Tom Smykowski: It's a "Jump to Conclusions Mat". You see, you have this mat, with different CONCLUSIONS written on it that you could JUMP TO.
Michael Bolton: That is the worst idea I've ever heard.
Samir: Yes, this is horrible, this idea.

Ego.

I knew a guy that programmed a music "jukebox" ... didn't have the heart to tell him that at most parties I went to the people just had a winamp and a folder open.

There are a lot of people who can literally do ANYTHING, and partly because of this they end up doing NOTHING. Kind of like a horse caught between two bales of hay.

Why smart people defend bad ideas

By Scott Berkun, April 2005

We all know someone that's intelligent, but who occasionally defends obviously bad ideas. Why does this happen? How can smart people take up positions that defy any reasonable logic? Having spent many years working with smart people I've catalogued many of the ways this happens, and I have advice on what to do about it. I feel qualified to write this essay as I'm a recovering smart person myself and I've defended several very bad ideas. So if nothing else this essay serves as a kind of personal therapy session. However, I fully suspect you'll get more than just entertainment value (Look, Scott is stupider than we thought!) out of what I have to say on this topic.
Success at defending bad ideas

The monty python argument sketchI'm not proud to admit that I have a degree in Logic and Computation from Carnegie Mellon University. Majoring in logic is not the kind of thing that makes people want to talk to you at parties, or read your essays. But one thing I did learn after years of studying advanced logic theory is that proficiency in argument can easily be used to overpower others, even when you are dead wrong. If you learn a few tricks of logic and debate, you can refute the obvious, and defend the ridiculous. If the people you're arguing with aren't as comfortable in the tactics of argument, or aren't as arrogant as you are, they may even give in and agree with you.

The problem with smart people is that they like to be right and sometimes will defend ideas to the death rather than admit they're wrong. This is bad. Worse, if they got away with it when they were young (say, because they were smarter than their parents, their friends, and their parent's friends) they've probably built an ego around being right, and will therefore defend their perfect record of invented righteousness to the death. Smart people often fall into the trap of preferring to be right even if it's based in delusion, or results in them, or their loved ones, becoming miserable. (Somewhere in your town there is a row of graves at the cemetery, called smartypants lane, filled with people who were buried at poorly attended funerals, whose headstones say Well, at least I was right.)

Until they come face to face with someone who is tenacious enough to dissect their logic, and resilient enough to endure the thinly veiled intellectual abuse they dish out during debate (e.g. You don't really think that do you? or Well if you knew the rule/law/corollary you wouldn't say such things), they're never forced to question their ability to defend bad ideas. Opportunities for this are rare: a new boss, a new co-worker, a new spouse. But if their obsessive-ness about being right is strong enough, they'll reject those people out of hand before they question their own biases and self-manipulations. It can be easier for smart people who have a habit of defending bad ideas to change jobs, spouses, or cities rather than honestly examine what is at the core of their psyche (and often, their misery).

Short of obtaining a degree in logic, or studying the nuances of debate, remember this one simple rule for defusing those who are skilled at defending bad ideas: Simply because they cannot be proven wrong, does not make them right. Most of the tricks of logic and debate refute questions and attacks, but fail to establish any true justification for a given idea.

For example, just because you can't prove that I'm not the king of France reincarnated doesn't make it so. So when someone tells you "My plan A is the best because no one has explained how it will fail" know that there is a logical gap in this argument. Simply because no one has described how it will fail, doesn't necessarily make it the best plan. It's possible than plans B, C, D and E all have the same quality, or that the reason no one has described how A will fail is that no one has had more than 30 seconds to scrutinize the plan. As we'll discuss later, diffusing bad thinking requires someone (probably you) to construct a healthier framework around the bad thinking that shows it for what it is.
Death by homogeny

shelf of boxesThe second stop on our tour of commonly defended bad ideas is the seemingly friendly notion of communal thinking. Just because everyone in the room is smart doesn't mean that collectively they will arrive at smart ideas. The power of peer pressure is that it works on our psychology, not our intellect. As social animals we are heavily influenced by how the people around us behave, and the quality of our own internal decision making varies widely depending on the environment we currently are in. (e.g. Try to write a haiku poem while standing in an elevator with 15 opera singers screaming 15 different operas, in 15 different languages, in falsetto, directly at you vs. sitting on a bench in quiet stretch of open woods).

