Knowing

I believe that in order to truly know something, one must be able to argue the opposite.  This idea achieves crystal clarity every election season - everyone's arguing, pointing fingers, and accusing the other side of...something.  Liberals like to raise taxes and take away our guns. Conservatives don't care about anyone except rich white people. Blah blah blah. It's always the same.  And don't get me wrong, this extends beyond well beyond politics and religion, and into every aspect of what we believe we know for certain.

The issue comes up whenever there is conversation more about being "right" than actually listening.  As a sophomore in my undergrad, my roommate and I were polar opposites, particularly on the divisive lines of politics and religion.  But we addressed this head-on.  In fact, we often would just sit and talk, sharing our perspectives and hearing what the other had to say.  We both knew that one, in all likelihood, wouldn't change the other's mind on anything, and with that in mind, we recognized that there was no point in trying.  Why yell and get irate? Why foster bad blood and unhealthy relationships?  Why not seize the opportunity to listen and learn things that you don't understand?

So can you argue, honestly and clearly, the opposite side without any sarcasm or irony? Do you understand the arguments that can and will be made against your stance? Are you able to articulate what the other side believes (and even take it a step further and explore why they believe it?)?  If not, I would argue that more research needs to be done.  I don't pretend to understand everything I believe, much less everything someone else may think, but I'm working on it.  Once we stop communicating and start clashing, when we start a discourse thinking we'll change their mind or our intent is just to convey how dumb they clearly are, we've already lost.  I'm not advocating against have strong, deeply ingrained beliefs.  Not at all. Just to consider arguing against them. Whether you believe it or not.

Logic?

So I was having a great conversation the other night about logic as I posited that I don't particularly believe in it.  As I see it, "logic" really boils down to nothing more than having the answer already.  I think about so-called "logic puzzles", and, having read more than my fair share, would I be able to assert that I am more logical than someone who hasn't experienced as many?  For instance, a relatively well-known puzzle goes like this: you're in an otherwise empty room with a candle, a book of matches, and a box of small thumbtacks.  Your challenge is to light the candle in such a way that the flame is six feet off the ground.  Spoiler alert: empty the box of tacks and pin it to the wall.  From there, simply set the candle on the box.  Boom.  Now, I know that answer.  No, I did not initially come to that conclusion on my own, but I have it now, so who's to say any different?  So am I currently more "logical" than anyone else?  I would say no.

Now, through the course of the debate, some interesting counter-points were made that really got the ol' brain box working.  One such argument would be that logic, as it were, comes down to the ability to connect prior knowledge with new and novel challenges.  Touche.  However, I would say that that is the definition of intelligence - the ability to take previous education, experience, and background and reapply concepts in different situations to reach a conclusion which then gets assimilated into your working memory once more for future situations.  Now even this isn't my own thought.  Over the course of my own experience I've been fortunate enough to be exposed to a cornucopia of others and this paradigm comes from the works of Daniel Willingham (the article can be found here).  So again I would argue that much of what we "know" is a direct product of external stimuli.

A bit off topic I realize, but by now the conversation had shifted slightly this direction anyway so we ran with it.  So, I asked, what would the difference be between logic and intelligence? How does knowledge factor in? What about common sense? I would say that there wouldn't really be a difference per se, but that logic is a misused synonym for intelligence.  I've often thought about logic (and I would assume you have as well) as a black or white issue.  Either you're logical or you're not, whereas more and more we've broken down intelligence into different types (read more about multiple intelligence) and "objective" levels.  I think about Spock, often commenting whether or not a decision was logical, not whether or not it carried any level of intelligence.

So then where exactly are we?  Here I tried to summarize my argument about the whole ordeal: if intelligence is the product of years and years of external stimuli being processed and rearranged into new a different situations, and we want to say whether something is logical (or common sense) wouldn't that very logic be entirely subjective and different from one person to another?  And if it's subjective, how could we ever assume logic as a constant?  See, I received a very different educational experience than even those I went to school with. Just as they had a very different experience than me. I've had life experiences others haven't or experiences in a different order, crossing a bridge before or after others have long since been there, done that. And everyone, you included, have experienced things I never have, and often, never will.  So where does that take us?  And consider the ramifications of this interculturally and globally!

Here's another puzzle for you: In an otherwise empty, windowless room, with only one locked door in and out, you have a saw, a baseball bat, and a piano.  There exist three ways out of the room using only these materials (no, you can't break down the door or saw through it).  This one I won't spoil for you.

