> On 15 Jun 2014, at 9:03 am, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote:
>
> Yeah, I remember Edward de Bono. I read what I think was his first book,
> which was all about thinking "outside the box" as the current phrase goes.
> It was good advice.
>
> Brent
Yes. And the implications for the TT are there to be seen. What makes up the
best in human thinking is the ability to conjur something out of nothing on the
spot. Creativity, in other words. Thinking outside the box means something very
profound. It means we have organised our perception around all these
Aristotelian boxes and they all have labels on them. The natural behaviour of
the human mind is to seek that box into which something or other should placed
or filed. Then the lid is slammed shut and the label slapped on. A thing is
either in the box or out of the box. A thing can never be halfway in and
halfway out. a thing can never be in two boxes at once. Everett is now spinning
in his grave. Our thinking system is predicated on the fable that only one
version of something can ever exist. You either accept something or you reject
something. You either agree with me or you disagree with me. De Bono called
this "old-fashioned intellectualism" or "Rock logic" where there is only
dialectic opposition of ideas with some truly vain hope of the ultimate
synthesis of the thesis and the antithesis. Nobody ever wrote a good book about
how this was ever supposed to come about. He then made a plea for what he
called "Water logic" where the idea is to go with the flow and to not worry
about the obstacles in the stream but to do as water does and to flow around
things. The biggest obstacle to the success of all human endeavours is this
thing called "human nature." That's a very difficult rock to remove from the
river. Intelligence is then about knowing when to call off the attack and to
keep your mouth shut. You can tell when people are arguing from their deep
emotional insecurities about themselves and blathering all over the place with
fine phrases and many words. They aren't talking about the topic at all; they
are justifying their need for others to reassure them that it's OK to be part
of the playgroup. There is also the famous "Intelligence Trap." This is the
observation that some highly intelligent people with 8 stroke motors between
their ears can easily be duped or misled by simple con tricks for the basic
reason that they have a deep need to be seen tfo be right about anything and
everything, therefore if they cannot see what is going on inside of 5 seconds
they start to get uppity. Some things take longer than 5 seconds to work
through, let's face it. Comp has kept me on my toes since 1998 and I don't
think I am all that stoopid. If you have a high IQ you have probably been told
by your mommy and your daddy and your schoolteacher that you are an
"accelerant" or some such bullshit, so you expect to race through everything
and always win for the least expenditure of time and energy. Such people then
marry the first partner that seems to fit the bill and end up in messy divorces
and get fleeced. Humans will make a judgement about something in a nanosecond -
this being the default behaviour of our argument-based adversarial thinking
style. Either I will eat or I will be eaten. This then translates into things
like "democracy" which is basically an excuse for yet more tribal behaviour.
Real thinking involves all four wheels of the car on the ground. An argument
style of thinking only has three wheels on the ground. The missing fourth wheel
is generic, possibility-based thinking that turns away from agreement and
disagreement. The idea should be the need to explore the terrain of ideas
rather than to seek the chink or the flaw in each other's armour. Exploring a
terrain of ideas such as we do here routinely is best done when we neither
agree nor disagree with each other but turn and face in the same direction and
simply report to each other on what we "see just up ahead." This way we advance
as a group and do not dissolve into sectarian, tribal "I am right, you are
wrong" adversarial squabbles. In the rare moments where humans do this, we are
truly persons; possibly the self-referentially correct Löbian entities of comp.
Sorry - this post was too long.
Kim
>
>> On 6/14/2014 3:35 PM, Kim wrote:
>>
>>
>>> On 15 Jun 2014, at 2:34 am, John Clark wrote:
>>>
>>> On the other hand there is no harder job in the world than being a
>>> intelligence theorist, but at least if you happen to stumble upon the
>>> correct intelligence theory the fact that you've suddenly become the
>>> world's first trillionaire is a pretty good hint that your theory is on the
>>> right track.
>> That guy was Edward de Bono. He was the first one to say that intelligence
>> is the horsepower of the car whereas thinking ability is the skill with
>> which the car is driven. He may have come up to the level of a trillionaire
>> at some point but he did at one point own 4 islands, one of them off the
>> coast of Venice and a castle or two in France as well as seeding
>> organisations in over 34 countries devoted to teaching thinking ability. He
>> appears on a list of 250 people who have contributed the most to humanity
>> and NASA named an asteroid after him.
>>
>> Now comes the sad part. He had a lousy marriage and had to sell off those
>> islands to finance his divorce settlement. So much for thinking ability.
>> Just the same, I don't see too many people making the necessary distinction
>> between perception ("seeing with the mind and the emotions/values") and
>> thinking (data crunching and survival strategies) People on this list
>> routinely argue about different things, thinking they are arguing about the
>> same thing. That's perception. De Bono also understood Gödelian
>> Incompleteness; in the 1970s he said that the choice of premises in any
>> argument or discussion is arbitrary and that the outcome of most discussions
>> is determined by the starting point or premises, so it hardly matters what
>> happens in between.
>>
>> A big part of intelligence is indeed knowing how to choose modes of thinking
>> as John says, and the biggest enemy of clear, effective thinking is
>> confusion. Confusion in thinking is where we try to do everything at once
>> which is impossible. The neurotransmitters governing the different modes of
>> thinking cannot all be optimised in the same direction simultaneously. So,
>> De Bono devised the Six Thinking Hats to force people to literally do one
>> thing at a time. Each coloured hat represents a particular mode of thinking:
>> Red for feelings, gut intuitions, White for facts and observations, Yellow
>> for the benefits, Black for the logical negative, Green for creativity and
>> seeking the alternatives (so-called "Lateral Thinking") and the Blue Hat is
>> for metacognition or the broad overview of the thinking process. This was
>> based on the neuroscience insight of the early 80s that a reasonably normal
>> human has about seven "slots" that comprise their thinking capacity that can
>> be filled. So, De Bono surmised that we would do better then to back-off by
>> maybe one slot to ensure brains don't go into meltdown so there are only six
>> hats, not seven. If you or your kid have not had this unbelievably simple
>> yet incredibly effective and powerful routine run past them at school yet,
>> then you aren't getting value for money for your school fees.
>>
>> Kim
>
>
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