That said, the more homogeneous a group of people are in their thinking, the narrower the range of ideas that the group will openly consider. The more open minded, creative, and courageous, a group is, the wider the pool of ideas they'll be capable of exploring.

Some teams of people look to focus groups, consultancies, and research methods to bring in outside ideas, but this rarely improves the quality of thinking in the group itself. Those outside ideas, however bold or original, are at the mercy of the diversity of thought within the group itself. If the group, as a collective, is only capable of approving B level work, it doesn't matter how many A level ideas you bring to it. Focus groups or other outside sources of information can not give a team, or its leaders, a soul. A bland homogeneous team of people has no real opinions, because it consists of people with same backgrounds, outlooks, and experiences who will only feel comfortable discussing the safe ideas that fit into those constraints.

If you want your smart people to be as smart as possible, seek a diversity of ideas. Find people with different experiences, opinions, backgrounds, weights, heights, races, facial hair styles, colors, past-times, favorite items of clothing, philosophies, and beliefs. Unify them around the results you want, not the means or approaches they are expected to use. It's the only way to guarantee that the best ideas from your smartest people will be received openly by the people around them. On your own, avoid homogenous books, films, music, food, sex, media and people. Actually experience life by going to places you don't usually go, spending time with people you don't usually spend time with. Be in the moment and be open to it. Until recently in human history, life was much less predictable and we were forced to encounter things not always of our own choosing. We are capable of more interesting and creative lives than our modern cultures often provide for us. If you go out of you way to find diverse experiences it will become impossible for you to miss ideas simply because your homogenous outlook filtered them out.
Thinking at the wrong level

Several story tall buildingAt any moment on any project there are an infinite number of levels of problem solving. Part of being a truly smart person is to know which level is the right one at a given time. For example, if you are skidding out of control at 95mph in your broken down Winnebago on an ice covered interstate, when a semi-truck filled with both poorly packaged fireworks and loosely bundled spark plugs slams on its brakes, it's not the right time to discuss with your passengers where y'all would like to stop for dinner. But as ridiculous as this scenario sounds, it happens all the time. People worry about the wrong thing at the wrong time and apply their intelligence in ways that doesn't serve the greater good of whatever they're trying to achieve. Some call this difference in skill wisdom, in that the wise know what to be thinking about, where as the merely intelligent only know how to think. (The de-emphasis of wisdom is an east vs. west dichotomy: eastern philosophy heavily emphasizes deeper wisdom, where-as the post enlightenment west, and perhaps particularly America, heavily emphasizes the intellectual flourishes of intelligence).

In the software industry, the common example of thinking at the wrong level is a team of rock star programmers who can make anything, but don't really know what to make: so they tend to build whatever things come to mind, never stopping to find someone who might not be adept at writing code, but can see where the value of their programming skills would be best applied. Other examples include people that always worry about money despite how much they have, people who struggle with relationships but invest their energy only in improving their appearance (instead of in therapy or other emotional exploration), or anyone that wants to solve problem X but only ever seems to do things that solve problem Y.

The primary point is that no amount of intelligence can help an individual who is diligently working at the wrong level of the problem. Someone with wisdom has to tap them on the shoulder and say, "Um, hey. The hole you're digging is very nice, and it is the right size. But you're in the wrong yard."
Killed in the long term by short term thinking

Tasty foodFrom what we know of evolution it's clear that we are alive because of our inherited ability to think quickly and respond to change. The survival of living creatures, for most of the history of our planet, has been a short term game. Only if you can out-run your predators, and catch your prey, do you have the luxury of worrying about tomorrow.

