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Simplify

Siiiimplifyyyy, maaaannnn!

When you try to say things in really fancy and clever ways, you spend more time thinking about how to say the thing than what you're saying.

When you create huge elaborate frameworks on top of simple ideas (metaphysics?) you distance yourself from reality, and spend more time working with the cogs of your system than with the thing those cogs are supposed to ultimately represent. (Analogy: a Rube Goldberg device that goes through a huge elaborate process to pop a balloon, when you could've just popped it yourself.) This is another example of thinking more about the means than the end.

People have limited intelligence. The huger and crazier the vocabilary of your subject, the less you actually know about the reality of it -- you're taking up storage space in your brain with all these useless words which represent things, when you could actually spend it on more things!

Learning a huge framework restricts your thinking. It's not a surprise that experts in a field rarely make groundbreaking and revolutionary changes. Their thinking is so rigid and based in their framework, that they can't see what their field is really about anymore. The people who make the biggest breakthroughs in fields are usually people who know about many different fields, and with broader experience, can see the bigger picture. They have more experiences and images coded in their minds, along with the connections between them and their common patterns. They have more powerful tools because they spend less of their mind thinking about thinking, and more thinking about the world. [For more info, see Blinded by your Expertise.]

Simplify (last edited 2010-04-24 09:29:35 by localhost)