FUNCTIONAL INTELLIGENCE
ARTICLES
Key Concept Usage
Functional Intelligence
Better Minds and Decisions
Cultural Mental Enhancement
Cultural Mental Impairment
Mental Tools
Mental Traps
Mental Clues
Mental Maps
Mental Houdini Moves
A Surprising Point Of View
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Functional Intelligence
Ordinal Approach to Evaluating Patterns of Thought.
Intro
My idea of 'Functional Intelligence' centers on the 'nurture'
aspect of intelligence and on epigenetics as it develops an influence on
genetic endowment. (the 'nature' aspect)
Why an ordinals approach? It was pointed out to me many years ago,
that to be taken seriously in the scientific community, the 'human sciences'
must have a foundation in mathematics. It was explained that methodology
development and numerical value assignment on human relationships were
difficult and rarely successful. It is not a human characteristic to be
mathematically predictable. It occurred to me that trying to force
a nonexistent characteristic to match scientific expectations was not
the best of scientific methodology. This inevitably results in distortions
and mistakes.
It later occurred to me that my interests, which are centered on the
psycho-epistemology of what works and what doesn't concerning thought
processes, especially creativity, needs little numerical information to be
quite valuable. The questions are; what works, what doesn't work, and why?
For instance one part of the study of thought processes is logic. If some
patterns of logic are valid it is useful to know what those patterns are. It
is important to know if you have identified all or most of them. Exactly how
many there are: not so much. Vin diagrams are more immediately functional for
application of important principles of thought that anyone can use effectively
than a more academic formula that the public will never encounter.
It is useful to know that premises are of critical importance and to understand
that truth is crucial for information to be dependable as premises. It is
the foundation of functional conceptual processes. Knowing and understanding
fallacies should be integrated into curriculum of every subject as the opportunity
arises. How they apply to all subjects is just one of endless opportunities to
offer instances of thinking in principle. Finding ways to assign numbers that
extend this insight may be butting heads with the law of diminishing returns and
distracting from what is actually important. What works or doesn't, why, and what
leads to improvement is the most important information. Specialists who choose
this as a strong interest and commitment as they mature will have a head start on
their career and understand that as they push the frontier they also need to
consider how to create functional uses for everyone else. Publishing should have
this as an important criterion for evaluation, not to exclude deeper professional
and academic works.
We are at a fairly early stage of understanding mental functionality
Young children might never learn to eat soup with a spoon if it were considered
necessary for them to understand algebra, XYZ coordinates, force vectors, fluid
dynamics, momentum, etc. and all of the relevant formulas and what to plug in where,
before they began to refine their skills. We are in much the same position in
learning to master our mental habits and processes for best results. We have put
little effort in developing and facilitating' best practices' in the use of our minds.
Logic is just one aspect of this vital ability and it is pretty much ignored in
cultures generally.
A mental tool box is needed for the use of everyone on the planet. There
will probably always be aggressive anti-social elements intent on degradation, corruption,
Greed, and power over others. Everyone else will be up on all of the old tricks and
anti-social success will be much harder in the future.
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