HOW FORCES WE IGNORE SHAPE US

von Boris Kriger

312 Seiten, Taschenbuch

Kurzbeschreibung des Verlags

A man walks into an emergency room holding his left arm. The arm is the problem. The arm is where it hurts, where he points, where he would like someone to do something. The arm is fine. It is his heart that is dying, and the only reason anyone finds out is that a hundred and fifty years ago a few physicians noticed that pain is a terrible witness - it reports the crime scene it feels like reporting, and it feels no obligation to be accurate.This book argues that almost everything we try to fix, we try to fix in the arm.We treat exhaustion as a failure of character when it is a failure of a thyroid. We treat a city's crime as a moral emergency and its lead pipes as a plumbing footnote. We run a root cause analysis that descends exactly as far as the organization has the authority to act, declares the bottom, and files the report. We are not stupid about this. We are built this way: the layer we can see is the layer that hurts, and the layer that hurts is almost never the layer that decides.Boris Kriger offers a test sharp enough to use on a Tuesday. A level of intervention is the right one if the system does not compensate. Push there, and the number stays pushed. Push at the wrong level, and some patient loop restores the old value while sending the bill somewhere you are not looking. Efficiency standards met by driving farther. Seat belts met by driving faster. Diets met by a metabolism that quietly turns the thermostat down. The compensation is not a moral failure. It is a receipt.What follows is not a summons to dig deeper. Depth is not authority, and the descent has no floor - beneath biology is chemistry, beneath chemistry is physics, and if depth decided everything the only competent physician would be a particle theorist. Sometimes the level that works is higher. A few grains of iodine in table salt did more for human cognition than the entire history of self-improvement, and that was a move sideways.Wide-ranging, funny where it can be and plain where it must be, this book is about the layer where the trouble actually lives, why we can almost never see it, who profits from our staring at the arm, and how to tell - before you spend twenty years on it - whether you are standing on the floor where anything can be solved.Keywords: levels of explanation, causation, systems thinking, compensation, root cause, biology and psychology, unintended consequences

• Reihe: Independently published
• ISBN: 9798176618211
• Sprache: Englisch
• Erscheinungsdatum: 23.09.2026
• Größe: 229 x 152 mm
• Verlag: Independently published