Philosophy: A matter of what matters

[zachary vex]

8^)

[tcobretti]

I thought it was:

to crush your enemies

see them driven before you

and hear the lamentation of their women


:D
travis

[csj]

I hate to cut against the grain of all this but I've got to admit to to a disagreement here.
I consider the whole idea of intuition
(which I take to mean understanding the world around me without any reference to my sense perceptions or without access to specialized training which I trust has dealt with that real world even though I might not have)
pure priestcraft suitable only for mystics and their devotees.

Knowing how to separate them is only done by intimate knowledge and experience. Every time an elder said that infuriating line, I got a little clearer picture, because it uncovered another subtle part of things that I hadn't thought of before. Over time, they added up.

This statement is the key to determining and applying the concept of "matteringness".

Without it (intimate knowledge and experience) what does or doesn't matter is simply unknown.


There is nothing intuitive in the slightest about this process of knowing and experiencing the world of electronics we all seem to love so much. Common sense knowledge plays almost no part here. Extensive and intensive amounts of work go into getting the formal and specialized knowledge you need to deal with this stuff.


This statement might rub some the wrong way. You EE guys might say "I've gotten to the point where I can intuitively see that it won't work because..." or "Common sense says that if you hook it up like that it'll fail...".  Again I say, with all due respect, this is a point you've reached which is neither intuitive nor commonly known. It's something you've had to bump your head up against before a certain level of understanding and proficiency sets in. Indeed, many of you have spent YEARS getting to that point that you, oddly, describe as intuitive. Let me sit you down in a chair, put a headset on you, key up 8 different discrete frequencies and unleash the Friday night 6:00 rush at LAX airport under IFR conditions and you've got aircraft backed up to the Grand Canyon, San Francisco, Hawaii and Mexico for the next 4 hours. Tell me how you feel when I smugly look at you and say "Can't you see it?"  
Intuition and "common sense" will quickly get you in a disaster. Steady, methodical, consistent and thorough training in the fundamentals HAS to be emphasized and accomplished. Comon sense accounts for nothing. Special senses are needed which don't come naturally. They have to be placed there intentionally; with a purpose. This seems almost too obvious a statement to even mention and I'd probably be embarrassed saying it if was in a context other than this discussion.


You "tsk..tsk" and "sigh" as you watch us, "the very beginning beginners", bump our heads against the tree while you walk with ease through the forest.

"No Clay. Back up, turn left, take 2 steps forward, turn right, walk...sigh"

That's cool...that's just the lumps you have to take when you start something new. And especially when you undertake something with the breadth and beauty of the "mysterious" universe of electrons. You see, it IS mysterious to me...still. Probably always will be. It's a fascinating mystery and a perplexing mystery to me...at my level. I'm not so much into pedals or amps or musical whatnot. For me that's just the medium...the backdrop for learning about electronics (and honestly, I'm fascinated by what you'd probably consider the minutiae of electronics...the irrelevant). Anyway, it's a backdrop I prefer because of it's low cost and functionality but nevertheless it's still just a backdrop. I've also grown to dig this site alot. It combines the best of both worlds. I hated the internet until this site.

But anyway...

when you see me, on my knees with my head firmly bumped up against that tree remember this...maybe I'm not that stuck at all. Maybe I'm just really, really looking closely at something I've never seen before...something beautiful down in the weeds.

[zener]

I'm not going to drop my 2 cents here for it may just simply ruined the beauty af points of views expressed here. I'm just amused with what I found out in the chorus of one famous Metallica song, "Nothing Else Matters".

And nothing else matters...

Never care for what they say
Never care for games they play
(I) Never care for what they do
(I) Never care for what they know...

And I know

Is there something there :roll: ? Could someone relate the lyrics to the discussion here? :roll:

[gez]

One of the key differences in temperament is whether you are an INTUITIVE type, who quickly learns the skills to work subconsciously and handle concepts, or a SENSING type, who quickly learns to keep watch over everything.  Intuitive types make good scientists, while sensing types make good bus drivers and policemen.  Interestingly, about 80% of people are sensing types, and only 20% intuitive.

As a result of having a partner who studied psychology, I've read a fair bit of her library over the years including a lot on type (Jung, Myers-Brigg etc).  I had to pick you up on the above Brett as your comments are a little sweeping.  Many people have BOTH intuition and sensing skills, but simply prefer one over the other.  How developed each is depends upon what your dominant is.  If you have a Thinking or Feeling dominant, then there is plenty of scope for developing both sensing AND intuition skills (though you will still have a preference for one over the other).

Being a Sensor myself (ISTP) I thought I'd better stick up for a few other 'bus driver' types.  Saw that Charles Darwin driving the No 37 the other week...strange geezer!  

