In our exploding world of cybermedia with peer2peer messaging at the speed of light, I believe that the global epidemic spread of lies may be one of the most serious challenges facing long-term human survival.

I believe this challenge needs to be taken very seriously and could be considered to be of a threat level similar to that of Avian or Bird Flu. Many scientists share this view.

As an antidote, I am now putting forward a new thinking methodology to help meet this challenge.

To follow on from the previous SOT thinking tools, thinking hats and brain software, this new tool for thinking is called: greyscale thinking: how to sort a truth from a lie.

What Makes A Great Teacher?

I was recently contacted by a young man in London who is a teacher/coach and personal trainer/consultant. He is in the early stages of his career and he sought my advice. He asked me this question: What makes a great teacher? That is a very good question. It’s exactly the question he should be asking as he embarks on this vocation.

My response to him was this: While there are many things that can make a teacher a much better one there is one non-negotiable, one litmus test, which defines a great teacher. This test is about how the teacher’s performance stacks up to the BIG question: IS IT TRUE?

Is It True?

Is what the teacher is teaching a TRUTH or a LIE? The answer to this question is what sorts out the frauds from the professors. If this test is passed then the teacher can be a great teacher if not then the teacher will always be a failure … in my view.

Making Claims

Anyone can make a claim. All sorts of claims are made in business, in science, in religion, in families, in governments, in education, in politics, in the media. But is it a true claim? Or, is the claim a lie? How do we know? Does it even matter?

Yes. It does matter whether a claim is a truth or a lie. For example, many people believe things which are dangerous lies. These lies may have been protected from thinking for hundreds of years. These lies all have consequences which may range from deception to dementia to death.

Like a brainvirus, these lies can infect the brains of very young children. This is happening right now to millions of children as you read this article. I do believe that the global epidemic spread of lies may one of the most serious challenges facing long-term human survival.

ANTIDOTE: If you feel this is important (please don’t spam lists of people) but send this article on to selected friends, colleagues and family who may find it useful.

Greyscale Thinking

To help meet this challenge I am introducing the idea of greyscale thinking (US grayscale). Greyscale thinking is simple, fast and scientific. Anyone, anywhere and anytime can use greyscale thinking to help sort out a truth from a lie.

Any child can learn to use it. Greyscale thinking can be taught to kids by parents and by teachers. Any employee can learn to use it. Greyscale thinking can be taught to employees by managers and business leaders.

The idea of greyscale thinking is: claim divided by questions equals truth or lie. This idea can be expressed as the formula c÷q=t>l.

This means that once a ‘claim’ is made it can then be subjected to ‘questioning’. Questioning reveals whether the claim is closer to being either a ‘truth’ or a ‘lie’.

Six True Questions

SIX TRUE QUESTIONS: The methodology of greyscale thinking is the cognitive skill or habit of putting a CLAIM to the SIX TRUE QUESTIONS: What and Where and When and Why and How and Who – (Click here for more on the questions).

The answers to each of the 6 questions moves the CLAIM to and fro along the greyscale continuum: | a TRUTH – w? w? w? w? h? w? – a LIE |

______________________________________________________________________________________________

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The answers to each of the 6 questions indicate, on the balance of the evidence, whether the CLAIM is more likely to be a TRUTH or more likely to be a LIE.

MAIN POINT: You will have noticed we are saying “a truth” rather than “The Truth”. Searching for truth is a journey and not a destination. We are more concerned with being right than being righteous. No individual brain can ever contain perfect knowledge of all possible facts. No brain can ever know the contents of the other people’s brains who are also involved in the situation. No brain can ever be have ownership of The Truth. And, that’s the point.

The rule of science is that you can have a good idea today, a better idea tomorrow, and the best idea … never! Why? Because there are always more facts to uncover–more opinions, more priorities, more options, more consequences, more positives, more negatives, more objectives, more measurements, and more experiments that can be tested. History has shown this to be a truth.

