From Michael Hewitt-Gleeson’s new book ET 123: English Thinking, The Three Methods for publication in August 2012:

Chinese thinking is different to Western ET 1 thinking because they do not both share the same cultural evolution. Chinese thinking methods obviously did not evolve out of a medieval bellicose Roman church.

For example, a dominant strategy of ET 1 thinking is to be First. This seems logical to the Western mind because, after all, I-am-right-and-you-are-wrong.

But to the Chinese mind the preferred strategy is not to be First but to be Second. In the words of the father of modern China, Deng Xiaoping;

“Keep cool-headed to observe, be composed to make reactions, stand firmly, hide our capabilities and bide our time, never try to take the lead, and be able to accomplish something”.

There are some Western leaders who also understand the beneficial paradox of the 2 strategy and Jack Welch of GE was a good example. Except in the very few situations, like boxing or poker when it’s a zero sum game, 2 is often a far superior strategy to 1. Have a think about it.

There is much that Western business can learn from Deng Xiaopeng’s ideas.

My personal experience is that many Westerners, even in 2012, are still pre-Enlightenment ET 1 thinkers. While they may know about the Enlightenment and be able to describe some of its breakthroughs their default position is still ET 1 thinking.

On the other hand, while it is true that the Chinese clearly have much to do and many issues of their own to work through and to improve and further develop, my own observation is that they are largely post-Enlightenment ET 2 thinkers.

They deeply understand the ET 2 evolutionary approach compared with the West’s ET 1 revolutionary approach and this gives them a great advantage going forward into the many possible futures. It will be interesting to see where this takes them in the next few decades.

Political thought-leaders are few and far between. In the latter half of the Australian Federation there have been two outstanding political statesmen who have enjoyed a global reputation as thought-leaders for the quality of their thinking. On the one hand, Sir Robert Gordon Menzies, the 12th Prime Minister, and on the other, Paul John Keating, the 24th Prime Minister.

Sir Robert Menzies, wrote:

A man may be a tough, concentrated, successful money-maker and never contribute to his country anything more than a horrible example. A manager may be tough and practical, squeezing out, while the going is good, the last ounce of profit and dividend, and may leave behind him an exhausted industry and a legacy of industrial hatred. A tough manager may never look outside his own factory walls or be conscious of his partnership in a wider world.

I often wonder what strange cud such men sit chewing when their working days are over, and the accumulating riches of the mind have eluded them.

In his recently released book After Words: The Post-Prime Ministerial Speeches, PJ Keating writes the following in the Introduction of this instructive and fascinating collection of original ideas and thoughtful commentary:

Creativity is central to our progress and to all human endeavour. But we need tools to mine good intentions, inspirations, ones which await the creative spark, the source of all enlargement.

Music provides the clue: unlike other forms of art, music is not representational–unlike the outcome of sciences, it was never discoverable or awaiting discovery. A Mahler symphony did not exist before Mahler created it. ETA Hoffman, a contemporary of Beethoven’s, famously said: ‘music reveals to man an unknown realm, a world quite separate from the outer sensual world surrounding him, a world in which he leaves behind all feelings circumscribed by intellect in order to embrace the inexpressible’.

This is not to turn our back on reason. Or to argue that modernism, with all its secular progress through education, industrialisation, communications, transport and the centralised state, has not spectacularly endowed the world as no other movement before it.

But a void exists between the drum-roll of mechanisation with its cumulative power of science and the haphazard, explosive power of creativity and passion. Science is forever trying to undress nature while the artistic impulse is to be wrapped in it.

While these approaches are different–perhaps often diametrically opposite–they inform related strands of thinking in ways that promote energy and vision.

This is what I have found when these forces are contemplated in tandem. When passion and reason vie with each other, the emerging inspiration is invariably deeper and of an altogether higher form. One is able to knit between them, bringing into existence an overarching unity–a coherence–which fidelity to the individual strands cannot provide.

