Or, looked at without the marketroid glasses, it's an expensive Lotus with shittier range and longer refill time which sometimes bursts into flames during minor collisions.

Yeah, but older cars can be maintained by anyone with the mechanical expertise.

Newer cars have computars 'n' shit which claim to make driving more efficient but cost me more in the end because not just anyone can fix them when they go wrong.

A few years ago my family retired a 1980 Datsun, which still had an excellent engine but was finally succumbing to rust, being situated fairly close to the sea. Engine problems have rendered every newer car uneconomic to maintain within 20 years.

Oh, you flirt! but, come now, you're taking away the surprise, and you know that's half the fun...

The crap are you talking about? It's a measure of the ridiculousness of someone's worldview when they end up with absurdities like "a person is just a type of business".

To break your analogy immediately: profit is by definition something a business does NOT use for its own enjoyment- it is primarily the reward to the owners of its capital; whereas by your analogy, profit is something a human DOES use for its own enjoyment. The underlying factor here is that businesses are not humans.

The premise concerns people who think that nothing outside their limited sphere of expertise is "important" - focussing on art, it concerns people who have no appreciation of something which is not apparently useful to them.

My hypothesis is merely that they are dumber for it. But you're adding the first condition that any mental improvement is "important". Now either you're carelessly or deliberately equivocating. If the first case, you're overlooking that the first "important" is based on the opinion of the subject, while the second is based on the opinion of the tester - in which case a more objective description should be applied. If the second, you're trying to impose the opinion of the subject (your being one, clearly) on the tester.

Your second condition is measurability, and that's fair.

Your third condition is "innovation", which is so weasely that I'm going to titter quietly and hitherto think of you as AlphaWeasel_HK.

Well, someone's defensive about their ignorance!

I haven't given a plausible explanation for how taking your mind out of its comfort zone will improve it?

How about starting with... the original article cited in the summary.

Yes yes very clever.

Making the effort to appreciate things that you do NOT necessarily have much care for helps to focus/train/expand your mind. It's not about people liking things I like - it's about breaking out of your and my comfort zones.

Same here. I summarise as, "Attack only upwards or inwards."

But so are most industries. Few people want to work with someone much more experienced than them, unless they lack the competitive streak - no more so than IT, an industry full of insecure autodidacts who are often more mouth than trousers.

One statistically significant study is "science".

You say "random data" like it's a bad thing.

When you say "isn't verifiable" are you saying the study can't be duplicated? Or that you think the researchers could have made up the data? That's a fairly serious accusation.

The report is from NYT but the original study certainly wasn't.

And perhaps if you'd paid attention at museums, you'd have some critical thinking skills.

But that argument, all researchers develop confirmation bias that makes their studies worthless.

Everybody wants their research to show positive results. It's much harder to publish a failure, let alone get cred for it.

I like to believe that this is true, but can we confirm that everyone who had their name picked out went, and everyone who didn't, didnt?

In a more general sense, it's clear around me that an appreciation of art develops thinking skills in unrelated fields. The dullest geeks I have the misfortune to associate with are those who think that nothing is important beyond their own tiny little corner of knowledge - it's not their ignorance which is grating, but their paucity of reasoning power.

It's a proportion of the value of my labour to the company.

Oh well, that's idealism for you.

Now imagine you didn't opt in, and the plastic thingummy design/factory process/etc. was borrowed by a competitor...

What does e.g. Foxconn have going for it? Well, it has a lot of capital, but mostly it has secrets! secrets to running a highly efficient build process. If it were entitled to no protection for these secrets, because there was no method in law of recognising them, anyone with enough capital would be able to poach Foxconn's employees and build an equally efficient competitor.

Artificial creation of companies to escape duties or take advantage of the system is nothing new. Here, the "buddy"'s soul task is producing IP using the CAD/CAM software.