Thinking

I remember early in my blogging that I wrote some god awful stuff, and many will say I still do (there, saved you the bother of adding a comment). But my motivation for starting was to help improve my writing skills and to help me slow down and structure my thoughts in ways that other people could understand. That is not to say that they are ground breaking thoughts but simply that I regularly failed to communicate even simple ideas to people. I still do fail in this way and the fault is all mine.

But in the same way that my early scrawling on ethics were amateurish and poorly structured (as I found out when I went to study it properly) my thoughts on thinking are probably the same when compared to formal psychology.

Over the last few weeks I have been lucky enough to get onto a project that could make a real difference. But the project is complex and has significant hurdles to overcome. What is nagging at me is that some of the people on the project have not stopped to think through what it is they are doing or why. They clearly believe that the vision they have is a good one but seem unable or unwilling to think through the what the project is trying to achieve. Action certainly do speak louder than words but action without thought is surely going to lead to change but possibly not improvement.

The reason I bring this up now is because I noted a parallel at a social event I was at. I rarely discuss religion with people for two reasons. The first is that it is an intensely private matter, the second is that many of the people who are religious have not thought through their beliefs.

That is not to say that there is or is not a god, or that religion is good or bad (although I do have my own views on the matter) but simply that people seem unwilling to think these things through. The few times I have been pressed to discuss religion with a few people who are (I normally refuse and get pushed to discuss) it nearly always turns out the other person gets offended. Not because I am rude or my views offensive, just that they have probably not rationalized their beliefs and when they do they run into difficulties. By this I mean that even the concept of unifying rational thought vs belief is hard even before you worry about what those beliefs might be.

The same reaction is happening on the project. They have their beliefs but have a blind spot to thinking about what they believe in. Because its hard. Yes we could think about stuff forever and never start (true of many projects and ideas) but that is not what I am proposing. I am saying that we need to get over the blind spot. People need to be more accepting of thinking through what is being done. Its like science. If we see that thinking something through and finding the idea is poor as a failure then we will never start. Success if science is about truth. It is as valuable to prove something as it is to disprove it. There is no such thing as a failed experiment.