Thinking About Thinking

[Endlessly Amazed]

Fortean colleagues –

I have puzzled for some time on how to present this topic to you for your entertainment and thoughts: thinking.

Specifically, how thinking (cognition) and experiences link to form a not-always coherent whole.

I was lucky enough to be born with unusual cognitive ability, an unstable and violent childhood, an ethnic culture with quite nutty beliefs, and urban poverty in a country with an ethos of conspicuous consumption. Until I was 18, I was also educated in how to think by Catholic Dominican priests. Everyone has a unique combination of factors which shape their lives; this was mine.

The critical thinking - its application and habit - which I was taught ages 15-18, was better than anything I was taught in college and later in my Ph.D. program. For decades I vaguely took it for granted, and wondered why other people couldn’t think like this. Then, in the last few years, I started researching this, and am now reading “The Intellectual Life” by Sertillanges, a French Dominican priest who wrote it in 1921 (I have the Ryan translation). Hurrah! For the centenary!

I am awed and amused that, while I was conferred a Ph.D. for my research on the structure and application of knowledge management, it was only years later that I realized my thoughts on the subject were shaped by my teen age years’ education. I feel deep gratitude for the one priest in particular who took such care with my mind and insisted I challenge my assumptions and thinking processes.

So, please, everyone, share your thoughts on thinking: how you learned, what helped and hindered, what do you think about, etc. And, especially, how your thinking has changed over your life.

 

[Mikefule]

The critical thinking - its application and habit - which I was taught ages 15-18, was better than anything I was taught in college and later in my Ph.D. program. For decades I vaguely took it for granted, and wondered why other people couldn’t think like this.

There is an old saying, "In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king." This means that if you have an abilty that no one else has (or at least, which is rare) then you have a natural advantage.

H G Wells wrote a short story, The Country of the Blind, in which he challenges this analysis. His protagonist is a sighted man who becomes lost and ends up in a land where everyone is affected by hereditary blindness. Rather than welcoming him as a man with superior powers, who can help them with his ability to perceive things that they cannot, they simply treat him with disbelief, derision, and hostility.

Thinking is a bit like that. Most people — even those who are trained thinkers — go through most of their lives spending most of their time reacting to events according to their established thought patterns and habits. Anyone who tries to use critical thinking in any social situation — and in many work situations — is likely to be derided or even rejected.

I remember many years ago (1980s) reading in the news about a brawl that broke out at a convention of philosophers at a local university. These were people who were trained and practised in the art of structured and critical thinking, but reacted like kids in the school playground rather than applying their professional skills to a real life dispute.

I saw a very interesting video the other day which built on the old idea that man is not a rational animal, but a rationalising animal.

All or most of us have the ability to compile and consider arguments and apply some basic logical and rational techniques. However, except in the specific cases of solving a puzzle or working on a technical problem, most of the time we use this ability dishonestly for social reasons. Not only dishonestly towards others, but dishonestly towards ourselves.

The common ways of using rationalisation are roughly these:

• To justify what you want to do, or have just done. There is somehow always a justification for buying a new toy, or pair of shoes, and there is usually a "perfectly reasonable excuse" presented for even the worst behaviour.
• To support an argument or point of view to which you are already committed. People often commit to a political party or religion without a huge amount of thought, but later may put a lot of thought into justifying their choice.
• To bond with other members of your "tribe" by justifying shared beliefs. This may be as simple everyone in a middle class social set agreeing about the best investment, or in the worst case it may be an entire community conspiring in complex but spurious justifications for racism, oppression and genocide.

Compared to that, only a very few people, in their personal lives, sit down, consider a range of objectives, choose the best, then collate and analyse the data before compiling a list of pros and cons and making a decision.

We might do this before taking early retirement, or choosing a house, but even then there is a strong likelihood that your strong desire to leave work, or the fact that you have fallen in love with the house, will lead you to finding the arguments that support the decision, and giving less weight to the counter arguments.

I think of myself as more analytical than most (there are 27 reasons why I think I am more analytical than most, which break down into 3 main categories, each of which further divides into 3 sub categories...) and I have occasionally been teased in this forum for listing and differentiating between subtly different types of broadly phenomena (which reminds me, I keep meaning to post a structured analysis of the relationships between groups of different approaches to taxonomy) but in real life, at work, or even in hobbies, it has been nothing but a handicap.

