In the past, I used to counter any such notions by asking myself: 'Would you really want President Hattersley?' I now find that possibility rather cheers me up. With his chubby, Dickensian features and his knowledge of T.H. Green and other harmless leftish political classics, Hattersley might not be such a bad thing after all.
People can do bad things for good reasons, or for what they think are good reasons.
Bad things happen sometimes.
I can't tell you that if you bring in a bunch of weird and different people, then a bunch of good things will happen. But I can tell you that if you hire a bunch of similar people and promote only the ones who are most similar, a bunch of bad things are likely to happen.
Chemistry can be a good and bad thing. Chemistry is good when you make love with it. Chemistry is bad when you make crack with it.
I love a bit of drama. That's a bad thing. I can flip really quickly.
Salt is a more-ish sort of thing. But it can be a bad thing if there's too much salt. It's awful.
Controversy is not necessarily a bad thing. It's a good thing at times.
Science has a culture that is inherently cautious and that is normally not a bad thing. You could even say conservative, because of the peer review process and because the scientific method prizes uncertainty and penalises anyone who goes out on any sort of a limb that is not held in place by abundant and well-documented evidence.
Most people aren't lying awake at night worrying about a nuclear threat. But we are unnerved by a lot of how technology is coming into our lives and starting to infuse our lives. And we question whether that's a good thing or a bad thing.
