This is to thank all of the journalists, reporters, newspaper columnists and editors who have applied critical thinking to subjects that I cannot see from my daily position in this world, but want to know about. I appreciate your contribution for how it has made me feel at ease, at home with the practice of challenging ideas.
I have a vivid memory of when I realized this: Someome on the radio said something while I was just lightly paying attention to the story. The commemt slipped an argument I would normally disagree with below my radar, and it got past my front-line defenses, it got past the the cognitive frames and constructs that define my usual positions. I started thinking about this unwelcome, uninvited argument from the speaker’s perspective. I completely bought into it. I started seeing past experiences that could’ve brought the speaker to their beliefs. I started seeing how their cognitive frames sealed and secured their worldview.
I am better off for having slogged through the battlefields where ideas, ideologies, and styles compete.
Now, I play a new game as I get to know other people. The game: A way to think through problems the way my partner in conversation would. I try to see how they got to their positions, opinions, or conclusions. Sometimes I find that the ends of those paths are familiar – a place I know of, a person I know, a character I’ve seen. After evaluating another’s perspective more thoroughly, I have a more complete understanding of their world-view. Often times, I am won-over to a perspective that is altogether new to me. Rarely do I become entrenched, because in the long run, I spend more time challenging their world-view and mine.
I enjoy the fruits of your labor every day when I listen to the radio, or when I read newspaper articles. If it harmed you that I didn’t pay for your work I consumed, I apologize. I love the idea of a reporter as one who digs to reveal. It’s romantic. But, the investigative reporter is a stronger kind of energy. A tension to open criticism to the public. A daring and bravery for being in the practice of analyzing and critiquing the politics and regularity every day.
I hope I get to see your profession bond with other parts of our lives, our markets, our economies to focus even more by grafting onto or being inside those entities. I have a dream that as newspapers – or, even the formal news outlets – deconstruct and dissolve the reporters take their trade into organizations as investigators on the inside. I dream and hope that investigative reporters develop a function akin to what user experience (UX) does: To analyze, criticize, improve upon how companies communicate within and without, how companies behave, how companies plan and develop.
Happily challenged and educated by your work,
Jay
Mind Games: Drawing spandrels into the conversation
A game of drawing conceptual spandrels*:
There’s a mind game like to play: I weave extra hints or messages or humor or sometimes oblique concepts into the statements I make; and, then, see who picks up on them. You score points by volleying a similar extra layer of meaning. Style points are awarded for the flavor of the volley: Is it thematically, stylistically, or structurally similar? Does it extend, engage the woven thread? Did it oppose or mock it? Did it trump or topple the original?
It’s always been odd to go through the day rarely meeting other people who play the game. Much less, finding people who are interested in it. Sometimes those who play a little will catch on and go a few rounds with you. Sometimes you meet players who are too different in style, structure, content for it to be a complete game.
This is my favorite sport. And, yet, there’s no league for it. It’s all pick-up games. In some places, you get labeled a witch for talking and thinking with such powerful cleverness.
* I borrow Stephen Jay Gould’s biology term “spandrels” for it’s ingenuity and uniqueness.
A variation on the theme:
Because so much time can pass between games, I’ve come up with a one-player variation to keep me mentally active. (I like to sharpen my knives, so to speak.)
In the single-player game, I use my imagination to paint layers of character on people when I’m with them; and, then, testing them – almost systematically – on whether and how the layers fit them. It’s as if I were looking at you through that optometrists’ tools where they flip the lenses to determine the appropriate refractive corrective.
Recognizing mental profiles:
“Persona Recognition” you might call the form of action that is the engine of both games. Think of it as on par with face recognition, verbal recognition, pattern recognition. But, this is another kind of recognition. I tend to think that cognition is as adaptive as any other biological trait. And, I tend to think that meta-cognition is undergoing an especially rapid period of adaptation.
Three dimensions of the game are:
I think there are other dimensions to the game – for instance, with how many people can you simultaneously keep a game going? Similarly, are those simultaneous games unified? On what level? Or, are they individual, simultaneous games?
It becomes apparent that the scoring above is not additive, but the scores are of different kinds and are separate units of measure.
I didn’t stay with any (physical) sport for very long, yet I always played these games. I will teach them to my children. I still seek challengers.
Tying this back to spandrels:
In chemistry, there is a process called chromatography, which helps you identify the molecules or atoms in a source sample based on the unique spectrum of light they display when excited. (I’m especially thinking of gas chromatography-mass spectrometry, which I had a bit of experience with in college.) I see those spandrels and character layers as the materials that excite mental states to a point where they reveal their characteristic identifying properties.
At some point, perhaps I’ll work on defining a mechanism for formally or experimentally revealing mental characteristics like this. Of course, maybe it’s been done.