I remember as a 9 year old kid asking questions or pointing out bits that didn't make sense in TV programmes, and my step mother saying, "Don't analyse it, just watch it."

Even now, at the age of 58, I encounter situations at work when I can see two or three possible solutions to a problem, and the foreseeable difficulties with each. The typical response is for the boss to take the simplest and quickest answer, or give the first answer that comes into their head, only to be surprised later when it doesn't work out.

My wife has a similar issue with her boss, who assumes there is a simple answer to every complex problem but never notices how many of the complex problems arise as a direct result of his earlier simple answers.

Certainly when I was at school, critical thinking was not taught as a skill. Even literary criticism, or A level history, was taught as a series of established arguments to be memorised and summarised. Getting to a genuine deep understanding was less important than learning 'the sort of thing you should think."

 

[Endlessly Amazed]

There is an old saying, "In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king." This means that if you have an abilty that no one else has (or at least, which is rare) then you have a natural advantage.

H G Wells wrote a short story, The Country of the Blind, in which he challenges this analysis. His protagonist is a sighted man who becomes lost and ends up in a land where everyone is affected by hereditary blindness. Rather than welcoming him as a man with superior powers, who can help them with his ability to perceive things that they cannot, they simply treat him with disbelief, derision, and hostility.

Thinking is a bit like that. Most people — even those who are trained thinkers — go through most of their lives spending most of their time reacting to events according to their established thought patterns and habits. Anyone who tries to use critical thinking in any social situation — and in many work situations — is likely to be derided or even rejected.

I remember many years ago (1980s) reading in the news about a brawl that broke out at a convention of philosophers at a local university. These were people who were trained and practised in the art of structured and critical thinking, but reacted like kids in the school playground rather than applying their professional skills to a real life dispute.

I saw a very interesting video the other day which built on the old idea that man is not a rational animal, but a rationalising animal.

All or most of us have the ability to compile and consider arguments and apply some basic logical and rational techniques. However, except in the specific cases of solving a puzzle or working on a technical problem, most of the time we use this ability dishonestly for social reasons. Not only dishonestly towards others, but dishonestly towards ourselves.

The common ways of using rationalisation are roughly these:

• To justify what you want to do, or have just done. There is somehow always a justification for buying a new toy, or pair of shoes, and there is usually a "perfectly reasonable excuse" presented for even the worst behaviour.
• To support an argument or point of view to which you are already committed. People often commit to a political party or religion without a huge amount of thought, but later may put a lot of thought into justifying their choice.
• To bond with other members of your "tribe" by justifying shared beliefs. This may be as simple everyone in a middle class social set agreeing about the best investment, or in the worst case it may be an entire community conspiring in complex but spurious justifications for racism, oppression and genocide.

Compared to that, only a very few people, in their personal lives, sit down, consider a range of objectives, choose the best, then collate and analyse the data before compiling a list of pros and cons and making a decision.

We might do this before taking early retirement, or choosing a house, but even then there is a strong likelihood that your strong desire to leave work, or the fact that you have fallen in love with the house, will lead you to finding the arguments that support the decision, and giving less weight to the counter arguments.

I think of myself as more analytical than most (there are 27 reasons why I think I am more analytical than most, which break down into 3 main categories, each of which further divides into 3 sub categories...) and I have occasionally been teased in this forum for listing and differentiating between subtly different types of broadly phenomena (which reminds me, I keep meaning to post a structured analysis of the relationships between groups of different approaches to taxonomy) but in real life, at work, or even in hobbies, it has been nothing but a handicap.

I remember as a 9 year old kid asking questions or pointing out bits that didn't make sense in TV programmes, and my step mother saying, "Don't analyse it, just watch it."

Even now, at the age of 58, I encounter situations at work when I can see two or three possible solutions to a problem, and the foreseeable difficulties with each. The typical response is for the boss to take the simplest and quickest answer, or give the first answer that comes into their head, only to be surprised later when it doesn't work out.

My wife had a similar issue with her boss, who assumes there is a simple answer to every complex problem but never notices how many of the complex problems arise as a direct result of his earlier simple answers.

Certainly when I was at school, critical thinking was not taught as a skill. Even literary criticism, or A level history, was taught as a series of established arguments to be memorised and summarised. Getting to a genuine deep understanding was less important than learning 'the sort of thing you should think."

