Several years ago some of my coworkers and their spouses played Cranium at a casual get together. One of the guys I worked with at the time, and someone who was generally very intelligent, had to answer a true/false question that asked roughly, "Do polar bears eat penguins?" He said they did not and provided an elaborate explanation. If I remember correctly, his reasoning was that penguins are protective of their young and travel in groups, so that they would be dangerous to hunt. While he was correct that polar bears do not hunt penguins his reasoning was faulty. The real reason is that polar bears live in the Northern Hemisphere and penguins live in the Southern Hemisphere. The phrase, "Penguins and polar bears," immediately became metaphor in my office for being right despite faulty logic, and I have come to love the concept.
One application of the concept is intellectual. Is a person who has a lot of the right answers, but who makes a lot of logical mistakes intelligent? What if that person is right only because he or she learns the right people to listen to even if he or she does not properly understand those intelligent peoples' logic? Is this person intelligent or not?
One application of the concept is ethical. For example, can a person with seemingly random ethical code be considered ethical for rightly considering murder wrong if he or she has no solid rationale for that belief? To further illustrate this, if a person decided that shooting people at close range was wrong because there is a chance that a splatter of blood will stain his or her clothes, is this person thinking ethically in that he or she believes that shooting someone at close range is wrong? Is the entire value of an ethical code the actual rules or is there significant value in the rationales behind the rules?
One application of the concept that I have posted on before is spiritual. If someone has faith in what is true for all of the wrong reasons is it true faith? As an extension of this question, is it inevitable that the person's false reasoning will undo his or her faith?
There are other applications as well, but they all boil down to the value of the work to get the answer versus the accuracy of the answer. I value the work more, but maybe that is so I can justify being wrong on occasion.
There are other applications as well, but they all boil down to the value of the work to get the answer versus the accuracy of the answer. I value the work more, but maybe that is so I can justify being wrong on occasion.
1 comment:
This is a great topic. I would say that the people you refer to are NOT intelligent, ethical, etc... they're just lucky. A CEO who surrounds himself with good counsel may end up making the right decisions, but only by proxy. It doesn't make him a good CEO... only perhaps a good judge of character. And his luck may not last, because even good consultants sometimes give bad advice.
To me, intelligence, ethics, etc, must be sustainable to be valid. A fish jumping into your boat does not make you a good angler, because it's not likely to happen again. Homer Simpson pushing the right button at the right time does not make him a good nuclear technician (even though he did it twice in a row,) because his solution is limited to one very specific type of problem.
At the risk of writing too much, I'll say one more thing. I may decide not to shoot somebody because I don't want to waste a bullet. But that won't keep me from strangling them, or stabbing them, etc. The faulty circumstantial logic that led me to the right answer the first time, will not be so helpful the second time. Therefore, concepts such as "ethics" or "intelligence" are never invoked.
Post a Comment