Estate Planning / Business Planning / Improve The Odds
THOUGHTS ON THINKING

"There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking."
Joshua Reynolds, 1723-1792

Thinking is one of those many things that we do not often consciously think about. A careful observer would say - with some justification - that that is self-evident. Why have I mentioned the subject of thinking on this Site? Simply this - that there is no more propitious a time to examine a familiar skill than when it is being put, or is about to be put, to an unfamiliar task. So long as one is dealing purely with the routine and the mundane, established patterns and habits of thought, no matter how flawed or inefficient, will often see you through.

However, when you are stretching your mental resources to cope with new and unfamiliar territory, additional rigor and attentiveness are essential. By happy coincidence, it seems that such a time is also when your analytical powers are at their best, and thus readier to tackle questions such as the nature of thinking. In this brief essay I will discuss a small number of books which, individually or together, could profoundly influence your views on this uniquely human activity.

1. The Crisis in Capacity. One person who has made a worthy effort to focus public attention on an endemic current problem is the late Steve Allen (yes, that one) whose book Dumbth : The Lost Art of Thinking (1998 - Prometheus Books, Amherst, NY, ISBN 1-57392-237-4), deserves your attention. Allen, although best known for his work as a comedian and in television (e.g. creating the Tonight show and the PBS series Meeting of Minds), is also an accomplished and vigorous author. A review of this book in Publisher's Weekly includes the following:

"...Allen brings his considerable talents to bear on a phenomenon that is increasingly a concern of critics of contemporary Americans - the "unprecedented amount of mental incapacitation" in our society ... Instructive in a pleasing, popular way ... tempering missionary zeal with humor and humaneness, Allen addresses a sorry condition and, better yet, suggests solutions."

About a third of the book describes, both anecdotally and generically, Allen's views regarding (a) the grievous shortcomings of our educational system, which has resulted in widespread ignorance of the factual substrate of contemporary life and (b) a broad pattern of inability of people to reason correctly; all of which, as he sees it, reduces problem-solving ability to an irritatingly, possibly even dangerously, low level.

The remaining two-thirds of the book set down "101 Ways To Think Better", a compendium of rules of reason which Allen believes will lift those afflicted out of their intellectual slough of despond. Like all rules, they are prescriptive, even a bit preachy in places, but they are clearly framed and entertainingly illustrated, and I daresay no harm would come from your reviewing them.

I am not going to re-hash here everything you can learn from Mr. Allen's excellent - and, not surprisingly, quite amusing - book. He did it much better than I could have. Have a look.

2. What About Economics. The next subject for discussion is a pair of similar books which I recently came across and want to commend to you here. They are The Armchair Economist - Economics and Everyday Life by Steven E. Landsburg, (1993 - The Free Press, a Division of MacMillan, Inc., New York, NY, ISBN 0-02-917775-8), and Hidden Order - The Economics of Everyday Life by David Friedman (1996 - HarperCollins, New York, NY, ISBN 0-88730-750-7). The good news about these books is that they will surely improve your view of the relevance of economics to the decisions we are all called upon to make in our daily lives. To these skillful young authors, economics is not a dry and desiccated collection of abstract theories, but a vital and useful methodology for describing how the world works and for predicting how the future will unfold.

There has been much ink spilled in the last decade over the triumph of capitalism (the "free market" system) over communism (the "planned economy" system). The essential distinction between the two (ignoring the distortions and evasions resulting from the fact that nowhere are either of these competing models completely pure) is that in the former, economic decisions are made as low down in the structure as possible, often at the level of the single individual, and in the latter as high up as possible.

In our popular imagination, all economists are middle-aged, eye-glassed, and massively non-charismatic figures, whose work has something to do with GNP (whatever that is), interest rates, prices and wages, unemployment rates, in(or de)flation, supply and demand, and other intangible, not to say incomprehensible, matters about which the ordinary citizen knows nothing, and about which, even if he knew something, could do nothing. The truth, as is so often the case, is wildly different.

