2026) "Angela Merkel was the true extremist of our age", The Sunday Times (19 September 2026) If extremism is defined as acting out of proportion with context, history or consent, I suggest Merkel’s tenure represented the high point of postwar European extremism. It was not just that she opened the door in 2015 to almost a million unvetted, largely male asylum seekers, but did so knowing perfectly well what the consequences would be. . . . She knew it would impose ruinous fiscal cost on the German people but she went ahead anyway, prioritising the projection of her own virtue above the interests of her voters. She knew it would add huge pressure to schools with tens of thousands of extra pupils needing German-as-second-language teaching in an already short-staffed system, not to mention adding huge tension to a tight housing market. She knew this would shaft her neighbours as migrants moved westwards, making a mockery of Schengen and adding to the drumbeat for Brexit. She must also have surely known there would be a spike in crime; rape and sexual assaults rose by 13 per cent in 2016 and asylum seekers were overrepresented sixfold in the numbers. On New Year’s Eve in 2015 more than 500 sexual offences were recorded in Cologne on a single night. . . . She embraced policies she knew would harm those at the bottom but (of course) not those like Klopp who live in gated developments and whose closest contact with migrants is millionaire footballers. You’ll doubtless have noted the increasingly Orwellian terminology applied to parties such as the AfD, Reform and the like. It started with “far” right, then moved to “hard” right, then “radical” right. Soon they will be labelled the “rabid right”. [T]he two great sins of hyperliberalism: open borders and the betrayal of Nato. Liberalism as an ideology is muscular and realistic. It recognises that defending freedom requires powerful militaries, solid alliances and strong borders, otherwise fifth columnists will enter our nations and wreck that which we value. [T]he rise of these new right parties was fuelled by the extremism of those who preceded them: a generation of hyperliberal leaders who forgot what they were for and who they were supposed to serve. External links Category:1970 births Category:Living people Category:Non-fiction authors from England Category:Journalists from England Category:University of Oxford alumni Category:People from Berkshire