@Mikefule – I have enjoyed your postings because of the unique approach you use. Re: “I keep meaning to post a structured analysis of the relationships between groups of different approaches to taxonomy” - I would really like to read this, assuming you were not joking.

Yes, I agree with you about one-eyedness vs blindness. Also, I just keep focused on trivial stuff in social situations.

The way my thinking has changed over time is that I have focused on increasing the robustness of my own processes. An example: categories are useful, artificial groupings. The defining characteristics of a category should be simultaneously clearly articulated as well as provisional. I now view categorical boundaries as semi-permeable membranes. To consciously think of them this way has been really helpful.

Operationally speaking:
I am still a little surprised at how many people shift between baseline assumptions and goals when developing categories, without realizing how this leads to unsatisfying results. Of course both are necessary, but to have one category based on baseline assumptions, and the next category based on different baseline assumptions, with a new emphasis on goals, is unproductive.

I also over the years have paid more attention to how I would present the findings as part of the process of designing a research activity or program. I included the marketing actions in both the process and results, and planned for project marketing milestones to be reached by internal deadlines. This increased but did not guarantee my success of getting my final results and recommendations approved. This part of project management was always a little uncertain for me as the organizational decision-makers were often rationalizing and not rational, as you pointed out.

Effective thinking is often not correlated with intelligence as much as it is self-awareness. Some of the most effective thinkers I have met were people of limited intelligence (maybe at about 90 IQ score; on mood stabilizing drugs; hired as disability quota fillers) who had the wonderful quality of being honest in their own self-assessment of their ability, comfortable with admitting what they didn’t know, and very careful in recording data. They made my working life so much easier: when they answered a question, I had complete confidence in their response. I wish I could have cloned them! I learned a lot from them.

 

[Mikefule]

@Mikefule – Re: “I keep meaning to post a structured analysis of the relationships between groups of different approaches to taxonomy” - I would really like to read this, assuming you were not joking.

Operationally speaking:
I am still a little surprised at how many people shift between baseline assumptions and goals when developing categories, without realizing how this leads to unsatisfying results. Of course both are necessary, but to have one category based on baseline assumptions, and the next category based on different baseline assumptions, with a new emphasis on goals, is unproductive.

Thank you for your kind comments. However, it was only a joke of the same family as "I used to believe in the uncertainty principle but now I'm not so sure," or, "There are 10 types of people: those who understand binary and those who don't" — or even "There are 27 reasons why I think I am so analytical."

I have no special knowledge of taxonomy although I have a natural tendency to wish to define and categorise things, which is sometimes a gift and sometimes an affliction.

On your comment about shifting baseline assumptions etc., one of the best little books I have ever read on this type of thing is Straight and Crooked Thinking by Robert H Thouless. Linked here.

It is a good humoured but serious book written with a light touch. It outlines 38 dishonest tricks of argument which are often used to persuade someone else in an argument.

The same 38 tricks may equally be used to persuade yourself that your preferred course of action — or indeed that your worst fear — is entirely rational and justified.

Each of the 38 "tricks" is illustrated with relatable examples, and the book has been revised and updated to keep the examples relevant.

One of the tricks is the incremental change of the definition of terms throughout an argument. Another is the hidden creep from some to many to most to all. These two bear some similarity to the point you have made.

On the creep from some to many to most to all, there is a similar technique used by fishermen — or indeed anyone given to boastful exaggeration. For a fisherman, the sequence goes something like this:
I caught a fish nearly a foot long. This morphs into:
I caught a fish about a foot long, then
I caught a fish that was easily a foot long, followed by
... at least a foot long
... over a foot long
... the best part of 18 inches long
... easily 18 inches long
... and so on ad nauseam.

 

[Endlessly Amazed]

Ha! Rats, I was hoping you would be as anal as I am about categories. I actually have done that type of comparison between different business analysis approaches and their taxonomies (PMP, LSS-BB, etc.) but it was only interesting to other eggheads.

 

[charliebrown]

Thinking equals to reward and satisfaction !

My babies figured out rather quickly that if they cried that they would get picked up, or feed, or get a diaper changed.

This reward process never changes going through life.

You work hard at something for reward like a pay check, and if you don’t understand the situation, your brain will figure out what you have to do to achieve your goal.

 

[Swifty]

Fortean colleagues –

I have puzzled for some time on how to present this topic to you for your entertainment and thoughts: thinking.

