The Critical Thinking
Personality Spectrum
Ensemble
Note 1 to Diana
Note 2 to Diana

Written by David Apollo
Note #1:
Dear Diana,
It was so good to hear from you regarding my early thoughts on Habit Formation. I didn't reproduce any of your reply on the site. My assumption is that your thoughts are intended just between us unless you mention otherwise. I will never compromise your trust in that.

What you capture and communicate in just a few sentences is so much more than I ever accomplish in a whole page. Even the heart resonates. And, after diving into the development of the Habit Formation chapter, I now understand that a little better. You speak the Truth, and the truth always impacts the Reward Center in my brain. Thus, the resonance. But because of the impact there, the Habit Formation Ensemble is in play. Quite simply, I am becoming addicted.

Now I don't generally succumb to addictions. (Those that I know about!) But I am telling you the craving is there.

I need your thoughts on a new filter I am working on. Words are limited in how to describe this right now, but maybe only a few are necessary right now.

This new filter is the one that enables Understanding. Understanding driven by a deeper, more truthful Comprehension. At first I didn't know how I would go about it, and I am unaware of any psych breaks that are studied mechanistically that can help me with it like the others. Basically, Understanding is the next step we take cognitively once we have certain facts that enable us to see (e.g. understand, comprehend) a bigger picture than just the one we have gotten used to perceiving.

We do see what is obviously in front of us, and we do come to "perceive" it in particular ways. We come to greater (better, more complete, or at least different) Understanding of what we are seeing when we are able to look at it in a new way. And not just an imaginarily new way (which might have gotten us to that first new perspective in the first place) but in a way that can be validated rationally. The movement is towards Truth. Not "the truth" we may want to find, but "The Truth" that is really there. And the leverage of Imagination, Memory, and Validation gets us to better Comprehension. Not many are instinctively driven in this way, but folks with a strong Critical Thinking Filter ARE.

Or whatever I'll (we'll?) wind up calling it.

It's not just a computational or memory or speed thing. Computers can do all that so much faster than people, but they don't get to Understanding. They don't themselves create or invent or synthesize new ways of comprehending an issue that we haven't considered before. People do, whether or not they are using computers, if they are enabled cognitively with the ability to regard what they are trying to comprehend Out-of-the-Box.

For example, I'll use astronomy. (I could use thousands of different examples.) With astronomy, what are the facts right in front of our eyes? The facts are the points of light we see in the sky. Not only do we see them, all the animals see them. BUT, a few of us (and, only a few) actually go further than just see the points of light. Like no other animals or most other people ever do. Some recorded when and where they saw those points. Being validaters, they repeated measurements on subsequent days, for various reasons. What they recorded indicated something unexpected. Eventually, they saw the measurements repeat, but annually, not daily (except for the planets.) Then, trying to validate those measurements over years, they found that they differed as well. Yada, yada, but in the end, we wind up with our current Understanding of how the universe actually works. And, we are still not done understanding things a little bit better over time. We've gone from just points in the sky to subatomic particle creation and black holes, etc. It's all pretty amazing.

Computers would have never gotten us there all by themselves. Humans did that. Just a few of them.

To get to that Understanding, each step taken was a step "different" from what most others were normally doing at the time. In other words, the "Understanding We Have Now Come To" required a willingness to look at things differently than what was already "obvious," and then embrace whatever new was experienced as relevant and validated fact, and then try to come up with some consistent narrative that explained truthfully both what we understood previously, and the new stuff. And this cycle was executed over and over again, over thousands of years, to get us where we are today. And, we're not done learning and innovating and discovering more.

If you don't like astronomy as an example, think of beer and wine. How did we get to where we are today from just being hunter-gatherers 10,000 years ago? A few just liked Thinking Critically.

Early this morning (3AM) I realized that this might be related to the Pattern Recognition Personality Filter I posted a couple years ago. Maybe all of this is enabled by that filter. My thought today - maybe those dialed up (by default, genetics) on one extreme are driven to Critical Thinking (based on the patterns they are seeing). Dialed by default a little lower, and we (many of us) experience and understand patterns, but just not at the same levels of complexity. Not a complex enough level to enable the Innovation behavior. Dialed a little lower, and we still are moved to understand some things, but they need to be in the "pragmatically relevant" domain. Dialed lower still, and those persons aren't necessarily driven to deriving Understanding themselves, but, they want understanding (it stimulates the Reward Center?) so they become "followers" of whatever they are being told that sounds OK to them. And so on and so forth till you get to the clueless.