PS The percentage of Sensors to Intuitives varies from country to country.

[Ben N]

CSJ:
I think this is really just a semantic issue.  I am sure that by "intuition" RG doesn't mean anything like hocus pocus, or even what is thought of as common sense.  What I believe was intended was nothing more than a network of neural shortcuts--where your brain, because it has well and truly assimilated the knowledge involved, can simply work through parts of a problem, or at least point you in the right direction, without any conscious thought of the steps involved.  It is unconscious, but it is not mystical or mysterious.  Anyone who has mastered some area or other experiences this, and can generally work more efficiently as a result.

Ben

[Mark Hammer]

I'm going to be bossy here, and impose my will as a trained psychologist  (3 degrees and over 30 years in the field is probably enough to qualify) and enemy of "pap psychology".

The Myers-Briggs stuff seems to live on like Freudian and Reichian psychology amongst a small insular group of people, mostly in educational psych, human resource management, and counselling, while the rest of mainstream psychology looks at it and goes "Huh?".  It has little utility except for those who make money off peddling it to others who don't know any better.  That's an extremely harsh and biased view, but not at all far off the mark. Still, its omnipresence convinces many as does the sort of face-valid story it seems to tell about people.  I understand why many get sucked in.

The fact is that EVERYONE is intuitive and sensing.  The extent to which they appeal to conscious declarative knowledge is far more a function of their familiarity and practice with the task than of temperament or personality (which are 2 different things).  Learning "style" is always, always, always, a function of the background knowledge that people bring to content, and what their learning/performance goals are.  Everyone uses every style, depending on circumstance.  

As far what gets called "intuition", very few people, with the exception of those speaking a second language they are shaky at, or aphasics in rehab, have to *think* about either planning out the grammar of their sentences or decoding the grammar of others' language most of the time.  It just "happens", and although it would seem to be intuitive, it is based on thousands and thousands of hours of practice.  So much practice that when people suffer neurological trauma/damage, language is often one of the last things to go even though they may be seriously cognitively impaired otherwise.  It's so engrained from practice that they can do it even without thinking or being able to "have" a thought.  Same goes for knowing how to walk.  Alzheimers patients wander off lost based on their "intuition" about walking despite being unable to organize a conscious thought.

Similarly, few of us have to think about how to sit up straight or chew our food.  We make largely unconscious "micro-decisions", based on extensive experience, about all of these things such that our attention can be devoted to the many other dozens of concurrent tasks we are always doing (like typing out this reply for instance, while trying to listen to an interesting interview on the radio, and muttering "Yeah, fine" to a child who wants your attention).  Indeed, the demands on our attention are such that all of us have a huge urge to automatize as much of what we do as we can, just to free up precious conscious attention for other things.

What many call "intuition" is, in fact, the result of a great deal of "tuition", which can be explicit (i.e., taught, read, told, etc) OR implicit (i.e., learned incidentally without awareness).  Arguably, very little of all that we know really is explicitly learned.  Those things we are aware of learning are just the tip of a huge knowledge iceberg.  Underneath the iceberg are things like how to stand up, how to keep piss in your bladder, how to talk, how to chew, how to gesture, how to move your fingers from chord position A to B, how to do finger vibrato, how to swing a tennis racket, and how to see the difference between a circle and square.  As we gain experience with any task, there is a gradual change in our knowledge from conscious declarative knowledge to unconscious procedural knowledge, the latter being something that is hard for people to articulate, describe, or be aware of.  

Knowing how to do finger vibrato is a good example and relevant to many here.  When you were starting out, people could say "Do this", or maybe you would try something new, listen to whether it sounded Kossoff-ish or Trower-ish enough for your liking, and try again.  Now, though, you just do it, and aren't really aware that you are doing it or drawing on your knowledge of that skill to do it.  If a beginner asked you "How'd you do that?" you'd more than likely answer "Do what?" or "I don't know".

The "intuition" that RG speaks of is, in fact, expertise.  The state of expertise in which the expert uses highly proceduralized knowledge about circuit behaviour to jump more quickly to the answer, or at least a reduced set of possible answers, to a given question.  This is no different than how a master chef tastes and says "Needs more tamarind", how a skilled auto mechanic listens and says "Sounds like a gasket", how a radiologist looks and says "That could be a tumour", or how a skilled coach decides that backup quarterback X could benefit by running a few plays now.  Given time and effort, they might be able to tell you roughly how they got to those inferences, but they were most certainly not aware of what they were doing or how they did WHEN they did it.