It follows then that we tend to be better at worrying about and solving short term issues than long term issues. Even when we recognize an important long term issue that we need to plan for, say protecting natural resources or saving for retirement, we're all too easily distracted away from those deep thoughts by immediate things like dinner or sex (important things no doubt, but the driving needs in these pursuits, at least for this half of the species, are short term in nature). Once distracted, we rarely return to the long term issues we were drawn away from.

A common justification for abuse of short term thinking is the fake perspective defense. The wise, but less confident guy says they are you sure we should be doing this. And the smart, confident, but less wise guy says of course. We did this last time, and the time before that, so why shouldn't we do this again?. This is the fake perspective defense because there's no reason to believe that 2 points of data (e.g. last time + the time before that) is sufficient to make claims about the future. People say similar things all the time in defense of the free market economy, democracy, and mating strategies. Well, its gotten us this far, and it's the best system we have. Well, maybe. But if you were in that broken down Winnebago up to your ankles in gasoline from a leaking tank, smoking a cigarette in each hand, you could say the same thing.

Put simply, the fact that you're not dead yet doesn't mean that the things you've done up until now shouldn't have, by all that is fair in the universe, already killed you. You might just need a few more data points for the law of averages to catch up, and put a permanent end to your short term thinking.

How many data points you need to feel comfortable continuing a behavior is entirely a matter of personal philosophy. The wise and skeptical know that even an infinite number of data points in the past may only have limited bearing on the future. The tricky thing abot the future is that its different than the past. Our data from the past, no matter how big a pile of data it is, may very well be entirely irrelevant. Some find this lack of predictive ability of the future quite frustrating, while others see it as the primary reason to stick around for a few more years.

Anyway, my point is not that Winnebagos or free market economies are bad. Instead I'm saying that short term bits of data are neither reliable nor a wise way to go about making important long term decisions. Intelligent people do this all the time, and since it's so commonly accepted as a rule of thumb (last time + the time before that), it's often accepted in place of actual thinking. Always remember that humans, given our evolution, are very bad at seeing the cumulative effects of behavior, and underestimate how things like compound interest or that one cigarette a day, can in the long term, have surprisingly large impacts despite clearly low short term effects.
How to prevent smart people from defending bad ideas

smart people defending bad ideasI spent my freshman year at a small college in NJ called Drew University. I had a fun time, ingested many tasty alcoholic beverages, and went to lots of great parties (the result of which of course was that I basically failed out and had to move back to Queens with my parents. You see, the truth is that this essay is really a public service announcement paid for by my parents - I was a smart person that did some stupid things). But the reason I mention all this is because I learned a great bit of philosophy from many hours of playing pool in the college student center. The lesson is this: Speed kills. I was never very good at pool, but this one guy there was, and whenever we'd play, he'd watch me miss easy shots because I tried to force them in with authority. I chose speed and power over control, and I usually lost. So like pool, when it comes to defusing smart people who are defending bad ideas, you have to find ways to slow things down.

The reason for this is simple. Smart people, or at least those whose brains have good first gears, use their speed in thought to overpower others. They'll jump between assumptions quickly, throwing out jargon, bits of logic, or rules of thumb at a rate of fire fast enough to cause most people to become rattled, and give in. When that doesn't work, the arrogant or the pompous will throw in some belittlement and use whatever snide or manipulative tactics they have at their disposal to further discourage you from dissecting their ideas.

So your best defense starts by breaking an argument down into pieces. When they say it's obvious we need to execute plan A now. You say, hold on. You're way ahead of me. For me to follow I need to break this down into pieces. And without waiting for permission, you should go ahead and do so.