It is the deliberate effort one makes to move closer to a truth and to move further away from a lie that produces all the benefits of greyscale thinking.

No claim should ever be protected from questioning

Any claim that has ever been made in all of history and any claim that ever will be made can be illuminated, examined, investigated and accepted or rejected using the 6 true questions of greyscale thinking: What and Where and When and Why and How and Who – (Click here for more on the questions).

Immerse yourself in a seamless beautiful environment.

WorldWide Telescope (WWT) enables your computer to function as a virtual telescope, bringing together imagery from the best ground and space-based telescopes in the world.

Experience narrated guided tours from astronomers and educators featuring interesting places in the sky.

I’m finally joining my friends on Facebook.

It’s taken me so long I feel as though I must be the last person in the world to attend to Facebook.

But, do come along and join me there.

I’m glad to be on Facebook now. I checked it out in 2008, along with Twitter and Second Life and aSW and Wikipedia, and have been exploring ways I can do something interesting.

I put School of Thinking on the www in 1995 when it became one of the first 10,000 sites and there are billions now. Now I think that there’s probably never been a better time to have some fun with Facebook. There are a number of my pet projects and interests that I’m planning to share with my friends in this exciting environment.

Physorg.com:
Cambridge-based researchers provide new evidence that the human brain lives “on the edge of chaos”, at a critical transition point between randomness and order. The study, published March 20 in the open-access journal PLoS Computational Biology, provides experimental data on an idea previously fraught with theoretical speculation.

Self-organized criticality (where systems spontaneously organize themselves to operate at a critical point between order and randomness), can emerge from complex interactions in many different physical systems, including avalanches, forest fires, earthquakes, and heartbeat rhythms.

According to this study, conducted by a team from the University of Cambridge, the Medical Research Council Cognition & Brain Sciences Unit, and the GlaxoSmithKline Clinical Unit Cambridge, the dynamics of human brain networks have something important in common with some superficially very different systems in nature. Computational networks showing these characteristics have also been shown to have optimal memory (data storage) and information-processing capacity. In particular, critical systems are able to respond very rapidly and extensively to minor changes in their inputs.

••• Click through to the original article …

TED Talk:
Researcher Hans Rosling uses his cool data tools to show how countries are pulling themselves out of poverty.

He demos Dollar Street, comparing households of varying income levels worldwide. Then he does something really amazing.

••NOTE: This is the presentation Tim Berners-Lee is referring to in his TED talk in the adjacent post.

•••Click through to watch this TED Talk …

TED Talk:
20 years ago, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web.

For his next project, he’s building a web for open, linked data that could do for numbers what the Web did for words, pictures, video: unlock our data and reframe the way we use it together.

•••Click through to watch his TED talk…

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the world wide web, in his address to the British Parliament today warned MPs and peers that they should not allow third parties, including commercial companies, to snoop on people’s internet browsing.

“We use the internet without a thought that a third party would know what we have just clicked on,” Berners-Lee said.

“Yet the URLs [webpages] people use reveal a huge amount about their lives, loves, hates and fears. This is extremely sensitive information.

Today is the WORLD WIDE WEB’s 20th birthday. It’s been an amazing journey in only 20 years.

The internet has been around in various forms for 50 years but WWW was invented by a CERN scientist, Tim Berners-Lee, in 1989. Now Sir Timothy, he speaks out against collection of users’ data by commercial companies

“People use the web in a crisis, when wondering whether they have a sexually transmitted disease, or cancer, when wondering if they are homosexual and whether to talk about it … to discuss political views.”

He said people “use the internet to inform ourselves as voters in a democracy”, adding: “We use the internet to decide what is true and what is not.

“We use the internet for healthcare and social interaction.”

He said people would consider using the web in a crisis in a different light if they knew they were being monitored and the data would be shared with a third party such as an advertising company.

•• Click through to the original article here …

The WWII era with its postwar capitalist bubble is now extinct.

