Monocausotaxophilia

An interesting restatement of H. L. Mencken's often restated:

"There is always an easy solution to every complex problem--neat, plausible, and wrong."

From Kim Stanley Robinson's "The Ministry for the Future":

Monocausotaxophilia: the love of single ideas that explain everything, one of humanity’s most common cognitive errors.

People are Mysteries, not Puzzles

This is the sort of thing that is obvious once you think about it, something we all know, but we tend to forget as problems crop up in our relationships with our fellow humans. More information about what isn’t working might not help, the proper way to deal with each other is still “conjecture and criticism”. This is why it is valuable to keep communications alive in all your relationships, coupled with the idea that you can question anything and you might just be able to build understanding. Not solve the mystery, just work towards being less wrong. 

Keep in mind this is about strengthening relationships between two or more people who have compatible goals and ideals. People who don’t have common goals, or even a common understanding of the world will need at a minimum a desire to understand each other.

People are not a means to an end, they are ends in themselves, this is the cause of the mystery. If all you needed to understand someone was to know everything about them, then they would have to be static puzzles with a finite number of pieces, instead of the dynamic mysteries we really are.

"Lucky isn't the best you can do, it is just what happens to you"

From this morning's "Family Circus" (which is weirdly restricted online so I will not be including an image).

Mother to Billy: "ALWAYS TRY YOUR BEST." (parents seem to talk in uppercase in the strip)
Billy's response is: "Why can't I just be lucky?"

Within seconds I had a new formulation for my motto: "Lucky is better than Smart" (with its vital addendum "As long as you can stay Lucky"). Now we have the more rhythmic version:

"Lucky isn't the best you can do, it is just what happens to you." 

I can see myself using this phrase with children, but it isn't the sort of sing-song one would use with another adult.

I have a few more versions I have been kicking around recently:

"Lucky is how I live my life, but I get paid to be smart"
-or-
"Hope for good luck, plan for bad"

One part of the search for a new phrasing is that the contrast between "Lucky" and "Smart" sounds like you are calling someone dumb, and there are situations where that is not going to inspire people to be smart. The other part is trying to minimize the confusion. I often get the impression people think I am advocating "lucky" over "smart" when in fact it is the opposite (thus the addendum).

:-Dan

What would you change in history?

I had one of those kid questions: "If you could change one thing in history what would it be?"

I didn't have an answer right away. As I was still thinking about it I was also listening to some debate about the nature of the bible. Then it occurred to me, if movable type was invented thousands of years earlier people would not be able to view any one book as so amazingly special. Also think of the improved literacy throughout history.