Specifically, how thinking (cognition) and experiences link to form a not-always coherent whole.

I was lucky enough to be born with unusual cognitive ability, an unstable and violent childhood, an ethnic culture with quite nutty beliefs, and urban poverty in a country with an ethos of conspicuous consumption. Until I was 18, I was also educated in how to think by Catholic Dominican priests. Everyone has a unique combination of factors which shape their lives; this was mine.

The critical thinking - its application and habit - which I was taught ages 15-18, was better than anything I was taught in college and later in my Ph.D. program. For decades I vaguely took it for granted, and wondered why other people couldn’t think like this. Then, in the last few years, I started researching this, and am now reading “The Intellectual Life” by Sertillanges, a French Dominican priest who wrote it in 1921 (I have the Ryan translation). Hurrah! For the centenary!

I am awed and amused that, while I was conferred a Ph.D. for my research on the structure and application of knowledge management, it was only years later that I realized my thoughts on the subject were shaped by my teen age years’ education. I feel deep gratitude for the one priest in particular who took such care with my mind and insisted I challenge my assumptions and thinking processes.

So, please, everyone, share your thoughts on thinking: how you learned, what helped and hindered, what do you think about, etc. And, especially, how your thinking has changed over your life.

When I was about 15 at school, we had to chose our GCSE subjects. I'm not going to lie .. the only reason I chose 'humanities' as one of them was completely because it was the only one that didn't require an exam at the end. The teacher taught me/us that all newspapers have a different view (agenda?) on a single story so I read 5 different newspaper reports about 1 situation being reported and realised I needed to learn to think for myself because each version was skewed by each writer's opinion influenced by their own life experiences. A read between the lines thing.

 

[Krepostnoi]

Thinking equals to reward and satisfaction !

My babies figured out rather quickly that if they cried that they would get picked up, or feed, or get a diaper changed.

This reward process never changes going through life.

You work hard at something for reward like a pay check, and if you don’t understand the situation, your brain will figure out what you have to do to achieve your goal.

Professor Skinner, I presume?

I'm fairly certain our cognitive processes cannot be reduced to simple stimulus/reward patterns. You could possibly argue that the activity itself or the finished product of, say, creative endeavours is nothing more than a reward, but I'd want to look closely at your working. And I can't imagine how that would also allow for metacognitive activities like, to pick an example completely at random, thinking about thinking.

 

[Endlessly Amazed]

Professor Skinner, I presume?

I'm fairly certain our cognitive processes cannot be reduced to simple stimulus/reward patterns. You could possibly argue that the activity itself or the finished product of, say, creative endeavours is nothing more than a reward, but I'd want to look closely at your working. And I can't imagine how that would also allow for metacognitive activities like, to pick an example completely at random, thinking about thinking.

Krepostnoi - in the context of this discussion, that seems so, er, circular

Skinnerianism was taught as a subject in my college, and later on, the first consulting company I co-founded was BBC - Black Box Consulting - because (not to be shared with the clients) we had no clue what our processes were - only RESULTS!

 

[Alchymist]

Mikefule, your family joke, "I used to believe in the uncertainty principle but now I'm not so sure," reminded me of something someone once said to me - actually there was a group of us -"I have second sight at times - you know, precognition - but it's so damned unpredictable." Everyone fell about laughing, but, if you think about it a bit, it does make a twisted sort of sense . . . .

 

[Victory]

My greatest bug bear with school was the emphasis on knowledge at the expense of being taught "How To Think Effectively".

Years of learning the structure of plans or what chemicals were what valency.... fine if you know you want to work in those fields...and I think you know pretty quickly if they are for you.

But I found it was only in the arts that we analysed data using interpretation skills of our own minds.

It was when I got to university that thinking was taught; analysis of text, how to spot a flaw in an argument.

My own thinking has not been great, I have made many mistakes in life decisions.
In hindsight I have let emotion cloud my judgement,

 

[Mikefule]

Thinking equals to reward and satisfaction !

My babies figured out rather quickly that if they cried that they would get picked up, or feed, or get a diaper changed.

This reward process never changes going through life.

You work hard at something for reward like a pay check, and if you don’t understand the situation, your brain will figure out what you have to do to achieve your goal.

That's only a small part of the picture.