Capitalism is dead!
The 100-year-old edifice of capitalism is cracked. It finally began its death throes in the last quarter of 2008 with the great lurching and cascading collapse of the global tower of capital.

The whirling, howling, cacophonous wilderness of the global marketplace has taken its inevitable toll on the capitalism system–with its ferocious fads, toxic wastes, and vicious moods, its callous explosions and cruel darwinian extinctions the global marketplace has put capricious end to the blind and righteous rivalry between spoiled and cosseted CEOs in clueless medieval double-entry boardrooms.

The CEO Delusion
In Richard Dawkins book, THE GOD DELUSION, he shows how the ancient belief that there are omnipotent GODs who are on-duty 24/7 and are busily and conscientiously intervening in worldly affairs is a medieval pre-scientific belief and is very likely to be also a mental delusion.

I have observed, for the past 40 years, that the same may apply to CEOs.

The capitalist belief that CEOs can be relied on to ensure the survival and growth of the enterprise is also a delusion and one that is not supported by the evidence (Welch, Jobs and Murdoch are the kind of exceptions that prove the point). This belief has also proven to be a very costly leap of faith for shareholders, employees and customers alike.

Cost of CEOs
When you consider the global cost to shareholders of CEOs over the recent era, the ROI has been a dramatic disappointment of Shakespearean proportions.

Intellectual Capitalism – IC
I have written about my belief in Software For Your Brain that we need to go beyond capitalism to intellectual capitalism where the brainpower of the stakeholders–shareholders, employees and customers–is used to lead the enterprise.

Sack the CEOs and harness the enterprise brainpower to grow the business!

Shareholders around the world have seen extravagant expenditures of their wealth squandered by loitering CEOs with their arm-waving and talmudic reading of balance-sheets and P&Ls, like the obsessive pre-scientific study of entrails, when less than one CEO in a hundred could give an intelligent, educated account of what strategy it would take for their business to survive in the fast-changing, darwinian environment of the next decade.

Like the Theory of Communism, which lasted 70 years before it became obsolete, The Theory of Capitalism is dead. Bereft. Discredited. Empty. Depressed.

2008 began the global assault on capital which has so overwhelmed the market that we find ourselves in an economic war involving every national economy in both hemispheres. A war which I’ve called WWIII: The Great War on Capital of 2008.

“Economic Pearl Harbour”
Even the guru of capitalists, Warren Buffett, admits the US economy has “fallen off a cliff”, describing the crisis as “an economic Pearl Harbour”, as concerns spread about the US administration’s fitful attempts to halt the collapse of the US banking sector.

The leading investor, an informal adviser to President Barack Obama, whose financial diagnoses are widely respected — although he conceded he failed to predict the severity of the crisis — said the economy had come “close to the worst case” imagined, and that recovery would be slow.

Mr Buffett, one of the wealthiest capitalists in the world, said the entire banking sector had been hours from collapse in September, and would have imploded without the $US700billion ($1trillion) Wall Street emergency bailout.

••Click through to original article…

(This is an SOT preview. This article will be published in the April edition of Australian Anthill magazine).

… Also check out this Catalyst video … “Risky Business” …

Michael will be presenting 2 different masterclasses (2 hours each) at Brisbane’s famous Ideas Festival at the end of this month.

The tickets are $40 and can bookings can be made here at the Ideas Festival site.

Sat 28 Mar 09 2:30pm to 4.30pm.
#1 Masterclass: Creative thinking and the universal brain software cvs2bvs

Sun 29 Mar 09 10:00am to 12 noon.
#2 Masterclass: How to Think Differently

VATICAN CITY: Islam has surpassed Roman Catholicism as the world’s largest religion says the Vatican.

“For the first time in history, we are no longer at the top: Muslims have overtaken us,” Monsignor Vittorio Formenti said in an interview with the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano.

He said that Catholics accounted for 17.4 percent of the world population — a stable percentage — while Muslims were at 19.2 percent.

Click through to International Herald Tribune for more …