In the world I have lived in, the world of politics, political economy and internationalism, the literature exists in abundance. But what is far from abundant are the frameworks for the intuitive resolution of complex problems which require multi-dimensional solutions.

For me, it has always been from two sources: policy ambition in its own right and from imagination–the dreaming.

What’s ten times better than chocolate?

What’s better than a $10,000 financial windfall?

What’s much better than one of these

Today I’m in the State Library of Victoria working on my next book and I picked up a new addition to the library. It’s a fascinating book by Carlo Rovelli  who is Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Marseilles. His book is called The First Scientist: Anaximander and His Legacy.

Here’s a quote from the Introduction:

“Human civilizations have always believed that the world consisted of the Heaven above and the Earth below. Beneath the Earth, to keep it from falling there had to be more Earth; or perhaps an immense turtle on the back of an elephant, as in some Asian myths; or gigantic columns like those supporting the Earth according to the Bible. This vision of the world was shared by the Egyptians, the Chinese, the Mayans, the peoples of ancient India and sub-Saharan Africa, the Hebrews, Native Americans, the ancient Babylonian empires, and all other cultures of which we have evidence.

“All but one: the Greek world. Already in the classical era, the Greeks saw the Earth as a stone floating in space without falling. Beneath the Earth, there was neither more Earth without limit, nor turtles, nor columns, but rather the same sky that we see over our heads. How did the Greeks manage to understand so early that the Earth is suspended in the void and that the Heavens continue under our feet? Who understood this, and how?

“The man who made this enormous leap in understanding the world is the main character in this story: Anaximander, who lived twenty-six centuries ago in Miletus, a Greek city on the coast of what is now Turkey. This discovery alone would make Anaximander one of the intellectual giants of the ages. But Anaximander’s legacy is still greater. He paved the way for physics, geography, meteorology, and biology. Even more important than these contributions, he set in motion the process of rethinking our worldview–a search for knowledge based on the rejection of any obvious-seeming “certainty”, which is one of the main roots of scientific thinking”.

Wow! Sounds like Anaximander should also get credit for metacognition and for being the first to put forward the idea of cvs2bvs!

We sometimes get questions about how we moderate all the comments that are posted by SOT students. Currently there are over 40,000 comments posted on our school.

In SOT we are not trying to promote agreement or disagreement but thinking. It is not important whether students agree or disagree with the lessons. What is important is that they go away and think about them. That’s all.

So, which of your many thousands of comments do we post? Which ones do we leave out? Why don’t we reply to each comment? What is our policy for moderating comments?

For example, we received the following excellent question from one of the SOT students today:

From John: I appreciate your regular newsletters, Mr. Hewitt Gleason, and particularly the opportunity to comment on the various thinkers you feature in them. I am wondering, however, why so many of my own comments have been censored. It has come to seem that there is a pattern to this: You don’t like to post comments that disagree too strongly with your own views. If this is true, it seems to run counter to the most fundamental principles of your School of Thinking. I would be interested to hear what you have to say about this.

We replied to John:

Dear John,

Thanks for your message and question about how we moderate the comments for School of Thinking. There are a number of factors involved in how we currently do this.

First, SOT is a school not a chat room. Therefore, we don’t undertake to post every comment from every person. We are selective towards the aim of the lessons but are not censorious. This means we are biased towards comments that assist in the pedagogy of the lessons and biased against comments that distract from this aim. It doesn’t matter whether the comments agree or disagree with the lessons as long as they are relevant and supported by evidence.

Some of the SOT lessons, for some people, may be quite provocative but they are always supported by evidence that can be independently checked out by the students.

We tend to leave out comments that are just peeved, irritated or even angry about the lesson unless they make a point that is supported by evidence. When they do this we check out the evidence and if it’s valid we leave the comment in. When necessary we may change or correct our lesson to update to the new evidence. We do this many times.