But if you figure out the three exits, consider if it's "logical" or simply a product of your experiences.

And whether or not it actually matters.

Opening the Partisan Doors

Are we even more partisan than ever?  I think I may think so.  But I haven't quite figured out why.

I think, taking a shot in the dark, a large part of it may be our incredible and unrestricted access to information and incessant communication with a larger scope of like-minded individuals.  Hear me out: Before Facebook, Twitter, newsfeeds, daily updates, and bloggers of all shapes and forms (the Dark Ages, if you will), most information was gathered from magazines, books, the news (on the television...), and our own circle of influence.  We were able to develop our own thoughts and beliefs, defining "liberal" and "conservative" based on our own beliefs, agreeing with some aspects of one group, some from the other, and crafting them into a finely-tuned encyclopedia of personal values.  Issues, I believe, were at the forefront - education, taxation, government spending, religion, and interpretations of the Constitution weren't mutually inclusive, where your beliefs regarding one didn't always guarantee where you stood on another.  And because of this, cooperation wasn't a four-letter word.  Because we each, individually, say across lines and parties, it only made sense that this would continue into the public sector.

Now, however, there's a different situation.  Today, we are assaulted with a constant barrage of stimuli.  Everyday, wherever we happen to be, we have such unprecedented access to whatever anyone cares to say, no matter how crass, short-sighted, or immature it may be, and we've lost that individual sense of self.  I don't recall any traffic law specifying that driver's should not read a newspaper while driving.  Now, however, we've all driven down the highway and glanced at the car next to us wherein the driver is completely engrossed in their phone.  What this also entails, I believe, is that we're now confronted with what parties are "supposed" to look like.  What a good Republican or Democrat should be for.  After all, once upon a time, one had to be an actual journalist to reach even one hundred people.  Now any average joe can start a blog and spout whatever nonsense he or she thinks people want to read (case in point...).  So now, rather than a handful of inputs to consider and bounce off our social circle, we face hundreds, if not thousands every week.  Slowly but surely, we are becoming more and more ingrained to what we're "supposed" to believe and the labels that come with one idea or another.  And, in an effort to avoid becoming an outcast, we begin to affiliate, gradually, with other concepts linked (somehow) to one or two with which we first sided.  And I believe this works both ways: reading a post written to (more often than not) an extreme 180 degrees of your perspective, the less you affiliate with those beliefs to any extent - and push us further into partisan positions.

Just look at Facebook.  Go on, scroll through a few posts.  Chances are, there's at least one talking politics (in some way, shape, or form).  Soon, this may just become a full-blown virtual battle, and, if you pay close enough attention, often you'll find people chiming in, people you know, who, you realize, don't actually have a horse in this race.  Gun control is a great example.  On the left, we need more restriction.  On the right, less.  It doesn't really matter what you actually think about guns anymore.  It's about maintaining your loyalty to your chosen brand.

Go on, ask any Mac user if they're willing to trade in for a PC.  And vice versa.  The Mac user will most certainly decline, citing the simplicity of the operating system, the ability to sync it with other Mac devices, and/or the Mac software.  And PC will argue that they've got the better deal as well, of course.  Now, sifting through all the B.S., unless you're using one or the other for work-related reasons (I hear Mac has better video editing software), is one inherently better than the other?  Of course not.  But we've invested so much of ourselves into the idea that we're right that anything to contrary must be wrong.

And so it goes with politics.  How about we stop thinking about which brand we've invested in, and actually start looking at the issues.  I know it's a big step, but how about a dialogue - not a debate, not a right vs. wrong argument, but an actual dialogue in which we try to understand opposing view points.  Surrounding ourselves with the same perspective will most certainly leave us seeing the same thing.

Post Script: Seeking to understand one another is not as simple as waiting for your turn to talk.  Please, stop nodding your head, shrugging your shoulders, and responding "well, it's the way I feel."  They say that when you stop learning, you should be six feet under.  Well, until you actually listen, you're as good as entombed.

Quote of the Week #4

"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire."
-William Butler Yeats

Quote of the Week #3

"A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn no other way."
-Mark Twain

Thinking and Learning II

Several weeks ago, I wrote about how the more you know, the more you can learn (accessed here).

Adding to it with a bit of Ken Robinson into the mix (an animated TED Talk he's done can be found here).  Initially, I predominately indicated that it's useful to have a depth of knowledge from which you may be able to draw referenences and points of comparison, effectively interconnecting the web of information that exists all around us.  And I most certainly still see that as an incredibly valuable asset to have.  The ability to observe a situation, understand the circumstances, recognize likely outcomes, and acknowledge the otherwise unforeseen effects is an incredible ability indeed.