What we call "common sense" is another kind of expertise about human affairs that embodies rules of practicality, rules of expectations about others, rules of morality or socially appropriate behaviour, and rules drawn from culture.  There is a LOT of training involved in creating common sense right from the cradle, and few of us are aware we are appealing to all this training when we use it.  Some folks may well appear to lack "common sense" but my sense is that such individuals more often have a common sense that is well-trained and used but simply incorrect and the product of what they were surrounded with from early on.  

In some cases, temperament, particularly impulsiveness, can lead people to overlook or underuse that which they do know and could use unconsciously in a "common sense" manner.  Of course teens are most susceptible to that, but some folks have a lifelong hurdle to manage in terms of being so propelled by their emotions and impulses that all the common sense they might have sits unused.  I feel for them.  They may act too fast to use the knowledge they have, but they never get to skip the part where they kick themselves in the ass for the screwups they did.

If learning more about expertise and skill acquisition piques your interest.  John Anderson is probably your man.

Enough pedantics for the night.  The Ottawa Renegades (my home team) are presently engaged in shaming the Edmonton Eskimos and I'm going to go watch Josh Ranek carry the ball for another hundred yards.  How I'm going to walk from my office to the couch, I don't know. :wink:

[WGTP]

As my Jr. Highschool History teacher Ms. Bailey told us, "the more you know, the more your realize you don't know."  

Anymore, I realize I can't philosophize may way out of a paper bag.  Actually about the only thing I'll be getting out of the bag with MAYBE is playing guitar and realizing that my children matter more than anything else in my life.

I thought it was:

to crush your enemies

see them driven before you

and hear the lamentation of their women

I like, "That which does not kill us makes us stronger." and I added, or leaves us maimed.

You guys are tooooo coooool.  

[brett]

Hi again.  Oh boy, there's some deep knowledge around on this.  I thought I was bringing clarity when I used stereotypes of intuitive and sensing "types".  I didn't mean to paint the people of the world as "this type" or "that".   :oops:  Of course there's more than the 16 M-B "types" in the world.  
But DO I find a certain robust basis for the types.  My work attracts different personality types (researchers of INTJ and farmers of XSTJ) to the type that I am (ENFP).  To aid communication, I find that some categorisation helps, and for me, the M-B system works ok.  To a psychologist it looks simplistic and full of holes, but that doesn't stop it being a useful tool for me (in the same way we might still use a 741 op-amp).
Just to add some extra confusion:- It has been thought that decision-making and intuition comes from a combination of memory and logical processing.  It turns out that memory is anatomically and functionally separate from decision-making.  Decision-making is tied instead to emotion.  So that old expression of having good "gut feel" for problems is apt.  Emotions may be better aids to the intuitive decision-making that RG talks about than memory and experience. :shock:  Neurobiology is sooo strange.

[gez]

To aid communication, I find that some categorisation helps, and for me, the M-B system works ok.  To a psychologist it looks simplistic and full of holes, but that doesn't stop it being a useful tool for me

Ditto!  

[Paul Marossy]

"One of the key differences in temperament is whether you are an INTUITIVE type, who quickly learns the skills to work subconsciously and handle concepts, or a SENSING type, who quickly learns to keep watch over everything. Intuitive types make good scientists, while sensing types make good bus drivers and policemen."

I'll agree with Mr. Hammer's statement about intuition. I am a very intuitive thinker, but my thought process revolves almost totally around my past experiences and what I learned from them more than just some whim that "this must be so because that's what my intuition tells me". All I know is that academic prowess many times does not pair up with being a great designer in my world (consulting engineering). In my world, you have "the engineer type" and "the nuts and bolts" type. It's kind of rare when one excels at both. I know the sensing type, those are the guys who micro-manage every tiny detail and make Mt. Everest out of a Pharoah Ant hill. These are the ones who drive me crazy, like half of the plans checkers that I deal with. Some of them are so incredibly anal about things that really have no bearing on anything in the grand scheme of things that I often wish that I had a punching bag in the corner of my cubicle! I could go into great detail on that, but I'll spare y'all...  :wink:

[Tim Escobedo]

This thread gives me a headache.

[Mark Hammer]

I think I can take a big chunk of blame for your migraine,so I'll take responsibility for making it go away.

Brother Keen had two main points.  The first basic point is that really *good* designs don't saddle you with the need to build in all sort of tweaking features for "coping" with varying conditions.  A great design makes varying conditions "not matter" moreso than a merely good design will.

The second point is that design should aim for attending to those things that DO matter, whether in terms of control/performance/usability features, or in terms of what it tries to make irrelevant as a necessary condition of operation.

Case in point.  Reviews of the early Joe Meek compressors noted that there wasn't a helluva lot of adjustments you could make but that every tweak of the controls provided resulted in meaningful change to sound, and that there were few settings where you *couldn't* get a decent sound.  THAT is a design that addresses what matters, and makes other things NOT matter.