That truth is, as these books are at particular pains to point out, that each and every one of us, except perhaps a monk in a monastery, is an economist, at least in the broad and encompassing sense of being a person who has, and who uses, the power of choice. This is because, simply stated, economics has principally to do with choice, the existence of choice, the extent of choice, information about choice, decisions about choice, and, possibly most important of all, the consequences of decisions about choice.

In a free market system, even an imperfect and circumscribed one, choice is literally everywhere, and the results of people's choices are, in the blended aggregate, the engine which drives our economic system.

A corollary, probably an inescapable one, of the very ubiquitousness of choice, is its complexity as an object of study and understanding, and these books put forward a most useful methodology for dealing with that problem. That method is to strip away the irrelevant (or more precisely the less relevant) factors - the ones which cloud, rather than enhance, our understanding - and to thus distill the stated problem down into its two or three most fundamental factors. This makes it easier for relationships, processes, and prognoses to emerge which were previously hidden from view.

For the purposes of this Site, your awareness of this technique of thinking and reasoning is what is important; it does not come easily - at least it doesn't to me - but when you see it done a dozen or so times you begin to get the hang of it, and an urge to give it a try yourself. This technique - of first re-casting complex (and thus seemingly insoluble) problems into a simplified form, preserving the essential ingredients but setting aside the inessential, and then later, as ability and insight permits, restoring those ingredients which were previously set aside - can be very useful to the person who is wading for the first time in new and unfamiliar waters.

3. The Value of Uncertainty. I now want to mention, and to recommend, another book which you cannot help but find useful, albeit on a much broader basis, than the ones mentioned above. Its name is The Meaning of it All: Thoughts of a Citizen-Scientist (1998 - Helix Books, a Division of Addison-Wesley, Reading, Massachusets, ISBN 0-201-36080-2). It is the transcript of three lectures which were given in 1963 by the Nobel prize winning physicist, Richard P. Feynman, a distinguished scientist, educator, and public servant. In those lectures, collectively entitled "A Scientist looks at Society", Feynman explores, in 120 small pages, problems in the borderlines between science, on the one hand, and philosophy, religion, and human society, on the other.

Do not be put off by the author's credentials or by the serious nature of the subject matter; the style is conversational, the tone earnest but not didactic, the approach intellectually honest, and the result humbling. The entire thing can be read in three hours and I promise you it will change for the better your perception of what the world around you is like and how that world works. If you are the sort who is looking for a quick return on your investments, here is a sure bet.

Although it touches on a good many subjects, the Feynman book is, at bottom, largely about the question of uncertainty, about its causes, about most people's abhorrence of it and, ultimately, about its great value in scientific, religious, philosophical and socio-political thought. The book is at once a paean to uncertainty, a plea for its acceptance, and an illustration of why it is a good idea for us not to become fixated on absolutes, on immutable truths, etc. It begs us to recognize that, no matter how "advanced" our civilization may become, the present is simply a way station on the journey to the future, and that it is unwisely limiting and confining, at any moment of that journey, to assume that you have answers which will be good and valid ones for the rest of the trip.

For me at least, this sheds just a bit of light on what distinguishes the mind of a Nobel laureate from the minds of the rest of us; the unblinking admission that "we just don't know", coupled with a plea that we accept that fact and that we not retreat into the dogmas, formalisms, and other absolutist safe havens that the human race so loves to construct, but instead that we preserve an open mind, a spirit of free inquiry, and the courage to go where that inquiry takes us.

4. Inhuman Thoughts. A recent trip to my local public library brought me face to face with When Things Start to Think, a first (but I am sure destined not to be the last) layman's book by Neil Gershenfeld, a senior researcher at MIT's famed Media Lab. His writing is a treat - here is what one reviewer had to say:

"Neil Gershenfeld has an extraordinary mind, able to leap dizzyingly from the physical to the logical world and back again. His witty book gallops along, with a surprise or an insight on almost every page..."

