learn how to think

To help future generations, study previous ones.

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The Common Problem . . .

is that people fail to examine geopolitics on geopolitical time scales. NATO is not an artifact of the Cold War era, it is a result of the interwar era. In 1914, the Pope warned that conflict between the two great alliances would be “the suicide of Europe.” By 1918, the millions of casualties constituted a demographic bottleneck called the “Lost Generation.” Yet, just 20 years after Armistice, the antebellum maneuvering of World War 2 was trumpeted as “Peace In Our Time” . . . and war only a year out. After the War to End All Wars, the Allied nations placed their faith in international justice and nonviolent coexistence. A generation later, the nations of Western Europe knew better. They had seen two wars settle into long, grinding equilibrium, then watched a latecomer disrupt the balance of power. With the knowledge that long wars just get more people killed on both sides, the statesmen of Europe and America created a power structure where the nation which had proved to be the balance of power in both World Wars would be committed to any new European war from Day 1. The nations behind the Iron Curtain subscribed to the new theory of heavily-armed peace, as well. When the Warsaw Pact was finally formed, it only formalized the existing power structure of Soviet forces under Soviet commanders deployed in the countries which the Red Army had reconquered from Germany. Any future war was to be made short and decisive, and preferably so destructive that compromise and coexistence would be a far better option. In ultimate purpose, NATO took the principles of 19th-century statesmen into the nuclear era, a non-nuclear deterrent schooled in the lessons of Summer, 1914.

The Uncommon Solution . . .

Geopolitics is best studied on generational timescales. When nations set policy, it is best done with an understanding of the previous 50-100 years of decisions and options in that area of government activity.

Copyright 2016 by J.D. Lewis

Ignoring history hurts everyone.

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The Common Problem . . .

is that people keep thinking they have outsmarted human nature. In the financial sector particularly, the “experts” keep thinking they have found a solution to the limits taught by 5 millennia of painful experience. All economies are barter economies. Advanced ones simply have a commoditized, granular unit of exchange called money. Instead of exchanging product for product, they exchange value for value; by decoupling value from the product, money integrates time as an aspect of the economy. Where Marx went wrong was to view time as an independent store of value, the determining factor in the value of labor. Time can never have commercial value unless some other exchange of value is also in progress. Quality of work, innovation in new products or practices, the effects of the mind, are where value comes from. Debt, interest, investment, can only exist with an agreed unit of exchange. Resources in their natural state have a latent value, but they provide no direct impact on the economy. Transferring the future value of undeveloped resources requires an agreement about the nature of possession, as well as a unit of stored value. That’s why inflation is destructive to economies, because it reduces the stored value represented by each unit of money. Interest, rent, and equity returns are the return on time value, because they represent a deferred exchange of value. The use of money as a unit of exchange means people can exchange partial value of a product, temporary use rather than full transfer of ownership.

The Uncommon Solution . . .

When someone with letters after their name says they have overcome or are willing to ignore history, expect their “new and improved” idea to self destruct. Sooner or later, history and human nature combine to return everything to normal.

Copyright 2016 by J.D. Lewis

Pick a perspective. Not permanently.

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The Common Problem . . .

is that people see qualitative vs. quantitative reasoning as a permanent choice. The reality is that both are necessary tools to be an effective thinker. Yes, there is a need for quantitative analysis. Balancing a checkbook, analyzing business opportunities, ranking athletes and sports teams, these all require using numbers to find the answer. For optimizing, for organizing, for defining the details of a problem. What the purity of numbers giveth, it also taketh away. Numbers lack context. The classic math homework of reading problems is all about the combination of qualitative and quantitative analysis. Before you do the math, you must decide what numbers are important. You finish the problem by using quantitative analysis to address the details.

Many people will argue that everything must be measured, numbered, and counted because of computers. Computers work in numbers, after all. Yet the Holy Grail of computer science for the last 20 years has been to equal the human mind in qualitative analysis. Boolean logic, the foundation of computer science, organizes relationships between values according to 5 criteria: and; or; not; not and; not or. These relationships are defined by whether or not they are true; by how large a margin is immaterial. Most software code is organized into statements of Boolean logic; computer hardware, from the fastest video card to the $5 thumb drive in your pocket, is built from logic gates that operate according to Boolean relationships. What Western society has skipped for the last century or more is the qualitative analysis to start the problem. Select the desired outcome, then define how to reach it.