However, I beleve that there may in fact be two sides to the coin.  On the one side, we have depth of knowledge - expereince and insight perhaps only gleaned through conscious effort to learn.  On the other side, I think we can find breadth of knowledge - experience and background into a wide range of topics.  This one's a bit more difficult for me to convey, mostly because I'm not a psychologist.  But I'll give it a shot:

The human mind is perhaps one of the most intricate and interconnected system of avenues and information in the history of the world.  no computer has even come close to providing anything on par with it, and as such, there's still much we don't fully understand.  What we, as humans, have come to learn about the human mind is that it's very dynamic and very diverse.  Two hemisphere's compose the brain, one, on the left, controlling logical/deductive reasoning and the other, on the right, controlling our artistic ability, spatial awareness, and creativity.  It's fun - to draw the left hemisphere, we need the right.  To study and learn about the right hemisphere, we need the left.  The two sides don't operate in a vacuum: they intermingle data from one side to the next, back to the first, shoots it over...and so on and so on and so on and so on, and it happened faster than you read this sentence.

Pretty cool, eh?

But what that means, however, is that as we learn, the dynamic and plastic nature of our mind organizes, accumulates, and reorganizes data in such a way that we haven't even begun to fully understand the pathways and synapses and connections made in the categorization of information.  What we know and what we've experienced shapes our perceptions and influences how we view the world around us.  The language we speak and use influences how we see the world more than how we see the world influences our language.  The experiences each of us have and the encounters we face all play a role in some way, shape, or form how we see the world, and in turn, perceive future events.  As such, if all we study and all we know is, for instance, 19th century English literature, we limit ourselves to (predominately) only be able to perceive the world through that singular lens.  Adding breadth to your knowledge, though, may just be the key to an ability to see more...

Thinking and Learning

Reading some articles of Daniel Willingham (check out some of his work here), one incredible fact sticks out to me: the more you know, the more you can learn.  Think of any random joke that happens across your mind.  Take, for instance, if there's H2O on the inside of a fire hydrant, what's on the outside?  K9P

First of all, that's hilarious.

But think of all the previous knowledge you need to connect the punch line with the joke.  You need to know that the chemical makeup of water is two parts hydrogen (designated by an "H") and one part oxygen (the "O").  And there's a good chance you already knew the function of a fire hydrant so the assimilation of "H2O" and "hydrant" was already apparent in your mind.  As for the punch line, this may have a taken a second to understand (I know it took me a second) because it's not immediately applicable to all people to refer to a dog as a "K9".  As our mind was already focused on interpreting chemical formulas, it may have taken a second to change gears into a new route of thinking.  But that second was undoubtedly just a second.  The connection was swiftly made for "K9" = dog and "P" = urine, drawing on past experience that dogs are known to pee on fire hydrants.

And those connects were made in less than a second.  You undoubtedly didn't have to put any thought into understanding the joke at all, it just clicked.  This is because you already had those requisite concepts stored in your long-term memory, drew them out into your working memory and complied previous knowledge with new information to arrive at the conclusion that the joke is phenomenal.  Without any effort.

Now apply that to reading a book or magazine, following instructions, or having a conversation.  If you're already well-versed in (or at least knowledgeable of) the basics of the Vietnam War, having a cocktail party conversation with someone about the merits and validity of U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia, the Domino Effect, and proxy battles of the Cold War shouldn't be an issue.  However, knowing absolutely nothing about it may leave you blindly searching your memory for 10th grade history class to retrieve any useful tidbit to avoid standing there staring blankly.  But this ability to retrieve such information is made possible by the fact that you already knew about differences between capitalism vs. communism and understood the opposing view points.  And now, with this prior knowledge, you're able to better understand the delicate nature of the Vietnam War, the incursions into Cambodia, and the confrontation with China regarding proximity to their border.  You're able to understand how photography offered those back home a look at the harsh realities of war and helped turn popular opinion against the war.  You'll be better able to understand the ramifications of the draft, and apply that to a conversation as we ventured into Iraq in the early 2000's regarding another one.

Similarly, the more you know about computers (of which I am not nearly as informed!), each experience, each method, or each upgrade lays the foundation for future situations.  Perhaps not exactly the same issue, but the previous knowledge serves as a building block, a stepping stone to understanding this new situation.

The more you know, the more you can learn...

So really, regardless of WHAT you're learning, just get out there and learn something new today!