The central theme of the book, which may surprise even the most technologically literate, is that "we ain't seen noth'n yet" in terms of the ubiquity of computers in our lives. Just what we may be seeing, some of it in the quite near future, is most entertainingly described and discussed, but I will not attempt to precis it here - have your own look. What the book primarily did for me, apart from entertainment, was cause me to reflect on the prospect of our coming to depend on the "thinking machines" even more in the future than we do today, and on some of the possible ills and evils suggested by that increased dependence.

In my view, the important thing for the lay person to know about "machines that think" is that they indeed can, at least superficially, do something which resembles thinking. The problem arising from that is not scientific in nature; it is commercial and opportunistic. Let me be specific.

Information is simply another part of the have/have not divide which separates one part of the human race from another. Those who have information have a very good leg up on being able to dominate and control those who do not. Those who have massive amounts of information, and the capacity to sort, arrange, compare and display that information to their advantage, will inevitably, as the record dismally shows, do just that. This problem, now manifested in such areas as
  1. "data mining", which is using sophisticated analytical tools to assemble, from disparate sources, valuable information regarding individuals or entities which they might well prefer not to have known,
  2. the secret "rigging", for purposes of commercial advantage, of the purportedly neutral and objective results of your search engine inquiries,
  3. the use of "cookies" and other software techniques to surreptitiously extract from you (or, more exactly, from your computer) information about yourself that you might not (and probably should not) give willingly, and
  4. the use of "portals" and other simple but sly devices to capture (and thus limit) your choices as an internet user, will simply and surely become more ubiquitous as the new thinking machines, supposedly designed to "enhance" our lives and to furnish greater "ease and convenience", instead become additional instruments of information-based oppression and deceit.
There is a chance that, by this point in the discussion, you have put me in the same pot with our childhood friend Chicken Little, whose only crime was to notice that the sky was falling, and who bravely stuck her neck out (chickens do that, you know) to try to warn those who were in danger. Fair enough, I accept the comparison. In our case, however, unlike that of my fowl friend, there is a way to defend against the threat. In a word, that way is awareness; awareness that the technology exists; awareness that it will almost certainly be misused; awareness that defenses are often available; and awareness that it is not in our interest to be blindly manipulated.

Despite the prevalent - and, to my way of thinking, pollyanna-ish - notion that much in commercial life is a "win/win" situation, with both parties deriving equal advantage from the relationship, the truth is, as it has always been, that one party usually comes out on top. If you want to try to be that party, do not cede control of information to the other side, and for God's sake don't assume that, just because the information comes out of a computer, it is a fair and even-handed representation of the truth. Do that, and the sky will fall on you. Of course, there is nothing new about deception, about the surreptitious gathering of information, or about people trying to obtain a competitive advantage by any available means. What is new is the speed, variety, subtlety and intrusiveness of today's computer-aided deception.

In short, in the 21st century it will not be possible for a person to consider himself educated and aware, and to live an optimally peaceful, productive and prosperous life, unless he has at least a general appreciation of the ways in which the information being pushed at him may have been selected, manipulated, distorted or otherwise arranged to his disadvantage. Every age has its own particular package of survival skills - henceforth that package will have to include a lively awareness of this type of deception, and the ability to identify and counter it.

5. The Role of Bias. Recently, in the autobiography of Kenneth Clark, the noted art historian and host of the landmark television series "Civilization", I came across the notion, attributed to the French philosopher Diderot, that "information can be made memorable only when it is slightly colored by prejudice". This started me thinking about whether prejudice, or bias as I prefer to call it, is as bad as we have been taught to believe, or whether it may have some positive attributes as well. This quite timeless question resonates rather well, as I see it, with the very timely questions presented by the information explosion.

A central problem presented by the information explosion is that of distillation; in order to be useful, information has to be "cooked down", like so much raw spinach, to the point at which it becomes knowledge; which in turn has to be re-cooked to convert it into judgment; which has then a chance to be further processed on the way to becoming wisdom. At each stage of the process, some form of evaluation must occur - the good kept and the bad discarded. This necessarily implies the making of distinctions, and distinctions are time-consuming and hence expensive.

