SO I was looking at the rules of the Blogging A to Z challenge and came to interpret it to to mean that all the posts should be organized around a topic. Reading the rules more closely, I don’t think that’s the case: “You don’t have to change your format of what you normally write, just come up with topics that correspond with the letter of the day.” Regardless, I know some people come up with a unifying theme, and I did so:
My conceptual library – or, more particularly, conceptual library curation.
Many great thinkers had to develop their own language to help them articulate their ideas – Immanuel Kant, Ayn Rand, and so on. I don’t know that I’m a great thinker, but I frequently find myself relying on a private vocabulary of ideas that help me understand the world. Some of these I’ve gotten from other people – like “autistic inertia” and “bullshit” – whereas others, like the “Gaimannian Landscape” and “value collapse” are my own inventions.
Others, unfortunately, I can’t share – such as the ideal C entry for today, a phenomenon we might call “prestranglulation,” or strangling a project by drowning it in unnecessary prerequisites. You’ll note that’s not the actual word, which starts with a C – but the private word I use for prestrangulation is based on the name of someone I know who does it, and, out of respect, I’m NOT going to shame them publicly by coining a term based on their name and blogging about how bad that behavior is.
Instead, you get this post, about the importance of articulating your own conceptual library, acknowledging or tracking down where those concepts came from, and challenging those concepts periodically to make sure they still make sense.
Some of my most cherished ideas don’t work. For example, one idea I picked up is that “you shouldn’t critique during a brainstorming session”. As it turns out, this idea, while it goes back far in brainstorming research, is at least partially bunk – totally off the wall ideas can derail brainstorming so a limited amount of criticism can actually be helpful. Other ideas I’ve had on my own similarly didn’t stand up for scrutiny.
One way that you can challenge your own ideas is to name them, to attempt to define them more precisely, and once you’ve done so, start seeking evidence that supports them – or contradicts them.
Contra what you may have heard from naive takes about the scientific method, a scientist should not start their investigation by trying to prove an idea wrong. First you have to have SOME evidence that an idea MIGHT be right, or you’ll end up wasting your time trying to refute every idle speculation that you have.
But, conversely, you are the easiest person to fool, and once you have an idea that you think might be true, it’s easy to get caught in confirmation bias, where you only look for confirming evidence and don’t look for evidence that contradicts your view.
So, as part of that exercise, i hope to spend a little time this month not just blogging ideas, but subjecting them to a little bit of criticism.
-the Centaur
Pictured: birbs, at Point Lobos, who happened to make a shape like a “C”.
