Alpha Mind Blog

Yeah, this post by Scoble is four days old, but he’s so dead-on right that I have to respond.

I recently plunged into YouTube. A serious time-sink, and a lot of fun, and a hotbed of serious possibilities for business communications. (More—much more—on that in coming posts.)

YouTube isn’t at all serious about policing my friend-making habits, and I’m glad of it. Yes, they do include a silly bit of language about “if you know this person” when you invite someone to be a friend…

… but they don’t ask you how you know the person.

The whole idea of friends on social media sites is fraught with much potential for silliness. It became the theme of my first YouTube video. Enjoy.

Lisa Donovan (LisaNova as she’s known on YouTube) and I had a very nice exchange of emails, so one could almost say we know each other—now. But that exchange happened after she signed on as my friend. I couldn’t have sent her the email if she hadn’t accepted my friend invitation without knowing me from swiss cheese. Of course, I could honestly say I knew her—I knew she makes well produced and really funny videos. But she didn’t know me. She accepted my friend invite because she’s gracious.

Well, actually, because she knows what’s good for her YouTube career. Turning away potential friends would have been rather boneheaded.

The very charming Kami Huyse blogged about the 10 Most Irritating Words on the ‘Net and so sent me on a journey that has now gone 8 hours (with two major computer glitches and a pastoral visit sandwiched in.)

Based on Kami’s partial list and this article, it looks like the full list is probably:

1. folksonomy
2. blogosphere
3. blog
4. netiquette
5. blook
6. webinar
7. vlog
8. social networking
9. cookie
10. wiki

My vote is for “meme.” Yuck. It’s as bad as kudo, almost, but kudo antedates the Internet, while meme, I believe, got currency on the ‘net way back when The Well was new.

It’s always a good feeling when a new application you’re trying out fails in the first 10 minutes. That way you haven’t wasted a lot of time.

Windows Live Writer just did that for me.

First thing it offered to do after making its first connection to my blog was to put a temporary post on the blog. It put the post there, but it was permanent, and I had to use my blog’s administrative interface to delete it.

Pretty bad manners. I uninstalled WLW.

Somewhere among WLW’s pages was a promise that I could see a perfectly formatted preview of my posts. Found no way to do that. But remember, I only gave the product 10 minutes.

I hear good things about WLW. Just didn’t work for me.

The important elements in the environment in which an idea vies for territory are these: the idea itself; other ideas; the idea’s originator; human receivers of the idea; the social groups to which the human agents belong, and the resources needed for the idea’s realization. An idea itself cannot take control of resources; it requires human decisions to allocate resources to an idea.

From the point of view of any idea, other ideas may be friend or foe or simply background; that is, may abet, impede, or be neutral toward the idea in its quest for territory. The conscious mind cannot process many ideas at one time, and conscious thought takes place using symbols and actions, in ways very similar to those by which interpersonal communication takes place. Our dreams are like films—we hear music in our heads, we think through problems using sentences or mathematical formulae, which we most often speak ourselves through internally. We have limited capacity to process thought in these ways; they must usually be processed serially, one at a time.

Thus ideas, even those involved in reverie, which by definition do not vie for any territory beyond the originating thinker, nevertheless compete for the time of the single mind.

For this reason, thoughts are neutral one toward another only in a very limited sense, in that each thought in a sense understands that the thinker must, at times, think unrelated thoughts. As an army on the march must at times eat and rest, expansive thought must at times give way to the demands of maintenance, making the maintenance thought neutral toward the expansive thought.

Expansive thought tends to be aggressive, however, so that it may at times regard maintenance as a competitor. Writers, artists, software engineers, and business executives frequently skip meals and their mental equivalents. Even in the non-obsessive, certain thoughts may take obsessive control, aggressively crowding out other thoughts.
An important action in the idea’s quest for territory is the co-optation of other ideas, which is the turning of neutral ideas into allies.

The groups to which persons belong have an important role to play in an idea’s realization. It is important to remember that these groups are not always properly called organizations, since in many cases they are scarcely or not at all organized. One’s language group, for example, cannot be called an organization, but is a group which affects how one thinks.

Certain groups have a formally defined role toward an idea; for example, work groups exist to formulate new ideas, such as “innovation round tables” in business, or any formal organization at a time when it needs to make a decision. In these cases, the idea may be at the heart of the group’s purpose, and yet the group may be dysfunctional in helping even good ideas come to realization, which is to say, dysfunctional in terms of the group’s stated purpose. These dysfunctions, and their corrections, are discussed in the chapter on realization environments.

