Can we know only what we are prepared to know?

[Moontanman]

I too have experienced the phenomena of not seeing until it was pointed out to me and then from then on seeing something in many places i hadn't noticed before. I think it's part of the way the brain perceives information, until information becomes important the brain edits it out of everyday perception.

I disagree with the idea of non fiction being some how superior to fiction. I think fiction can and does (more so than non fiction ) prepare the mind for new ideas and inserts them into our consciousness. I started out reading fiction, I can remember many paradigm shifts that were instigated by fiction. I grew up in an area that was backward to many ideas and the new was seldom encountered, fiction gave me lots of new ideas to think about and increased my perception of what was going on around me.

[HydrogenBond]

Higher education is geared toward specialization, since industry needs specific cogs for the machine. This basic educational schema sets the landscape of the mind, relative to how we see and deal with social problems. Most social problems are not speciality problems, but overlap many areas of specialty and therefore need to be looked at from many angles, all at the same time.

If you try to look at a social problem from many angles, specialization will tend to slant assessment to one of the angles. What is then needed is a committee of specialists, where each is seeing their area clearly, but each are much less competent with other areas and therefore unable to grasp the compromise interfaces that allow solutions that integrate all the points of view. These fuzzy interfaces are filled in with personality or emotional appeal. This means politics becomes part of the solution.

Education should also be training generalists, where their education touches upon all the specialties areas associated with broad based problems, including the psychology of political special effects. Such people would be better trained to look at the many interfaces in a way that is less politically subjective. The generalist would knows enough to understand the good arguments of the many specialties and would have a better shot gluing together the interfaces.

Let me give an example. Say we go into a new forest that contains minerals, geology, flora and fauna. We only have so much money to deal with the instability but need to stabilize it. Each specialist knows their field and wants the funding. But the solution, for that price, is the glue in the no-mans land between them. This will have to be dealt with by another specialty group called politics, where conservative or liberal have their specialty template. Moderates are sort of like the generalists, but are not as entertaining or compelling because they don't always have a specialty template.


The next scenario adds generalists to the blend, people who knows enough about all the areas to see the concerns of each of the specialties. But they are not so knowledgeable to be biased where they feel most comfortable or would like all the sources directed to their area, since each specialty knows of hundreds of things that could use the funding and will try to lobby for as much pie as possible.

The generalist lives at the interfaces and would prefer funnel the resources into the glue interface, that will solve the overall problem. Without a lot of people to provide this objective glue, political entertainment works the glue, trying to spread out the resources using their own test proven specialty party templates, which involves the needs of reelection. There is nothing wrong with that, since that is the nature of this specialty. You actually need both the specialist and generalist, with all the specialist better at defining the entire problem, down to the details. The generalist works at the interface with this information.