Thinking Is Difficult

DesignIsDifficult because ThinkingIsDifficult. We can run a remarkable percentage of our lives with remarkably little thinking. Most of our behaviour is stimulous response based. Programmers attempt to do on a daily basis what physicists and mathematicians do only when they are solving their big problems.

Programming requires abstract thinking. It requires building and being able to manipulate long cause-effect chains. This is not easy and it is not something normal humans do in any part of their lives. It's also something no two people will do the same because of the abstractions in their own brain which makes programming hard to teach.

Programming also requires an interest in the subject. It is this interest that triggers thinking. You can observe the opposite with a lot of CorporateDrone?'''s.

I agree in priciple, but it is not that difficulty in thinking is intrinsic, but rather that the skills are (mostly) not taught and acquiring them involves deliberate study and a measure of self-inflicted brainwashing.

Once the skills have been mastered, the effort involved is greatly reduced. Some people learn thinking while learning programming. I feel for them.

Some things that make thinking harder than it needs to be:

Learning things out of sequence
Learning things too steeply for the individual
Necessary information missing/denied/hidden
Including irrelevant data
False data presented as fact
Conflicting "facts"
Incorrectly assessed relative importances
Learning things the person doesn't want to learn
(others as I think of them)

-- GarryHamilton

If thinking isn't that difficult then people are idiots. How else to explain cases where people persist in using a metaphor or concept even after it has been proven inadequate and blatantly false?

You can add:

Learning things the person doesn't want to learn. -- (done, thanks)

[rk]

I agree that the appearance of people "doing thinking" with bad data (bad rules, information, etc.) certainly takes on the aspect of idiocy. Given sufficient garbage as fuel, thinking becomes quite difficult. Quite apart from one's intrinsic ability to effectively process data to correct conclusions (which may be considered IQ), the "difficulty factor" tends to vary in direct proportion to the amount of garbage.

I work with people who are not stupid and who, given the proper framework, are quite capable of arriving at correct conclusions but who, outside of that framework, make egregious mistakes of the shake-your-head-and-marvel variety. It would seem that they have certain sets of "thinking" data that are correct and complete and some that are garbage or incomplete or both. In those situations, a casual observer could certainly conclude "idiot" and not be truly wrong.

-- gh

It's not just bad data here. Lots of people think in terms of metaphor. But metaphor is simply not sufficient. A metaphor tells you that one thing is like something else. Metaphors are good but you have to be prepared to junk them, possibly very quickly, in order to think about the thing itself. So saying "love is like yadda yadda yadda" is fine but you should be prepared to think about the essence, the nature of love itself and not just what "it is like". As a concrete example:

I demonstrated to every reasonable person's satisfaction that LoveIsNotAnInstinct. That wasn't enough for some people who didn't like the conclusion so they started the LoveIsAnInstinct page with some cobbled together Zen-like nonsense. I then proceeded to explain exactly what love is and what it is not. What happened is people didn't want to listen. And it's not just because they don't like the conclusion. On its own "LoveIsNotAnInstinct" simply isn't that big a deal one way or another (it should affect public policy and nudge people's worldview but that's about it). What they refuse to accept is that "love" is something definite which can be analytically defined. To them, that would reduce the "specialness" of love, that it isn't some fuzzy Zen-like quality. They confuse absurdity and fuzziness with some deep and fundamental insight which they are priviledged to. -- rk

We're not disagreeing. "Bad rules" would include broken metaphorical approaches, fixed ideas (of the "all [ethnic group] are bastards" or "you must be broke to be rich" kind). I understand your frustration, but it doesn't expand the concept. Simplify.

You have bad data and bad programming (rules). Fixed ideas are a form of bad data. Compulsions are a form of bad programming. Bad data can be combined with bad rules. An illustrative dramatization of this is the protagonist (played by Mel Gibson) of Conspiracy Theory. The everyday form of this is less dramatic, but can be observed easily in government establishments ("Yes, Ma'am, I understand, but the rule says ...").

I might point out that attempting to alter either of these (data or rules) by force of will or emotion is very likely doomed. Sometimes you have to accept that the pig isn't going to learn to sing. Of course, there's always the courteous approach, but where's the fun in that? -- gh

BertrandRussell once said, ?Most men would rather die than think. Many do.?