Learning is a function of need

Children ask questions and chew on pieces of wood because they are awed. They need to grab hold of the immensity of life. They have to learn. Why is the sun bright? Why are trees so tall? Why do people live in houses? The subject matter could be anything. To a child, everything is striking. Everything is new. As an adult, it is useful to contemplate children’s questions: they point at the things we take for granted. As children get older, however, they come to believe that learning involves facts, that it occurs in a classroom, and that is realized only as a result of a long and determined effort. They cease to ask question. Learning becomes difficult. It is removed from everyday life. This is the main philosophical difference between adults and children: Children need to ask and explore to survive; adults believe they have already done it.

Philosophy as abstract puzzles

Much of what is considered philosophy should be considered a thinking game. It is the fun and exciting manipulation of abstract thoughts in the same way that pure mathematics is. Some people delight in finding the squares of consecutive primes, or memorizing the digits of Pi. Other people might relish thinking about the meaning of “Freedom” or whether the Universe really exists.

In essence this is thought without a subject; it has no bearing on the real world. It does not seek to explain or elucidate, it will not lead to any different actions or any changes in our lives. Discussions of this kind are for entertainment. They are puzzles or riddles. Philosophy that falls into this camp, though, is difficult to distinguish from the kind that appears to discuss issues in the world. The trick is to spot the difference.

Constructive Criticism

Constructive criticism to many people means rather than saying “this paper sucks” he should say “this paper can be improved in the following way.” Miraculously, weaknesses are transformed into growth areas and problems become challenges. This misses the whole point of constructive criticism, which is not meant to be criticism delivered nicely.

Constructive criticism is meant to construct, i.e. to help a person build from what they have. If a paper is handed to you by a colleague and you want to be constructive, then you should do the following. You should outline the parts that you don’t like about it, or that you think are weak. Then, you should come up with a few ideas of how those areas can be strengthened. Then you should offer both to your colleague.

To be valuable as criticism, the recipient has to be able to do something immediately with what you’ve told him. It has to be actionable to be valuable. If you are not thinking, how will he use these edits?, then no matter how nicely you spin what you say, your criticism will not be constructive.

Standardization

If 5 people were sitting around a table, each would see 4 other people. We can’t really say that each person sees the same thing, because none of the people sees himself. And, even though a sound in the middle of the table might be heard similarly by all, the coordinates of the sound are going to be different.

We get around this little trickery of perspective by creating standards. Maps, for example, make space absolute so that everyone can orient himself in the same way. But in order to create this standard, we have to abstract. And in this process we lose a dimension. A map, for example, is a two-dimensional representation of what we experience in three dimensions.

Terms of explanation

The human desire to explain is consistent throughout the ages. What changes is the terms we choose for making our explanations. For a variety of reasons, in contemporary American society, we have determined to explain things in terms of laws following mathematical rules. For some people this kind of explanation of why the planets move as they do, or how the Universe began makes perfect sense. Other people find it just as satisfying to explain these things in terms of God or gods. The science/math people can have difficulty with God as an explanation, because that particular belief is not testable. And those who turn to God for explanation, find it difficult to see how mathematics or science can explain everything.