Category Archives: Rational

A Master of Us All

Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater.Albert Einstein

This garden universe vibrates complete,
Some, we get a sound so sweet.
Vibrations, reach on up to become light,
And then through gamma, out of sight.
Between the eyes and ears there lie,
The sounds of color and the light of a sigh.
And to hear the sun, what a thing to believe,
But it’s all around if we could but perceive.
To know ultra-violet, infra-red, and x-rays,
Beauty to find in so many ways.

Two notes of the chord, that’s our poor scope,
And to reach the chord is our life’s hope.
And to name the chord is important to some,
So they give it a word, and the word is OM.
Graeme Edge, Moody Blues

euler_mosaic

There have been many times I have heard an individual say something to the effect: I hate (don’t like, don’t do) “math.”  Shame on our ignorant “math” educational system, but now with the Khan Academy there is no excuse for such a lament from our kids.

I always enjoyed “math” — hey, I am a nerd from the sixties.  But I “hit a wall” in mathematics in the second-year of college. And even modern “mathematicians” have to “specialize” because the “difficulties” of “mathematics”. Practically all believe that mathematics, even for the “mathematicians,” is too vast and large to now to “see” the whole elephant (so to speak).

In mathematics you don’t understand things. You just get used to them.
— John Von Neumann

Someday information science [in some form of Formatics] will encompass all of math and science, but until then:

The religion of Mathematics is a Master of Us All.

Except when in the 1700’s,
Continue reading A Master of Us All

Innovating Innovation

He wasn’t talented enough, he thought.

To join Disney Animation Studios as an animator.

So he became a scientist

A Computer Scientist.

He has had a hand in innovating with a team, in a whole new way.

Necessity is the mother of invention.

Now he is the President of Disney Animation Studios… and Pixar Animation Studios … and Disney Toons Studios.

Computer Science, Ed Catmull, and Innovation has come a long way baby…

And you haven’t seen nothing yet.

Continue reading Innovating Innovation

Big Think

The guy makes sense.

“It is very REASONED with compassion too.”  Some might say he is Rational in his thinking.

And people are slowly, but surely realizing this.

Charlie Munger for one.  Even John Stewart has caught on. 😉  And me too, even though I thought his fantastic idea about fast and slow ideas was the only article I would read of his.

openquoteThere are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.closedquote — Hannah Arendt

tortoise-hare

“And one of the things they showed us was how to really focus on making it swift and usable. We made a two-minute surgery checklist; it had just 19 items. Some of them were just make sure you don’t forget dumb stuff: make sure you gave antibiotics, make sure you have blood ready for a high-blood-loss case. And then there were other interesting parts: make sure everybody in the room has been introduced by name and role; make sure the surgeon actually explained to the team what their goals for the operation are; make sure the anesthesiologist and nurses had a chance to explain their plans for the operation. We put that checklist in eight hospitals around the world, ranging from rural Tanzania to Toronto and Seattle, and every single hospital we put it in had a double-digit reduction in complications. The average reduction in death was 46 percent. That made me realize there was something much deeper and more important going on here about this set of problems we’re grappling with in the modern world.

You see, his main ideas are Slow Ideas.  Complex ideas: hard to take hold in the general public zeitgeist.

Continue reading Big Think

Wandering Towards Enlightenment, revisited.

I would have to say she has done it.

She is definitely Enlightened, oh well, the rest of the world is still wandering, wandering, wandering towards Enlightenment.

Yes, she is enlightened.  But still most people in the world are comfortable in the previous centuries: hopefully most looking forward, however, there are plenty of people, few in the seventh century, but the rest that dwell in the twentieth century and looking backwards. Even in some in the most “seemly advanced” universities in the world, such as Brandeis University, have enough individuals with loud voices who are comfortable in previous centuries.  I am sure Justice Brandeis would be turning in his grave.

The Original: Wandering towards Enlightenmentenlightenment

 

 

A Mistake Was Made

Oops — by me

Well, and there were mistakes made, but not by me 😉

The remarkable thing is understanding never stays put. It is important always to get a new understanding … … … understanding can be improved
Saunders MacLane

She was misunderstood by many people: for she discarded the traditional political philosophy’s conceptual schema.