To talk about the will of the idea is not merely fanciful. It is helpful to us in two ways. First, it allows us to think of ideas as entities with lives, and thus to analyze what conditions most conduce to an idea’s realization. Second, and more importantly, when we set about to apply the principles of thoughtcraft, personifying the idea gives us several advantages. Most of these derive from our separating the thought from the thinker, the idea from its originator or champion. The thinker is usually far better off to think of the idea as something owned by or entrusted to him, like a dog that has followed him home, than to think of the idea as intrinsically part of the self. Among the advantages are these:

• It separates the idea from that defensiveness which necessarily surrounds the self. If the idea seems to be one’s self, there is far greater risk in communicating it, far more pain if it is rejected.
• Similarly, even in the most emotionally robust persons, there is a certain rigidity to one’s self-identity. Major changes in one’s understanding of who one is are like earthquakes, shaking up areas of one’s life and thought that aren’t even close to the epicenter. None of us can go through many of these. But if we believe our ideas are us, we take the risk of a self-identity shift each time we entrust an idea to others. Nearly all ideas undergo modifications, some of them radical, on the way to realization. Ego-involvement with the idea will bring about a fear of such modifications, while ego-separation decreases the fear.
• This in turn permits more flexible negotiations among all the parties necessary to the idea’s realization.
• For an organization, it may permit the realization of more ideas. An individual’s or group’s self-identification with an idea may create a jealous attitude toward other ideas, and leads to the stifling of some ideas which may have been of great benefit. Since creative individuals tend to be fickle, most in love with their latest idea, self-identification is a far greater problem for organizations and for adopters of an idea than for individual originators. An organization which learns to view ideas as quasi-autonomous entities will be less jealous, and more inclined to give every idea, even if it competes with another adopted idea, its best opportunity.

We want some ideas to take physical shape. We want others to take over minds. In either case, the idea’s path to realization is a quest for territory.

For many people, their very job is to originate or assist ideas whose bent is to change the physical environment. For others, modifying physical space is an important form of self-expression. Yet very few ideas can be effectively moved from vision into physical reality without making space in their social environments, since few individual thinkers have total control over much physical space. Ideas not requiring physical realization vie only for mental space.

This is true even for some thoughts that are kept private; the mnemonic jingle or acronym rehearsed in order to memorize a list is employed precisely for its ability to claim space in the mind and occupy it. Even where the mental space to be claimed is in a single mind, I find it most helpful to think of this as social space, for two reasons: first, those constraints on thinking which we will analyze in the realm of the group have their counterparts in the individual mind; second (and this partly explains the first), many of these constraints arise from the individual’s group affiliations and memberships, so that even if we were not employing a “society of mind” model (which I do), we would still have to deal with the individual thinker as the social being he or she is.

The concern of the rest of this book is the quest of an idea for territory, its journey from conception to realization. In studying the matter, I am taking an idea-centric point of view. If the ideas themselves were the readers of this book, it would constitute their manual for conducting a successful quest. In taking this approach, I fully realize that ideas are not this book’s readers. I understand that in talking about an idea’s will I am guilty of pathetic fallacy, and while it may seem otherwise, I never forget that my goal is actually to serve the human beings who originate, adopt, adapt, and find their lives shaped by ideas.

Today I begin to post chapter 2 of Thoughtcraft. Here I begin to take an idea-centric view of the thinking process, assuming that every idea has, inherently or as accompaniment, an impetus to change something, somewhere. I call this the idea’s “quest for territory.”

Membership in any community affects individual thinking in two ways: it teaches one what to think, and it teaches one how to think.

We are taught what to think by all the ways in which the community signals to us which ideas are in favor and which are not. Signaling may be very overt (”How dare you say that!?”) or less so, as when one’s statements are based on assumptions the group doesn’t share, and are consistently met with non-understanding. In many persons, these signals result in various thoughts being either “thinkable” or “unthinkable” in the context of the group.

We are taught how to think when we are taught explicit paradigms for thinking (”Here is a model for thinking; find ways to apply it.”), or rules, which are even more explicit and which normally come packaged with statements of the conditions under which they apply (”When both A and B occur, do C.”) All formal rules of logic are obviously teachings as to how to think.

