FLAKES : Think things through

Is it possible that when novelist W. Somerset Maugham wrote that, “If 50 million people say something foolish, it is still foolish,” he was predicting the effect of the Internet upon human conversation? Maybe not.

I am told that some universities are trying to forbid students to quote from the Internet. At the same time, in the opposite direction, many of us are becoming Google-perts – “I know because anything I don’t know can be Googled.”

The trouble with the Internet is that it is an intrusive technology.

It blithely enters the spaces that few others have permission to invade: our homes, our phones, our desks and our minds.

I was thinking about this as I eavesdropped on a conversation between two ladies at the gym about an insane diet that one of them was following.

When cautioned, the dieter firmly said, “I found the diet on the Internet and it is working!” It is amazing that one can use 11 simple words to illustrate three common flaws of human thinking.

The first is “herd instinct” or “if everyone is doing it then it must be o.k.” The second is “authority by placement” – if something is put in a place alongside other important things then it must be important. The last one is “confirmation bias” meaning if I think it should work then it works (and therefore I will accept any evidence that it is working and dismiss any evidence that it is not working).

HUMANS ARE BORN THINKING

The trouble with thinking is that it is one of those things which we were never taught to do at school because there was an assumption that we already knew how to do it.

Human beings are literally born thinking so by the time we get to school we’ve already spent some 20, 000+ hours doing it consciously and probably a couple of thousand more hours doing it unconsciously.

However, like walking, talking, fighting and singing and all those other pre-school skills, the fact that we could do it was obviously no indicator of our ability to do it well.

As some clever person said, the trouble with assuming is that it often makes an ass out of u and me.

Of course the world would be a far less interesting place if thought became a compulsory subject at school.

In my estimation, the first thing that would die is humour. Humour thrives because errors of thought lead us to anticipate the direction that a statement will take, so when something is “unexpected” or “incongruous” we are often provoked to laugh at it. Once you understand that humour stems from a type of ignorance, then it is easy to forgive the many mathematicians who never laugh.

(I will try not to jump onto my pet bandwagon in order to further develop this theme with the thought that, if the hate police get their way, then humour will fizzle out altogether - since ordinary jokes thrive on folly and prejudice.)

And just to be doubly unkind to mathematicians, I found a joke at thoughtcatalog.com that combines just the right mix of wrong thinking and prejudice:

A physicist, a mathematician and an engineer stay in a hotel.

The engineer is awakened by a smell and gets up to check it. He finds a fire in the hall-way, sees a nearby fire extinguisher and after extinguishing it, goes back to bed. Later that night, the physicist gets up, again because of the smell of fire.

He quickly gets up and sees the fire in the hallway. After calculating air pressure, flame temperature and humidity as well as distance to the fire and projected trajectory, he extinguishes the fire with the least amount of fluid. At last, the mathematician awakes, only again to find a fire in the hallway. He instantly sees the extinguisher and thinks, “A solution exists!” and heads back into his room.

And since I must provide at least one sample of the poor quality thinking that is the hallmark of your favourite Flakes articles, ponder this: No pain no gain or discomfort is the grandmother of progress.

Think well this weekend.