We don’t promote debate or streams of abuse or endless I-am-right-you-are-wrong interchanges. These can be found elsewhere all over the internet.

We are also mindful of the amount of time students have for the lessons, which are already time-consumng,  so we are forced to be selective in the comments we post. We also make choices regarding quality, diversity, participation and fairness. Having said that we do have biases of our own, limited resources and don’t always do everything to please everybody all of the time. We also make mistakes.

In your case John, we have posted 66 of your comments to date and we do value the quality of your work and the thought you put into them. However, for example, we did not post your comment below on the Hawking article:

John: “The idea that there is no afterlife of any kind is one of those theories for which there is no possible evidence, nothing which could support the concept. If you want to believe this, you just have to accept it on faith, which makes it a curious notion for a scientist to put forward with such confidence!”

The reason this comment was not posted is because, as far as we can tell, the claim of an afterlife is not a scientific claim. Since this idea of the afterlife is not one that has been put forward by science, it is not a scientific theory, so it is not one that is required to be supported by scientific evidence. Evidence of an afterlife must be supplied by whomever puts forward the theory of an afterlife. In your comment if you could provide the evidence that supports the theory then your comment would be considered for inclusion. It is commonly accepted that the burden of evidence lies with the one who initiates the positive theory. All Hawking is doing is making that point. Should any individual like yourself, or a scientist or group claim the existence of an afterlife of some kind and support that claim with evidence that can be tested independently then I would expect Hawking to change his view as would many other thinkers.

Again, because of the lack of resources, a limitation of SOT (which must be frustrating to students) is the lack of commentary we can make on all their contributions. Many students wish they could get more personalised feedback on their comments. When we tried this in earlier years each comment on a comment would lead to a further comment which would need yet another comment and that sets off chains of time-consuming commentary which seemed equally frustrating so we have limited the system to what we currently have. Should Bill Gates or some other well-heeled and generous philanthropist provide resources for SOT one day then we could expand the pro bono services we provide to our students.

Thanks again for your interest and support John,

Best regards,

Michael

Last night the Minister for Manufacturing in Victoria, The Hon Richard Dalla-Riva, honoured Mr Ken Grenda AM, Founder and Chairman of the Grenda Group by placing him on the Honour Roll of the Hall of Fame of Victorian Manufacturers. The Minister said the honour was to recognise Mr Grenda’s “leadership, innovation and generosity”.

Ken Grenda with some of his employees.

Mr Grenda’s company Volgren is Australia’s leading bus manufacturer. Volgren has been a consulting client of the School of Thinking since 2009.

I first wrote about the idea of the cognos in NewSell (Boardroom Books NY) in 1984, as follows (Ch 9 – The Cognos: A New Universe) :

“Recently, in a television interview, the host asked me, “What is an important new area for scientific research?” I suggested the time may have come to define a new area for scientific theory and technical research, which I would call “cognitive physics”. Cognitive physicists would try to understand the nature of how humans try to understand. They would investigate how humans create the world in which they live; how humans create explanations for those things that they need explanations for; and what humans can do to improve on these methods. In addition, cognitive physicists would explore the cognos as quantum physicists now explore the cosmos: What is the cognos? What does the cognos do? Of what is the cognos constructed? How big is the cognos? And much more.”

Bryan Alvarez is a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, researching brain-based and cognitive mechanisms of a unique form of sensory-blending called synesthesia, which he also experiences.

‘English Thinking’ refers to the three dominant methods which are inside-the-square thinking and outside-the-square thinking plus apps for intelligence.

Is there more than one universe?

In this visually rich, action-packed talk, Columbia University Physicist Brian Greene shows how the unanswered questions of physics (starting with a big one: What caused the Big Bang?) have led to the theory that our own universe is just one of many in the “multiverse.”

Brian Greene is perhaps the best-known proponent of superstring theory, the idea that minuscule strands of energy vibrating in a higher dimensional space-time create every particle and force in the universe.