Types of thinking

Here's another one "from the archives" aka I found a note I made about a year ago. I was thinking about what "Sandtalk" did to my brain, and the whole idea that universities have about themselves that they teach you how to think, not what to think. I'm not entirely sure that these are completely different in the end (teaching someone to think within a particular paradigm also limits them to thinking certain thoughts), but that's perhaps a discussion for another time. For now, I want to explore a few different types of ways we can, from time to time, move from one way of understanding the world (or parts of it) to another, which opens up a whole new way of understanding the world. I'm going to give these numbers but there is no particular order or hierarchy.

Type 1

> X is always A => X is sometimes A, but can alternatively be B.

A personal example of this is when John Howard's Liberal Party won election in 1996. I distinctly remember being quite confused. I was 16 years old and the Labor Party had been in government since I was four. The Liberals were the Opposition - that was their role in the system. I knew how elections worked but the idea that they could actually become the government was still incomprehensible to me. To some extent this also explains some of the exuberence around the victory of Kevin Rudd's Labor in 2007 — a lot of young Labor supporters could only ever remember Howard's Liberals.

A possibly better example is the saying "You can't be what you can't see". The Prime Minister is always a man. The President is always white. There are no gay footballers. People like us don't go to university. Girls don't like mathematics. This area has never flooded. You get the picture — it's true ...until it's not.

Type 2

> X is only A => X is A, but is simultaneously B.

Type 2 is in play when a child suddenly realises that the lamb chops they're eating used to be frollicking in a paddock. It's also the moment an adult discovers that mushrooms are merely the fruit of a much larger mycellium network. Or when we come to understand Jevon's Paradox.

Jevon's Paradox (Wikipedia)

Type 3

> X is inscrutable => X can be understood with effort => X is effortless.

Type 3 occurs when we learn to see patterns we previously could not decipher. Think of learning to read in a first or subsequent language. Think also of things like learning to play Chess, and then becoming a Chess master. To those unfamiliar with the game, Chess makes little sense. To those who have learned to play, it is now clear how to play and what their options are for the next and perhaps subsequent move. The Chess master sees every move that could be played in the next three moves on both sides of the board, at a glance.

This last "type" does seem somewhat different in nature to the previous two, but it also has similarities. All three open up enormous new vistas of understanding. They are related to the idea of "threshold concepts" — those things that learners must understand in order to progress their knowledge of a field any further.

There's no big point I want to make here, I was just thinking about the ways our understanding of the world and what there is to undertand about it can change slowly but also quite quickly, and why that is.