[Vision2020] Problem Solving

[Joe Campbell]

Great article. Thanks for posting it!

On Tue, Mar 29, 2011 at 7:12 AM, Art Deco <deco at moscow.com> wrote:

>  From:  *The New York Times*
>
>  March 28, 2011
>  Tools for Thinking By DAVID BROOKS<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/davidbrooks/index.html?inline=nyt-per>
>
> A few months ago, Steven Pinker of Harvard asked a smart question: What
> scientific concept would improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit?
>
> The good folks at Edge.org <http://edge.org/> organized a symposium<http://www.edge.org/q2011/q11_index.html#greenej>,
> and 164 thinkers contributed suggestions. John McWhorter, a linguist at
> Columbia University, wrote that people should be more aware of path
> dependence. This refers to the notion that often “something that seems
> normal or inevitable today began with a choice that made sense at a
> particular time in the past, but survived despite the eclipse of the
> justification for that choice.”
>
> For instance, typewriters used to jam if people typed too fast, so the
> manufacturers designed a keyboard that would slow typists. We no longer have
> typewriters, but we are stuck with the letter arrangements of the qwerty
> keyboard.
>
> Path dependence explains many linguistic patterns and mental categories,
> McWhorter continues. Many people worry about the way e-mail seems to degrade
> writing skills. But there is nothing about e-mail that forbids people from
> using the literary style of 19th-century letter writers. In the 1960s,
> language became less formal, and now anybody who uses the old manner is
> regarded as an eccentric.
>
> Evgeny Morozov, the author of “The Net Delusion,” nominated the Einstellung
> Effect, the idea that we often try to solve problems by using solutions that
> worked in the past instead of looking at each situation on its own terms.
> This effect is especially powerful in foreign affairs, where each new
> conflict is viewed through the prism of Vietnam or Munich or the cold war or
> Iraq.
>
> Daniel Kahneman of Princeton University writes about the Focusing Illusion,
> which holds that “nothing in life is as important as you think it is while
> you are thinking about it.” He continues: “Education is an important
> determinant of income — one of the most important — but it is less important
> than most people think. If everyone had the same education, the inequality
> of income would be reduced by less than 10 percent. When you focus on
> education you neglect the myriad of other factors that determine income. The
> differences of income among people who have the same education are huge.”
>
> Joshua Greene, a philosopher and neuroscientist at Harvard University, has
> a brilliant entry on Supervenience. Imagine a picture on a computer screen
> of a dog sitting in a rowboat. It can be described as a picture of a dog,
> but at a different level it can be described as an arrangement of pixels and
> colors. The relationship between the two levels is asymmetric. The same
> image can be displayed at different sizes with different pixels. The
> high-level properties (dogness) supervene the low-level properties (pixels).
>
>
> Supervenience, Greene continues, helps explain things like the relationship
> between science and the humanities. Humanists fear that scientists are
> taking over their territory and trying to explain everything. But new
> discoveries about the brain don’t explain Macbeth. The products of the mind
> supervene the mechanisms of the brain. The humanities can be informed by the
> cognitive sciences even as they supervene them.
>
> If I were presumptuous enough to nominate a few entries, I’d suggest the
> Fundamental Attribution Error: Don’t try to explain by character traits
> behavior that is better explained by context.
>
> I’d also nominate the distinction between emotion and arousal. There’s a
> general assumption that emotional people are always flying off the handle.
> That’s not true. We would also say that Emily Dickinson was emotionally
> astute. As far as I know, she did not go around screaming all the time. It
> would be useful if we could distinguish between the emotionality of
> Dickinson and the arousal of the talk-show jock.
>
> Public life would be vastly improved if people relied more on the concept
> of emergence. Many contributors to the Edge symposium hit on this point.
>
> We often try to understand problems by taking apart and studying their
> constituent parts. But emergent problems can’t be understood this way.
> Emergent systems are ones in which many different elements interact. The
> pattern of interaction then produces a new element that is greater than the
> sum of the parts, which then exercises a top-down influence on the
> constituent elements.
>
> Culture is an emergent system. A group of people establishes a pattern of
> interaction. And once that culture exists, it influences how the individuals
> in it behave. An economy is an emergent system. So is political
> polarization, rising health care costs and a bad marriage.
>
> Emergent systems are bottom-up and top-down simultaneously. They have to be
> studied differently, as wholes and as nested networks of relationships. We
> still try to address problems like poverty and Islamic extremism by trying
> to tease out individual causes. We might make more headway if we thought
> emergently.
>
> We’d certainly be better off if everyone sampled the fabulous Edge
> symposium, which, like the best in science, is modest and daring all at
> once.
>
>
> ___________________________________________
>
> Wayne A. Fox
> 1009 Karen Lane
> PO Box 9421
> Moscow, ID  83843
>
> waf at moscow.com
> 208 882-7975
>
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