First, nothing is obvious. If it were obvious there would be no need to say so. So your first piece is to establish what isn't so obvious. What are the assumptions the other guy is glossing over that are worth spending time on? There may be 3 or 4 different valid assumptions that need to be discussed one at a time before any kind of decision can be considered. Take each on in turn, and lay out the basic questions: what problem are we trying to solve? What alternatives to solving it are there? What are the tradeoffs in each alternative? By breaking it down and asking questions you expose more thinking to light, make it possible for others to ask questions, and make it more difficult for anyone to defend a bad idea.

No one can ever take away your right to think things over, especially if the decision at hand is important. If your mind works best in 3rd or 4th gear, find ways to give yourself to time needed to get there. If when you say "I need the afternoon to think this over", they say "tough. We're deciding now". Ask them if the decision is an important one. If they say yes, then you should be completely justified in asking for more time to think it over and ask questions.
Find a sane person people listen to

Some situations require outside help. Instead of taking a person on directly, get a third party that you both respect, and continue the discussion in their presence. This can be a superior, or simply someone smart enough that the other person might possibly concede points to them.

It follows that if your team manager is wise and reasonable, smart people who might ordinarily defend bad ideas will have a hard time doing so. But sadly if your team manager is neither wise nor reasonable, smart, arrogant people may convince others to follow their misguided ways more often than not.
And yet more reasons

I'm sure you have stories of your own follies dealing with smart people defending bad ideas, or where you, yourself, as a smart person, have spent time arguing for things you regretted later. Given the wondrous multitude of ways the universe has granted humans to be smart and dumb at the same time, there are many more reasons why smart people behave in stupid ways. For fun, and as fodder for the forums, here's a few more.

If you have some thoughts on this essay, or some more reasons to add, please head on over to the forums.

* Smart people can follow stupid leaders (seeking praise or promotion)
* Smart people may follow their anger into stupid places
* They may be trained or educated into stupidity
* Smart people can inherit bad ideas from their parents under the guise of tradition
* They may simply want something to be true, that can never be

Slashdot

Us smart folk have great ideas! Wonderful ideas!

Like that time everyone wanted to give a multi-billion dollar corporation hundreds of millions of dollars to make another season of a mediocre TV show. That was a great idea, wasn't it?

Oh, and then there was the tens of thousands of dallars they gave to that guy who ran a copyright-material-file-trading-site. That turned out smashingly well.

And-- umm--- hrm.

{pause}

............ good article.

Insert GOP/DNC joke here.

a lot of it has to do with ego, and a lot of it has to do with committing to something and saying "this is what we are going with"

some people invest a lot of time into ideas and when they see their ideas threatened, they throw up the defense like no other. it transends programming all the way up to world politics.

i am guilty of it, but i have gotten better at admiting my mistakes and using it as something to build upon. it takes a lot to realize when you are at fault and you fucked up.

IMO people that can do ANYTHING are likely
an INTP http://www.intp.org/intprofile.html [intp.org] personality type. This would explain why they don't always produce much. Merely proving to themselves that they CAN do it is quite enough.

- Difficult conversations, a book about confronting people in tough situations.
- The argument clinic, Monty Python (If you've never seen it, watch it before reading this script. It's in the 3rd season, disc 9 of the boxed set). Also see the splunge scene in episode 6.
- Games people play, Eric Byrne. A book on transactional analyis: a model for why people behave as they do in certain situations.
- The informed argument, Robert Miller. Textbook style coverage of both proper and unfair argument tactics.
- With good reason, Morris Engel. a short summary of common logic manipulations, explained with a sense of humor (over a dozen cartoons).
- Why smart people can be so stupid, Salon.com

Best. Citation. Ever.

It's simple. Everyone can have dumb ideas. It's our god given right. And if you think that you are going to pry them from our cold dead fingers, you have another think coming. We can come up with all the bad ideas that we want, and we STILL have more good ideas than the less fortunate. So I say LEAVE US ALONE!

considered smart?

