Intuition
Pay attention to your intuitions.
One of the downsides of the Feminization of our culture (for lack of a better term) is that ideas that resist analysis by verbalizing are dismissed as unimportant or result in endless argument. For example, I was showing somebody how to prune a tree and told them how to hold the by-pass cutters to reduce the effort to cut the limbs. I was demonstrating this as I told them.
To my consternation they insisted that I use words to explain why that worked. I said "It works. Just try it." No go. They refused to do it "my way" unless I could use words to describe friction and vectors and bending moments and the distribution of compressive stresses in a beam. Some concepts resist verbal explanation.
Much of what we call "intuition" falls into this "resistant to verbal explanation" category.
A hunch or gut-feel might be triggered by an unusual swirling of a crowd that avoids a certain vehicle idling beside the road or maybe pedestrians giving one particular doorway and extra 3' of distance. It might be a smell that is out of place or a conversation switching to a foreign language or a high-pitched whistle and heat felt on your cheek. Only after-the-fact can those cues be teased out of the deluge of information we operate within.
While you are in the maelstrom, get off the X. Don't stop and analyze. Move to safety. Drag those who depend upon your wisdom with you. If others follow, that is fine.
Sylvester McMonkey McBean
Quicksilver is busy reading about Sylvester McMonkey McBean and Thing One and Thing Two giving me a minute to throw together this quick post.
RE: "...ideas that resist analysis by verbalizing are dismissed as unimportant or result in endless argument.:
ReplyDeleteBTDT. A Certain Woman Of My Aquaintance absolutely could not "just do something," the "something" had to be fully explained in terms she could understand before any action could be initiated.
Neither my nor her prior experience in identical situations possessed any value, observed outcomes in previous events carried no weight, highly predictable outcomes were valueless, everything had to be explained.
Fortunately, during our period of Shared Experience there were no instances of "MOVE! NOW!" because she was in the path of a bus. (Were such to occur I'm quite confident it would have been necessary to convey a post-grad treatise on the physics of large masses in motion in single syllable terminology to avoid a calamity.)
I see that in a lot of teen-agers. They want to know EXACTLY what the consequences will be when they are planning to do something they know is wrong.
DeleteAs an adult, my view is that if "it is wrong" you just don't do it. That is all you need to know. It Is Wrong.
How can you explain the probability cloud of possible outcomes. And that even assumes you can foresee all of the outcomes.
Life is fragile. Entropy never sleeps.
One of our children learned this lesson as a young child. We were driving down the road, when my spouse pulled over the car and said to the occupants, "get out of the car now". The child needed to know "why", so the child was pulled out of the car without explanation. It turns out there were flames coming out of the engine that no one else had seen yet. The child learned that sometimes you just have to follow instructions without explanation.
ReplyDeleteThe time spent with my children on my lap reading Theodor Geisel was priceless.
ReplyDelete