Monday, July 6, 2009

Sticking to your guns

People will often interpret a difficult problem as being impossible to solve before they have considered all possible solutions, spent sufficient time on it, or thought about it in an efficient way. Often, the person will also be a pessimist, and will therefore be inclined to declare a problem inherently insoluble all but immediately.

This would not be a significant problem on its own. It would be easy to find solutions, explain them, and solve the problem. It would also be easy to explain to the person, perhaps after solving a few problems for them as a demonstration, how to think better and solve problems more efficiently.

The real problem arises when they wish to maintain that the problem is insoluble despite proposed solutions. This seems generally to be a case of sticking to their argument and not wishing to be shown to be wrong. So even when you propose a solution, they will insist that it will not work (often for self-imposed emotional reasons), rather than being optimistic and trying to find ways to make it work.

Pessimism is very dangerous; it makes us self-sabotage.

8 comments:

  1. Not everyone can create knowledge.

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  2. That statement is false. The human brain is a universal knowledge creator.

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  3. That's not what you witness happening. Only a few people create new knowledge, others copy it. You, for instance, are copying Elliot.

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  4. Not consciously. The above post was written after a conversation with a pessimistic friend who has never met Elliot.

    But even so, all people can create knowledge.

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  5. All people can copy some knowledge, with a degree of failure. Only a few people create new knowledge. That is very rare. These people have something different. What is it?

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  6. Oh. The ability to think rationally and thereby criticize freely.

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  7. How does criticism equal new ideas?

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  8. Because without criticism, the mistakes in the old theories will never be noticed, and we will never think that there is a need to replace them.

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