Probably because they did well in school. But school (at least in the US) wasn't designed to teach people to think, but to teach them to memorize facts and follow directions.

There are lots of very capable coders out there who make excelent code for other techies, but for this very reason the UI often sucks. The individualism and "if you don't like it, fix the code yourself" attitude of many open source projects means that people who aren't code junkies, but are excelent at understanding what a user might want get excluded from the process far too often.

What I've often seen is that really smart people can end up being really stupid because they have not yet run into that challenge that really tests them, so they don't have the experience of having to do real intellectual work. I remember a friend in high school who sailed through everything and got a near perfect score on the SAT only to crash and burn, flunking everything his first year. He'd gotten by his entire life on quick thinking, and had never had to do any real intellectual heavy lifting and when confronted with the need, he simply did not have an practice.

This is not to say all really smart people do this. But it is a danger among the smart who never really made themselves work.

is when people who are very intelligent compared to the rest of the public think they know it all. I think there is probably nothing worse than arguing with someone who thinks that because they are brilliant in one area that they are now all of a sudden uniquely qualified to render an opinion in all areas.

I think the issue at hand is that many people confuse leadership ability with skill. Being a good programmer doesn't necessarily make you a good project manager, nor is the best manager also the best coder. It's sometimes the case, and certainly some very skilled people successfully rise into management because their skill translates into seeing the big picture and hence being a good manager.

But not all really skilled people see the big picture, and that's when ego kicks in. They can't stand taking orders from somebody less skilled than them. People complain about pointy-headed PHB's with no skills getting paid more that them, but the reality is that having 20 coders is a waste if they lack direction, and ideally, that's what the PHB is there for.

Whether the PHB is actually effective is another story. Leadership is a nebulous thing and much harder to quantify and identify than skill - hence the embarrasing examples that slip through the cracks.

The problem with smart people is that they like to be right and sometimes will defend ideas to the death rather than admit they're wrong.

I've known smart people like that.
And fantastically dumb people like that.

I've had someone argue that the queen of England isn't rich, and get this, when I explained that she's the biggest land owner in the U.K. and she made about 27 million a year last time I checked, he argued that she isn't rich because when she dies someone else will inherit her money (unlike Bill Gates, who'll bring it with him to the afterlife?).

Smart people just defend their insanity with more flair.

I quite deliberately confront people with, and defend, astonishingly bad ideas. (For example: "If the US government really wants to save as many lives as possible, they should give everybody two weeks' notice and then drop a nuclear bomb in the center of Jerusalem. This would destroy the largest cause of Israeli-Palestinian violence.") I do this not because I actually believe such things, but because I want to find people who are willing to contradict me and justify their positions.

Sadly, the vast majority of people either disagree without justification, or (even more worryingly) agree without justification -- which just demonstrates how unwilling most sheep^Wpeople are to engage in thought and/or debate.

...because people are not rational. We are sometimes temporarily capable of rationality, but the other 99% of the time we're ruled by subconscious forces. We arrogantly think in terms of making intelligent choices, but modern brain science is showing that decisions are an illusion, that there is only behavior, and that our behavior is out of our conscious control.

So smart-schmart. Intelligence has nothing to do with it.

In order to hypothesize we simplify. Using the idea of Occam's Razor [wikipedia.org] we make a number of assumptions and the assumptions we make have a number of presuppositons attached to them. This is how we hypothesize in order to predict and once our predictions are shown to be correct we theorize. Gregory Bateson [edge.org] investigated these ideas in his book Mind and Nature [amazon.com]. Smart people should defend dumb/wrong ideas, if they are concerned about falsification as the leading idea in the progress of scince, because the smarter the person the more likely the argument will be logical and the more logical the argument the more able we are to potentially falsify or verify it.

What he's saying:

As a condition of being smart, defending ideas is a natural skill. Sometimes that skill takes precedent over rational thought and smart people will focus so much on being right that they will forget to think rationally.

