In search of problems

It is possible that you are perfectly reasoning from the wrong context. We do it all the time. If you’re operating in the wrong context you will get nowhere.

The greeks were great at perfect reasoning from a wrong context, so was St. Thomas Aquinas and they didn’t get anywhere because the context in which they were operating was wrong.

Problem-finding is much harder than problem-solving. Everyone can solve a problem when they know what the outcome looks like. The hard part is thinking outside the frame, coming up with outcomes no one could conceive of because they were thinking within their biased context.

Here are biases you need to escape from:

Let me add four more:

1. Perfect reasoning from wrong premises
    Forgetting that reasoning is only about representation, and that the world is quite independent of our representations. Thus “Mathematics” is quite dangerous without “Real Science”
2. Abandoning the real problem for something that can be solved
    This is the “looking under the lamppost for the lost keys” rather than the block in the dark where they were dropped.
3. Giving up something really important for convenience
    This is “Esau giving his birthright for a cup of soup”, etc.
4. Linear scaling bias
    Most things don’t scale according to human common sense.