 

The Uncommon Solution . . .

Quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis are tools. People need to know which one is appropriate to the answer they are trying to find. The problem comes when one or the other becomes someone’s worldview. Qualitative analysis is rooted in Platonic philosophy, the study of the ideal and abstract; quantitative analysis arises from Aristotelian reasoning, reaching a specific conclusion on the basis of the empirical and concrete. Concrete observational is an intermediate stage in cognitive development. Continued progress requires moving beyond that stage. After 2000 years of practice, Western society should have some margin of superiority over the ancients in terms of how to use information.

Copyright 2016 by J.D. Lewis

Numerical solutions do not fix human problems.

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The Common Problem . . .

Is that people immediately define a problem in terms of exact measurements and precise definitions. They skip over looking at the problem on a human scale, and matching the context of the original problem. For centuries, scholars have tried to match the description of Atlantis, given by the ancient Greek philosopher Plato. He says it was equal in size to Libya and Asia combined. Obviously, anything as large as a continent should be easy to locate, even from the debris of catastrophic destruction. Perhaps any search for Atlantis should back up from the quantitative pattern-matching and fully examine the context of the information given.

First and foremost, how far south does Plato mean when he says “Libya?” How far east is his definition of Asia? Secondly, this is Plato we are talking about. He not only literally wrote the book on metaphysics, he defined the concept of the concept. Are you 100% comfortable assuming he was referring to physical geography? He would more likely refer first to the economic footprint or area of cultural impact. If he in fact meant “from Libya to Asia (Minor)” then a dominant power in the eastern Mediterranean is a distinct probability.

Many people argue that no location in the Mediterranean could be the origin of Atlantis, because Plato specifically says it is beyond the Pillars of Hercules, typically associated with the Strait of Gibraltar. However, many places in the ancient world were identified with Hercules; specifically, Heraklion in Crete would be the most likely candidate. The tale of Atlantis is ascribed to one Kritias, whose name is derived from Crete.

Finally, the geography of the area around Crete matches the description given of Atlantis’ concentric rings of land and water. Cartographic projection in the Classical era was, at best, inexact and most commonly outright propaganda. For an author whose name is synonymous with abstract thought, the geography could not fit more perfectly. Start with the island of modernly known as Santorini. Thira, in the Sea of Crete, bounded by the island of Crete and the islands off the Attic region of Greece. Expand across the Eastern Mediterranean, take in the narrow passages separating Italy from Sicily and then North Africa, and finally look at the Mediterranean as a whole. Add the final layer of the nations in the Mediterranean basin, and the area Plato describes does indeed extend from past Libya to the far boundary of Asia as it was known in the Classical era.

 

The Uncommon Solution . . .

Even a logical problem makes more sense in a human context. To solve human problems, the problem itself must first be placed on a human scale before the abstract numbers have any meaning.

Copyright 2016 by J.D. Lewis

Education is Free. You get what you pay for.

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The Common Problem . . .

Is that back-to-school time in many of the largest urban school districts represents more harm than good. What is the point of requiring students to attend in a school district where the pregnancy rate is higher than the literacy rate? What is the point of forcing young people into an environment where they are more likely to witness a violent crime than to graduate? As a nation, we spend more time discussing refugees from failed states than we devote to providing refuge from failed schools.

Ignore test scores. Look at graduation rates, at literacy rates in high schools. Compare them to the crime rates for the same demographics. Identify the schools that have failed for years, for generations in some cases. They have failed their student populations. They have failed the neighborhoods they are supposed to serve. They have failed to deliver on the resources spent to build and run them. These kids would learn better math skills making change at a burger joint. They already do get more practice in literacy skills via social media than they do via school. Letting good kids get out of bad schools and build a work history earlier only adds options for the working poor in the urban core.

Every school would be a more productive learning environment if certain students didn’t show up. For the schools in worst trouble, make that an option. Don’t waste resources forcing kids into an environment where they deliberately interrupt someone else’s opportunity to learn, to have better options in life. If the school population was made up of only students who had someone at home emphasizing the importance of education, how much more time would teachers have to teach? How many frustrated students who drop out with a GPA in the “C-” or “D” range would instead graduate?