There, I just saved you 10 minutes of reading.

Where's my check?

Why do smart people defend bad ideas?

Lots of ideas become 'good' or 'bad' only with hindsight. (E.g., pet rocks, E-books...) And, 'smart' doesn't always mean 'prescient' ...or 'lucky'...

Any really intelligent person will weigh all sides of an issue before making a decision.

The great ones are the ones that select the facet that is the least known, but has no good reason to be unknown; and they make it very well known - either just because, or because they can.

The essay's title is probably derived from Paul Graham's essay Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas [paulgraham.com]. Recommended read by the way, that man has insight.

In the software industry, the common example of thinking at the wrong level is a team of rock star programmers who can make anything, but don't really know what to make: so they tend to build whatever things come to mind, never stopping to find someone who might not be adept at writing code, but can see where the value of their programming skills would be best applied

Well, that explains Daikatana [eidosinteractive.com]

Geeks can get infatuated with an idea that seems good, ignoring other good ideas that conflict with it. We used to call this "the tyranny of the single idea" - especially ideas that seem so good that they're treated as a "magic bullet", or (from a perhaps gentler folk era) a "panacea". This seems to be an variant of the Usenet wisdom immortalized in /usr/bin/fortune as "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail".

Maybe... they aren't all that smart. Now, to answer the question why does society recognize absolute cretins as people of respectable intelligence?

Low self esteem which is a long-term estimation of self and high ego which is a transitory and ephemeral estimation. You can't replace the former with the latter any more than you can replace a proper diet with nothing but Cheetos and Ding Dongs no matter how much some try. And you can't invent the former simply with empty exercises. You have to examine yourself, be honest in both directions good and bad, and accept the outcome and the options for change as needed and commit to those changes or at least the endless path to the unattainable goals.

But the usual response is the "sour grapes" one instead. These geniuses feel the world doesn't like them and regard them highly enough. They hate the world for that. They begin to respond accordingly with a haughty sneering disregard for others' accomplishments and abilities outside of their fold. Non-geeks are "lusers" and worse.

Admit they are wrong? Fark no. That would be embracing the death of their artificial self they've made of ego straw. They can't face and embrace true emptiness that comes with the finality of true understanding and acceptance. They can't because of fear. Non-geeks may be right that they deserve derision and scorn. Non-geeks may be right that technical smarts aren't as good as hot social skills. Non-geeks may be right and they may be... wrong. And if the geek is wrong, then he isn't smart. And if he isn't at least smart, then he has nothing else and consequently would be... nothing.

I went through gifted classes with kids who exemplified this thinking. Everything was about showing off their smarts. Making a calculator out of flashlight bulbs and switches. Creating new number and word games every single day. Designing new things and creating new programs and writing new reports every day. At all times, they had to be smarter. Any mistakes were not ignored as you ignore the dog barking outside while watching the football game. They were ignored in the style of a child covering their eyes with their hands and plugging their ears with their thumbs at night in the dark in fright desperately trying to ignore the things that go bump in the night.

Because if they were wrong, then they weren't as smart as all that, and if they weren't smart, then they had nothing and were nothing. This would be the same as accepting total psychic death. If you are nothing, then how can you be?

This is the mindset of most of the Linux world today. If they are wrong, then Microsoft by default is right and there is no other outcome. They cannot be wrong but learn and grow. They can't see that Windows is easier to install, configure, use, and support than any Unix variant for the average person and try to make Linux as easy. They can't backtrack and admit mistakes and leave it to others to fix their sloppy work on the theory that at least it is free. On this score, Microsoft is smart and sexy because they will after a while admit, say "we screwed up", and shrug and move on. The geek brigades besieging the MS world on the field outside never do.

