Weekend OT: The Expert Mind - "Knowledge Guided Perception"
There is a great article in this months "Scientific American" on the mental processes of experts. And the findings are startling i.e. great minds are made not born.
One of the comparisons they made, compared chess masters with novices. What they found was that much of the chess masters advantage over the novice derives from the first few seconds of thought:
Experts think in chunks: e.g. take the rhyme "Mary had a little lamb". If one knows the poem then they only have one chunk of information to remember. If one only knows the words they have five chunks of information. And if one knows neither they have 21 pieces of information to remember.
So when the chess master looks at a chess board they remember, not more information, but better information, so they can find the right move much more quickly. e.g. they may remember a bishop was not open two plays before so it must have had a pawn in front of it.
One great chess master said: "I only see one move ahead, but it is always the right move."
One man raised and taught his three girls to all be grand masters.
So it is with politics, in my opinion. Many people think one always has enough information to make good decisions regardless of their knowledge, but without knowledge guided perception they cannot make good decisions, just as a novice chess player can not beat a grand master.
And we know Bush, from Karen Huges, David Frum and others close to bush, "does not read and really does not like people who do read, or people with novel ideas".
Bush has little curiosity and is not a thinker. So the many mistakes we have seen him make in his five years is due, in my opinion, to not having "knowledge guided perception" --- he is unable to see the best moves because he never studied.
According to Doonsberry, bush did not know the difference between sunni and Shia before he started the war in Iraq!
We elected a novice president and are now paying the price. |