You can use reasoning — a particular type of thinking — to find the best way of achieving your goal. Even corvids and chimps have been observed doing this.

The baby in your example probably does not use reasoning, but simply learns a pattern of behaviour because the outcome is what is desired.

Most of us are like this a lot of the time: we do things because they always seem to have worked, but in day to day life we seldom pause, consider and decide. This is how decent people rub along together in a busy world; it is how dysfunctional relationships develop; and it is how superstition works. One sort of behaviour is normally followed by one sort of outcome, and the behaviour becomes ingrained. Sometimes that is positive, sometimes very negative, and sometimes more or less neutral.

However, reward and satisfaction are not the whole story.

How do you choose the objective: the thing that will be the reward? What if there are competing or conflicting objectives?

At bottom, we all have the same basic needs: food, warmth, shelter, and safety. On top of those, non human animals and most humans — but not all — seek a mate and the chance to procreate. Animals and most people work towards these basic objectives through a combination of instinct, learned behaviours, and pattern recognition.

However, what about the person who decides to concentrate on studying medicine "for the greater good", or the person who decides to conquer an unclimbed peak, or row across the Atlantic, or the soldier who gives his life for his comrades? What about the person who decides to give up his comfortable lifestyle, with abundant food, warmth, shelter and safety, to become an ascetic, or the person who decides to give up a well paid job to spend more time with his family, even though this involves a reduced "standard of living"?

In these, and other examples, the thinking is not so much about achieving the objective, but on choosing the objective. It is not, "How do I achieve a satisfactory outcome?" but "What would I consider to be a satisfactory outcome?" That is a different level of thinking.

Then, a step further along the curve, there is thinking for the sheer pleasure and satisfaction of thinking as an activity, whether that is in the form of solving logic puzzles, or plotting a novel that no one else will ever read, or following a philosophical idea to its conclusion.

 

[Endlessly Amazed]

@Mikefule –

The examples you gave for the different levels of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs gave me a lot to think about. Thanks! It encouraged me to think about the way cognition, desire, and one’s self image all combine to shape decisions and thought itself. This rumination was rumbling around in the background of my thoughts for decades, but your presentation brought it out more clearly.

About 15 years ago, I realized that I thought, with some evidence, that I would not be skilled at writing poetry. This was a life-long belief about myself. So, I decided to see if I could write some. I designed this to be a series of poems with a theme, not a single poem. The theme was the evolution of desire and self-awareness from loneliness to sexual desire to desire for union with god. The structure would be a year’s life cycle of seasons. It took me over 4 years and perhaps thousands of hours to do this! Working full time for a living is such an impediment to doing what you want.

What I found out is: I have no natural ability to write poetry. Studying the structure of poetry I admired (Cavafy and Sufi poets) only helped a little. I could not design poetry by structure to achieve beauty. Some kind of magic was necessary.

So, I decided I must experience my life as a poet would. What would that be? At first I had no clue, but persevered and developed a poet’s perception. Almost every waking moment, I interpreted my sensory perceptions and emotional and cognitive reactions with the lens of searching for beauty. When at work and focused on work thoughts, I kept in the back of my mind the themes and phrases of self-awareness and beauty I was developing. I even dreamed of this transcendent beauty at night.

In a small way, I hypnotized myself to become a poet. This gave me the perception and desire. The hard work of structurally crafting a poem with the right cadence and development of thought was cognitive. The criteria to evaluate the poems was based on both cognition and perception.

Some poems were better than others. Some were really bad. Some were the wrong theme or didn’t fit in. After 4 years, I was getting tired of doing this. It was a lot of mental hard work. With this tiredness, my ability to hypnotize myself to think like a poet decreased and then stopped. This is the main reason why I think I have no natural ability. I wish I did.

My conclusions were that it is possible to develop skill, but one’s natural ability will be the most important factor limiting the maximum expression (all other things being equal: motivation, time to practice, feedback criteria available, etc.). Now, years after my experiment, I read poetry and enjoy it. I also feel a sense of nostalgia and regret that I didn’t or couldn't persevere.

Here is a short poem I wrote:

When My Beloved Visits

When my Beloved visits,
All, all is changed.

My dusty street and old home
My lover’s socks and dirty dishes
My favorite tree and forgotten books
The air itself -
All are kissed by my Beloved.
All are the kiss of my Beloved.

When my Beloved visits,
All, all is changed.