Well as someone who went through gifted classes and was maxing out the scores on all the IQ tests they could throw at me in grade school, I can confidently say to them, you can be and in fact are more often than not wrong. And the courage and intelligence to admit this and learn from it is far greater an intellectual exercise than making X11 behave with a new video driver while using Vi on a Chinese keyboard when your first language is French.

I would further say to these people, let your fear go. You're wrong all the time starting with that you're wrong that being wrong means you're nothing. You are not secretly dumb because your intelligence is less than omniscience or because real world things trip you up as opposed to computer world things. And when you get older, you will get slower and you will seem less brilliant. If you insist on believing that your smarts are all you have, then when they are gone you truly will have nothing.

Stop the worrying. Save time. Embrace the death of yourself. Begin recompiling self version 2.0.

Infact Paul Graham wrote on this just a month ago..

Rather Interesting...

http://www.paulgraham.com/bronze.html [paulgraham.com]

Smart people defend bad ideas...

because there is a difference between knowledge and wisdom.

In part the article talks about how to handle yourself in a conversation with a someone who is wrong but (successfully) verbally agressive. This reminds me of a great book called _The Gentle Art of Verbal Self Defense_ [insert your own Amazon affiliate link here...] which discusses all kinds of conversation techniques for dealing with people who have mastered various annoying habits that seem to keep you from making your point. And if you don't think you need this book to help yourself then you should read it to learn about all the unfair, annoying and childish ways you can dominate a conversation. Just in case...

Slashdot should change it's slogan from "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters" to "Slashdot: smart people defending bad ideas". Never before have I seen a more apropos description of this very sight than the article linked herein.

Why Smart People Defend Bad Ideas

Because their parents, and/or religious leaders, tell them to.

*puts on asbestos suit*

Three words

"Pride of authorship"

When people learn new ways of doing things, they often forget or disregard other possible ways of doing things. Most people assume the new ways they learn are better, and they often are. However, it is a quite easy way to get a group of people in a rut, especially if they only work with each other and, shall we say, "don't get out much."

This happens in the musical world as well. As a composer, learning new rules and methods leads to writing that better follows and can more skillfully and effectively bend these rules. However, I've noticed that once I learn any given rule, I forever think in terms of that rule. If I ever want to ignore that rule, I am "actively" ignoring it. Once a new method is learned, methods that are oblivious to it vanish from one's repertoire, for better or worse.

I somehow thought this was relevant to the topic.

The writer is talking about poseurs and pseudo-intellectuals. You know - the ones you can't *avoid* hearing at parties... These people know that they are not *that* smart and try to protect their image of intelligence by defending every statement. While they believe that they have successfully pulled this off (as in the article...) what they have really done is convinced practically everyone around that they have no clue.

In contrast, the majority of *really* smart people don't really care if they're wrong occasionally since they *know* that they are smart and being wrong once in a while is no biggie and they'll learn something so that they will be right (again) the next time...

And this is why Edward de Bono [edwarddebono.com] makes for interesting reading. I wont bother detailing his bio [edwarddebono.com] but point you to his website [edwarddebono.com]. de Bono spent the early part of his life working on the structure and self organisation of the brain.

He has spent considerable more time trying to get people to think better. For example in a thinking exercise he tries to explain why people (not just smart ones) argue incorrect results to problems through a simple example:

• '... Most people cannot distinguish between: 6+2 = 8 8 = 6+2 The difference can be rather important. The addition of 6 and 2 cannot produce any answer other than 8. But 8 can be made up of combinations other than 6 and 2 (5+3, 4+4, 7+1). Why is this important? Because people start to believe that if you have a 'right' answer there is no need to think further because you can never be more than right. Having the right answer means you do not have to listen to other answers because they can never be 'more than right'. The result is a severe limitation on thinking. The point will be followed up in my next message. [Weekly Message (Week 20), Edward de Bono 8th May 2004 [edwarddebono.com]] ...'

Good ideas flow from good thinking. Good thinking is (mostly) about changing perception not logic or argument.