Hannah Arendt employed the famous phrase about “banality of evil” in her book about the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Now almost a cliché, it is easy to forget the storm it once generated. As a former victim of Nazi persecution in Germany who had later worked for the Zionist cause in Palestine, many Jewish writers had expected Arendt’s book on the trial to reinforce their own conviction that Nazism represented a radically new type of evil. To her own surprise, Arendt was unable to oblige.

Conventionally Eichmann was viewed as a “evil monster”.  However, after Arendt studied Eichmann during the trial and after, she did not see a demonic force but a mediocre personality, that she concluded, who inhabited a thought world of platitudes. A banal obsession with process and following orders, not some special, radical type of evil, had enabled him to commit crimes on a massive scale. Arendt’s critics had misunderstood her if they ever thought that her Zionist past meant she was going to play the part of the “good Jew” in approaching Eichmann’s crimes.

Nothing is more obstinate than a fashionable consensus.  — Margaret Thatcher

Some of her critics did not read much or any of her writings.  Some of them probably based their criticisms of Arendt on what their own cohort had said.

Based on their personal experiences with totalitarian regimes in their youth, Hannah Arendt and Ayn Rand were two individuals who pointed out the hypocrisy of the established Western World intellectuals.  They spoke truth to power, and were criticized, ignored, or ostracized because of it.

stalin-hitlerUnfortunately my blog about Hannah and Ayn had a flaw it it.

Watch what they say and do, if you can — don’t rely on second and third sources.

I knew a great deal about Ayn Rand, having read about and following her for decades, and reading a couple of her books since I was a kid.  I had studied Arendt to a degree, but not enough.  I made a mistake.  NO, my mistake was not on what their ideas were: Hannah and Ayn were very articulate, and had well formulated their prose.  Those who don’t have their political, economic, and cultural religion blinding them can easily understand their point of view and their message.

My mistake was of a differing kind.  I was mistaken in what Hannah Arendt’s personality type was.  I had hypothesized that Hannah Arendt was a Mastermind Rational, same as Ayn, [Contending Rational (INTJ)], but Hannah Arendt not a Mastermind (as I later discovered, after my blog was published), rather, based on listening to an extended interview (in German, with subtitles) was it was clear to me that she was Architect Rational [Accomodating Rational (INTP)].

Architect Rationals need not be thought of as only interested in drawing blueprints for buildings or roads or bridges. They are the master designers of all kinds of theoretical systems, including school curricula, corporate strategies, and new technologies. For Architects, the world exists primarily to be analyzed, understood, explained – and re-designed. External reality in itself is unimportant, little more than raw material to be organized into structural models. What is important for Architects is that they grasp fundamental principles and natural laws, and that their designs are elegant, that is, efficient and coherent. [Please Understand Me II]

Mastermind Rationals do not feel bound by established rules and procedures, and traditional authority does not impress them, nor do slogans or catchwords. Only ideas that make sense to them are adopted; those that don’t, aren’t, no matter who thought of them. Remember, their aim is always maximum efficiency. Problem-solving is highly stimulating to Masterminds, who love responding to tangled systems that require careful sorting out. Ordinarily, they verbalize the positive and avoid comments of a negative nature; they are more interested in moving an organization forward than dwelling on mistakes of the past. [Please Understand Me II]

Most Rationals are reasonable human beings as long as they don’t have to suffer fools.  This attitude made them appear as both an arrogant human and a humble human at the same time.  Masterminds are not concerned with ideas, for their own sake, as much as the Architects, but rather are interested in ideas for their use and utility in reality. Generally, the Masterminds are looking for interesting answers and Architects are looking for interesting questions.  Architects must understand their field of study, use of those ideas by others and reality is secondary.

“That’s mere reality.”
David Keirsey

Both Rationals are arrogant, Architects are the most arrogant in the natural way: all you have to do is ask them ;-).

Hannah Arendt’s prime directive to herself was to “understand.”

