meritokratias
Resisting the Design – Understand your thinking
“Dubito, ergo cognito, ergo sum.” (I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am.) – René Descartes
Thinking is important in this society. There are a lot of schools teaching you how to think. Not all advice is good for you. There are namely 8 ways of thinking according to people’s different personalities.
First type of people focus on isolating different elements of the materials, and characterise them to fully understand different underlying concepts. Any issue will be subdivided into different components, namely costs, effects, morals, principles, symbolism, historical impact, scientific logic and so on, depending on the particular learning of the individual. These kind of people like to be kept level headed in their own thinking. Some are better communicators who can then abstract and express it out for others to understand. Some are not as good so they would look like they’re just hoarding knowledge for the sake of it.
Then another type of people focus on the “placement” side of different modules of knowledge. To them, isolation and characterisation are only meaningful if you can find some practical use of them. A world event to them only matters if it has an impact to them that they need to somehow react and make plans to accomodate the changes. They focus on organisation and planning. World politics happening on another side of the world? Well they may need to short some stocks or doing whatever reallocation they need.
The third type of people have some sharp senses of intuition that they can summarise and simplify very complex concepts into a one-liner or a simple story with just a handful of lines. To them, complexity is never a true problem and the use of microscopic logic is actually detrimental to the goals, as they only seek to minimalise the story so that it becomes easier to digest and manage.
The fourth type of people focus on detecting different possibilities, including hidden reasons, agenda and future errors. Their thinking is intuitive and quick, but can be indecisive – as it is hard to tell which of the possibilities is the real solution.
The fifth type of people prefer making references to an old experience or some old literature they know. When a world event happens, their first reaction would be “And therefore history repeats itself.” Or when something happens in their life, their reaction is “I know this from my youth.”
The sixth type of people will try their best to find out all the real world feedback and actually put their feet into the water. How to sense the world’s movement? Why of course by investing in market sensitive stocks. How to understand what people feel? Of course go to that place and sit around, even may try to live like the people in that area for a month or so.
The seventh type will just sit down and ask what feels right in their gut, what feels like it is just, and what sounds like it agrees with their personal beliefs. They all have different ways to collect information but the processing of information always refers to their personal values and gut feelings.
The final type will ask for opinions of others. They would think that finding a ground where they can preserve the most friends is more important than anything. They will usually take the stance to maximise the number of empathetic souls. They are also fairly convincing and persuasive on specific ideas that they like.
There is no right or wrong for having different personality types. The motivation of mentioning these different ways of thinking is to demonstrate how different it is between 2 different persons.
The critical thinking programmes we may find online may not be suitable for you. I believe that understanding both about what is happening in the world and about how your own thinking pattern perceives any event will allow an individual to seek alternative perspectives, and will become less prone to media manipulation.
