institutions for long periods after it was clear they should be removed. The

obvious implication: Be careful whom you appoint to power because a dominant

authority figure will often be hard to remove, aided as he will be by

Authority-Misinfluence Tendency.

 

Twenty-Three: Twaddle Tendency

 

Man, as a social animal who has the gift of language, is born to prattle and to

pour out twaddle that does much damage when serious work is being attempted.

Some people produce copious amounts of twaddle and others very little.

 

A trouble from the honeybee version of twaddle was once demonstrated in an

interesting experiment. A honeybee normally goes out and finds nectar and then

comes back and does a dance that communicates to the other bees where the nectar

is. The other bees then go out and get it. Well some scientist—clever, like B.

F. Skinner—decided to see how well a honeybee would do with a handicap. He put

the nectar straight up. Way up. Well, in a natural setting, there is no nectar a

long way straight up, and the poor honeybee doesn’t have a genetic program that

is adequate to handle what she now has to communicate. You might guess that this

honeybee would come back to the hive and slink into a corner, but she doesn’t.

She comes into the hive and does an incoherent dance. Well, all my life I’ve

been dealing with the human equivalent of that honeybee. And it’s a very

important part of wise administration to keep prattling people, pouring out

twaddle, far away from the serious work. A rightly famous Caltech engineering

professor, exhibiting more insight than tact, once expressed his version of this