These two teachings, what to think and how, interact with each other and are interdependent. Some of what we may or can think is actually decided by what we learn about how to think. When we have been taught rules for thinking, they inform what we are able to think in that, using a given set of rules, certain thoughts can be thought and others cannot.

This is true and obvious in language: in English, which makes no distinction between polite/formal and familiar/informal forms of address, there is no way precisely to translate the insult conveyed when a Frenchman addresses a social peer or superior as tu on their first meeting. Similarly, when a framework for how to think has been put in place, it makes certain thoughts truly and literally unthinkable, while other thoughts will come rather naturally, proceeding almost inevitably from the framework of rules.

Conversely, we infer part of the how from the what. Even when rules are not taught us explicitly, we learn them by inference, based on what we observe to be permissible. Again, this is true and obvious in our learning of language: most of us have no conscious knowledge of syntax or grammar, never having heard their rules stated explicitly. Yet we know these things quite well, learning them by example and by inference. Those individuals who are able to make explicit what is implicit may originate an explication of the rules they obey in speaking and writing, and we might say these people are self-taught in grammar.

This would be wrong, however. Rather, they are only expressing in words what they have certainly been taught in another way, the same way all others are taught.

There is also a kind of middle ground between what we learn about what and how to think. This is the case when we are taught rubrics for judging thoughts based on outcomes. Some groups are quite explicit, for example, in applying a pleasure principle: only think “positive” thoughts, or those which make you feel good. This may lead to highly stilted and unrealistic thinking. But closely related rubrics may be very healthy, such as when alcoholics in recovery learn to eschew thoughts that would lead them to drink.

Since some thoughts are made easy or hard, near-inevitable or near-impossible, by one’s group membership, any group which must think must be aware that its very existence as a group will tend to advance certain kinds of thinking and thwart others. Groups as groups will never be aware of these group-engendered influences on their thinking, but depend on their constituent members to recognize them. The individual thinker within a community that must think should be aware of the effects of group membership on individual and corporate thought processes. I will explain some of these effects in the next chapters.

All complex thought processes, and all efforts to achieve ends, involve multiple thought processes, in multiple modes, in master-servant relationships.

Visioning frequently brings the other modes of thought into its service. When a visionary idea begins to move from reverie toward purpose, an essential step is to bring new thought processes into the service of the idea. Thus when a visionary thought begins to harness the work of explanation, a step has been taken toward realization; an effort to work out how to present the vision to others has been started. At some point puzzle-solving thought will be brought into the service of the vision, as the thinker begins to work out how to resolve challenges to the idea’s realization.

Visioning is not the only mode that presses other modes into its service. Any mode of thought may be master over other modes.  The likeliest master processes are visioning and maintenance, visioning because it so often leads to an effort toward realization, maintenance because it is essential for survival and because many maintenance activities require other modes of thought in order to be carried out.

For example, many physical maintenance tasks are of such complexity that conscious schemata are necessary in order to perform them. Even as simple an activity as brushing one’s teeth is done by many persons in a ritual manner, with a conscious inward recitation of the steps involved, the number of strokes in each area, and other details. In some (probably not all) persons, these recitations involve explanations: “we do this because…” Maintenance tasks frequently cross the line from simple remembering to puzzle-solving. For example, while eating is a simple activity, obtaining food is less so; when hunting and gathering are required, then puzzle-solving has become the servant of maintenance.

Frequently, visioning is also called upon as a servant even before puzzle-solving; the hunter who must puzzle-solve in order to find the prey may need to image the successful outcome in order to motivate and focus the puzzle-solving effort, and sometimes to recall the conditions under which success was achieved in the past.

Of most interest to us are those processes which are either ruled by visioning or which employ visioning as one of the “first servants hired,” so that visioning becomes a master over other processes. These are the processes whose over-motive is expansion rather than maintenance, which in a sense vie for territory.

Yet even when the over-motive is maintenance, once visioning has been employed and assumes a master role over other processes, the overall process is in a sense expansive. It aims at an alteration of outcome, which is another way of saying a claiming of territory.

When the route to food is simply remembered, although there will no doubt be a change in the world when the food is claimed and eaten, the eater has little or no sense of mastering or prevailing over the food such as inheres in actually puzzle-solving to obtain the food.  This is clear in the case of hunting prey in the wild. But even in the simpler case of maze-running, the first learning of the maze is a puzzle-solving activity, and is expansive in that success results in a kind of ownership of the maze.