Creative Problem-Solving

by Paul Lutus @ arachnoid.com

"God is subtle, but he is not malicious" – Albert Einstein.

I want to blame television, but I suspect that's too easy. I've been hearing about the decline of standards in American education, the absence of creating thinking skills in young people, but until recently I had no direct evidence. Now that I receive daily e-mails from people asking questions about the Internet, all doubt has evaporated – today's Americans cannot think for themselves.

In the largest sense, American society is breaking into two classes:

The first class are people who know how to think. These people realize that most problems are open to examination and creative solution. If a problem appears in the lives of these people, their intellectual training will quickly lead them to a solution or an alternative statement of the problem. These people are the source of the most important product in today's economy – ideas .

The second class, the vast majority of Americans, are people who cannot think for themselves. I call these people "idea consumers" – metaphorically speaking, they wander around in a gigantic open-air mall of facts and ideas. The content of their experience is provided by television, the Internet and other shallow data pools. These people believe collecting images and facts makes them educated and competent, and all their experiences reinforce this belief. The central, organizing principle of this class is that ideas come from somewhere else, from magical persons, geniuses, "them."

The world view of these two classes is so fundamentally different that a chasm is opening between them that will soon swallow even the illusion of American democracy. We are entering an era in history in which, if things go very badly, a small number of people trained to create ideas will completely dominate the lives of a vast sea of idea consumers, people whose lives are ruled by facts.

The belief in the authority of idea producers is the modern replacement for religion. Just like religion, this belief closes off a vast area of human experience, streamlines the equations of life and makes one's existence pathetically simple – all one need do is find out what views it is acceptable to hold.

My purpose in this article is to undermine that belief . I assert that there are no authorities in the realm of human ideas – each idea must be weighed against all other ideas, and ideas should be evaluated solely on their intrinsic merit, without regard to their source.

The above position will not be a fast-breaking story to someone trained in original thought, and neither will this : all these statements are one person's ideas and are most useful when included in a much larger collection of ideas, including the reader's own .

Here are some common misconceptions about ideas and idea production:

Thesis : A holder of a college degree has an intellectual superiority that others lack.

Does anyone still believe this? Yes. And the fastest way to lose this belief is to talk to college graduates, as I regularly do. At its best, college will train you to think creatively, and prepare you for the reality that education never ends . At its worst, college will reinforce an inbred intellectual smugness, dress it in facts, and provide you with a document asserting your immunity to all future intellectual experience.

If this thesis held any intrinsic truth, then going to college would make you smart, a position for which there is no evidence. Going to a college doesn't make you smart any more than going to a bank makes you rich – unless, of course, you bring your own money to the bank. By the same token, if you arrive at college with your own intellectual resources – your own riches – you may well become "smarter," whatever that means in real human terms.

In the absence of that personal investment, as you leave the bank or college, you will end up with symbolic wealth instead of real wealth, and the trip will have been wasted. The expression, "I must be smart -- I went to college" makes as much sense as "I must be rich -- I have dozens of credit cards."

Thesis : Consulting an expert is a more efficient way to solve a problem than simply working it out for myself.

This is only true if you are a lifelong idea consumer, an unenviable position. After the most basic facts have been taken into account, one is better off creating personal solutions to problems than searching for existing solutions. The reasons this is true are almost too numerous to list:

By solving the problem yourself, you will increase your index of self-reliance, which might eventually become a theme in your life.
In solving the problem, you may create a more efficient solution than anyone has before you (translation: nature might smile on you). You might thereby make an original contribution to the store of human knowledge. If you haven't experienced this, you can't imagine it. But if you have experienced this, you can't describe it.
While solving the problem, you will place your personal stamp on the end product, thereby creating a personal expression that cannot be erased by time.
By solving the problem yourself, you become less dependent on experts, authorities, technical super-beings, perhaps even to the extent that those people will be reduced to human proportions.

Thesis : A computer program with a lot of predefined features is superior to one that allows me to create my own features.

I know this is a sudden shift from the general to the specific, but it serves to show how a bias created by television can influence other behaviors. The basic message of television is "Let me do it for you -- you cannot do it alone, I am essential. Your experience is shaped by my ideas, your own ideas have no value at all. You cannot possibly detect humor, that is beyond the scope of your small brain, so I will signal the presence of humor by laughing for you. Laugh with me, think with me, become me."