 

The Uncommon Solution . . .

Free public education is supposed to be universal in industrialized societies. In the cases where it is very public that education is not happening, give people the option of a free education for their children, and the freedom to enroll them in the school of hard knocks.

Copyright 2016 by J.D. Lewis

Free Ride or Free State?

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The Common Problem . . .

Is that people look at government as good or evil. They tend to view it as either their best friend or their worst enemy. Government is always inefficient, because government, by definition, is about control and limitation in the interest of safety. The question is, what is the appropriate balance point between safety and self-determination? Unfortunately, this is one of those questions where 3 people will give at least 4 different opinions.

Opinion is a bad basis for policy in the first place, but it often becomes law through the force of public opinion. In this case, opinion cannot even provide a generally accepted answer. Logic is the only available answer to set the appropriate balance between safety and self-determination. So, do we make government a first response, last resort, or somewhere in between?

There is a case for government being the first response. Government can bring more power to bear on any given problem than any other entity, because it can always assemble more resources. With a gross revenue measured in trillions, and future revenues guaranteed through a monopoly on premeditated force, government can buy the answer. The question is, at what cost to the rest of society? Because of its very size, national government alters the supply-demand curve by any concerted action. That alone makes a good case for delegating powers to lower tiers of government. Greater accountability of and access to government institutions makes a better case for assigning government power to the lowest level with the budget and personnel base large enough to handle the job. This is the core ideal of federalism, many smaller units of government working for the narrow interests of their specific constituencies and ceding to higher levels of government only what powers they cannot effectively use themselves.

Even better, though, is for government to be the final resort. This is not because large corporate interests are inherently more moral or responsive; in the general case that is used to set public policy, they are not any better than government. They are, however, more easily avoided than government, if they become harmful to someone. Nor are small, voluntary associations such as co-ops, collectives, or syndicates going to be an effective alternative. For government to justify its existence, it must be large enough to do what the people themselves cannot do in voluntary associations. For government to meet its primary responsibility of preventing violence to its populace, it must be powerful enough to coerce compliance from those who place little or no value on peaceful coexistence. In short, there is no more trustworthiness or value in large corporations or small associations than in government. However, there are more options available in interacting with them.

 

The Uncommon Solution . . .

The balance between safety and self-determination lies in a government which follows the Hippocratic Principle: First, do no harm. If a government will limit its actions to ones which meet that standard, it can be trusted with sovereign power. Even such a government, though, should be a last resort. If another private entity does harm, the government can provide effective redress. If the government does harm, there is no other recourse.

Copyright 2016 by J.D. Lewis

High-Level Thinking To Solve High-Priority Problems

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The Common Problem . . .

is that people have become dependent on precise knowledge. There is an epidemic of “analysis paralysis,” where everything must be numbered off, measured, and calculated. There is a lack of abstract thinking, being able to address the “big picture” of conceptual knowledge and high-level thinking skills such as analysis and synthesis. For the entire 20th century, the pattern has been to teach skills and facts, and that trend toward limited thinking skills has only strengthened in recent years. Skills-based education was displaced by a focus on STEM subjects, Science, Technology, Education, and Math. Yes, student performance in these areas has collapsed over the past few decades, but focusing only on those subjects is a failure to address the bigger problem.

Anyone who learns algebra just for the math skills is missing out on the logic skills, learning to rearrange the terms of the problem into a more tractable form. History and literature teach not only reading comprehension, but also the higher-level thinking skills. They provide invaluable practice in understanding something that one has not directly experienced. What people need is formal training in how to think big, how to understand and analyze something from a conceptual standpoint, how to step back and step up to abstract thinking and other high-level cognitive functions. Most of these functions depend on qualitative learning. Qualitative understanding is more than knowing the definition and description of something, it is knowing why something is the way it is. Cause-and-effect is a good way to start critical thinking, but it needs to go more than one level deep to aid understanding. Those second and third order thinking skills are what contribute to understanding the whole picture, rather than getting mired in unconnected details. Numbers are good tools, but they must have context to have any meaning.


The Uncommon Solution . . .

Don’t limit teaching to skills, to STEM. People need to learn analytical skills, abstract reasoning, how to comprehend the whole, not just details.

Copyright 2016 by J.D. Lewis