One sensible way of reducing time and expense is to make the distinctions, at least in part, with reference to what has proven effective in the past; in other words, to pre-judge. If it worked before it will likely work again. Not inevitably or invariably, but likely. This reliance on past results, unless used blindly, can improve both the speed and accuracy of the decision process. Guess what? This is our old friend, bias. We are all biased, and we should be, in favor of what our past experience has taught us is apt to be superior. I could spin this discussion out much longer, but will content myself with the observation that, if bias were unable to form a part of the decision-making process, virtually nothing would get done, all prior experience would be without value, and the rate of progress we have become accustomed to would cease.

6. Solitude. One of the books currently on my nightstand is the autobiography of Abraham Pais, a Dutch born Jew who, as a young man, lived through the German occupation of his country ( A Tale of Two Continents - A Physicist's Life in a Turbulent World, - 1997 - Princeton University Press, ISBN 0-691-01243-1). Like a number of his countrymen, most famously the young woman who came to be known as Anne Frank, he spent those years in hiding. Though it was a time of great uncertainty in his life, and quite fraught with peril, he had some good things to reflect on, including the following:

"From that period dates of the most important discoveries I ever made, and which forever changed my life. It concerned new insight into the process called thinking. Since my earlier years, at the university and especially in preparing my doctoral thesis, thinking had taken on ever-increasing importance in my way of life. In those years, I had to tell myself: Now sit down, young man, forget everything else and concentrate on your thoughts. Diversions could not only easily deflect me but would also cost time and effort afterward to return to the thinking mode."

"Now, in hiding, it all worked differently. I would get up, exercise, have breakfast, then sit down at my little worktable and, presto, thoughts emerged totally unforced, by themselves, you might say. It was as if it was not I who did the thinking but as if thinking took place independently of my willingness to think. It was, in other words, as if the self became the passive receptacle of thoughts that came independently of any effort by me. That was the most important positive experience of my years in hiding."

"The most famous example of the positive influence of isolation on progress in science may well be the case of Isaac Newton, who in the 1660s was forced to live in seclusion on his mother's estate at Woolsthorpe for the greater part of two years, after the great plague closed Cambridge University. That a youth should immediately after graduation retire to a lonely village and there, unaided, make three capital discoveries in science, is nothing short of miraculous."

At first reading, this seemed to me like a no-brainer, so obvious that it hardly needed to be said. Of course we think better and more clearly when we are not distracted or interrupted by outside influences; it would be a surprisingly obtuse person who has not already figured this out for himself. On reflection, however, it occurred to me that Pais is talking about something else, a different level or intensity of isolation which, in the right conditions, can lead to a different type of thinking than most of us will ever experience - the kind of passive receptivity which he describes.

To achieve this state the isolation has to be of significant duration, of course, and represent a dramatic change from the prior social and intellectual milieu of the person involved. Both Pais, who had prior to the German occupation been a graduate student at the University of Utrecht, and Newton, who prior to the plague had been a student at Cambridge, cannot help but have been profoundly affected by the sudden and unanticipated transition from being a secure member of a vibrant and challenging academic community to being a solitary and threatened individual.

This is both qualitatively and quantitatively a very different type of isolation than the one you get by telling your secretary not to allow you to be disturbed by any calls or visitors for a few hours, or even by getting away for an entire weekend. It is so different, indeed, that almost none of us will ever experience it, but I found it interesting, nonetheless, if only to reinforce our existing awareness of the benefits of the latter type of solitude on our powers of thought.

7. In Closing. I believe that if you read and absorb the lessons of any of these books - and the more of them the better - you will become a better citizen, a better businessman, a better consumer (of ideas as well as of tangible things), a better observer of the passing scene, and, last but not least, a better client to your struggling lawyer.


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