Diana, I don't really know where to go with all this. And, I'm limited by the experience (and biases!) that I have. So, I am turning to you. You have a knack for "seeing through the bull", whether it be the intentional or the unintentional kind. You see through mine, when I can't, because all mine is unintentional. I am very careful at validating what I embrace to be true, but still, I am positive I make mistakes, and so I believe things that later I'll re-evaluate. You see through my unintentional BS, and push me to reexamine faster!

What is your take on this Critical Thinking thing? Can it be written about? Credibly? What do you see as what may be enabling it?

Because I get you,

David
→ Note #1 to Diana Collins was last updated 06 Jul 2017 16:45 PDT ←
Note #2:
Dear Diana,
My thoughts on this new filter has evolved a little. Well, significantly actually. I just decided to start writing and let the unfolding of it develop. And ... it has.

I will probably name it differently, as Understanding or Comprehension just really isn't descriptive enough as "single words" to imply what I am wanting to get across. It turns out that three terms do a better job at it, if taken together. This new Filter is really an ensemble of the three terms (and, of course, more!), although those three terms will need further definition. And they are: "Comprehension," "Out-of-the-Box," and "Bat Shit Crazy."

So, I will call it the Critical Thinking Ensemble.

Basically, to be enabled to do this rare (uncommon) kind of understanding and innovation:
  • You have to be rational.
  • You need to be based in fact and validation.
  • You have a current level of understanding, but you want to comprehend more. Truthfully. You want to understand more of The Real.
  • You have to be willing and comfortable going Outside The Box (OTB) in order to come up with a workable idea or explanation. Actually, related, you already knew that to come up with an interesting advancement on the issue you are working on, OTB was going to be required. Period.
  • You don't know if the idea will pan out - validation will select the one's that do. So, you are pretty much OK with the idea that much of your effort will be devoted to finding out what doesn't work, so that you can get closer to figuring our what actually will.
  • However, in order to get to the OTB place, since you don't know which OTB idea may or may not be actually workable, and Real, you pretty much have to be comfortable suspending how you are used to thinking about solutions relevant to the thing you are thinking about.

    A lot of that thinking is already something you and others are comfortable doing, and there are a lot of "validations" that back up the current method of thinking. Thus, there is a lot of indoctrination in play, and you have to be able to suspend what you are habitually comfortable believing in order to get OTB.

    When you suspend the indoctrinated thinking, that's when the others around you begin wondering, "What's going on?" "Why is he going in that direction?" "Has he gone Bat Shit Crazy?!" And, of course, since indoctrination is involved, the tendency for others is to dismiss rather than to spend any time considering a validation of this "new suggestion out of wherever."
It is from this realm that the "Bat Shit Crazy" (BSC) aspect comes from. Not that the innovator actually is BSC. Well, perhaps he or she is but what I mean is that the specific new idea in question may not actually be BSC this time. But it is still "knee jerk perceived" this way by the innovator's associates, and even the innovator understands this. And yet, he wants to go forward with it because he has actually gotten to his place rationally, believes it a credible hypothesis that warrants checking into further, and if all works out, then this innovation would be a real improvement.

The Critical Thinking Personality Spectrum Ensemble. If the dial is turned to either extreme, he or she will be seen as BSC. However, in one extreme the BSD is actually credible, worth checking into further. On the other extreme, the BSC is simply in the realm of the Imaginary, is not validatable, and may not even be consistent with how the natural realm works at all. Either way the putative innovators believes enough in their out-of-the-box ideas that they keep moving their understanding of what they are working on forward, one likely but unproven hypothesis at a time ... until their failures are unavoidably clear ... and success rewards their persistent compulsion.

Fortunately, for Thomas Edison, his failures were not unavoidably clear to him even after 1000 failures. Then ... he got his validation!

Thoughts?

In Plain Sight,

David
→ Note #2 to Diana Collins was last updated 06 Jul 2017 17:15 PDT ←
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