Wir mussen wissen, wir werden wissen.
(We must know, we will know)
David Hilbert

“Never accept an idea as long as you yourself are not satisfied with its consistency and the logical structure on which the concepts are based. Study the masters. These are the people who have made significant contributions to the subject. Lesser authorities cleverly bypass the difficult points.”
Satyendranth Bose

openquoteThere are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.closedquote — Hannah Arendt

Other Architect Rationals include: James MadisonSrinivasa RamanujanEmmy NoetherPaul DiracRobert RosenDavid KeirseyAlbert EinsteinLonnie AthensDavid Bohm

Rational Maverick

In Memoriam

It is the first anniversary of my father’s death.

david_keirsey_in_library
Professor David West Keirsey
(August 31, 1921 – July 30, 2013)

I always imagined that Paradise will be some kind of library — Luis Jorge Borges

I was born into even a better paradise.  My father was wordmeister (a studier of words) and a personologist (a studier of persons), and a book reader: A Rational Maverick.  And I was just like him — well sorta’.  He was born in the 20’s and I was born in the 50’s.  Two ages of innocence:  he after WWI and me after WWII.

He had different upbringing than me, but we were of the same Temperament (Rational), Role (Engineer) and Type (Architect).  A kind of a natural science and engineering type of person: a nerd, in modern argot. I naturally graviated towards being a scholar in quantitative reasoning and the use of words, because of his and my mother’s library of life. He had naturally became a scholar in qualitative reasoning and the use of words.

I began reading when I was seven. Read (most of) a twelve-volume set of books my parents bought, Journeys through Bookland. Read countless novels thereafter, day in and day out. I educated myself by reading books. Starting at age nine my family went to the library once a week, I checking out two or three novels which I would read during the week. Then, when I was sixteen, I read my father’s copy of Will Durant’s The Story of Philosophy. I read it over and over again, now and then re-reading his account of some of the philosophers. (Long afterwards I read his magnificent eleven volumes—The Story of Civilization. I also have read his The Lessons of History many times, this being his brilliant summary of the eleven volumes.)

I mention Durant’s book The Story of Philosophy because it was a turning point in my life, I to become a scholar as did Durant, thereafter reading the philosophers and logicians — anthropologists, biologists, ethologists, ethnologists, psychologists, sociologists, and, most important, the etymologists, all of the latter—Ernest Klein, Eric Partridge, Perry Pepper, and Julius Pokorny—of interest to me now as then. [Turning Points, David West Keirsey, unpublished]

When I started to discuss (and soon to debate) things with my father, we discussed logic and the use of words.  I had become a reader too, rather naive and ignorant as children are, however.  Luckily, my father had learned what it meant to learn.

The second turning point occurred when there came a sudden, drastic, and permanent change in my life. In May 1942 I was drafted. I quit school immediately and joined the Navy to become a fighter pilot. Why fighter pilot? Because as a child I had read every book I could find about the fighter pilots of the first world war, finally resorting to 5 cent pulp books, many well written (I have no idea why these planes and their pilots fascinated me). So when called to war I could not imagine my engaging in any other kind of warfare. Not that I wished to go to war. Far from it ─ I wished to pursue, not the enemy, but college studies. Even so, I found flight training fascinating but challenging and hazardous, many cadets failing to pass the frequent tests at each stage of training. Incidentally, it was during flight training that I learned the crucial difference between education and training. An educated person has acquired knowledge; a trained person has acquired skill. An effective person has acquired both. [Turning Points]

He was able to go to college on the GI bill, renew his scholarship, and to continue “action” research (as he called it) when the War ended.

In January 1946 back to college. We lived in my wife’s parents’ home in Costa Mesa until the summer, at which time we moved to Claremont, this because my wife’s parents let us live in their (refurbished) garage. Indeed, we chose Pomona College in Claremont, not for its many merits, but solely because we had a place to live in. What a stroke of luck! Claremont was a college town housing no less than seven colleges, each unique and well known, one of them being Claremont Graduate University, my place of study for thirteen years, I resuming my interrupted life as a scholar.

 …

I attended Claremont Graduate University—the fourth turning point in my life.

Claremont Graduate University had a clinic in which I practiced counseling troubled persons for four years.

Pursuant to writing my masters thesis I studied ten persons said to have high blood pressure without physical disease or defect, then called “essential hypertension.” Met with each person many times for many months, using personality inventories and what was then called ‘associative anamnesis’ in which they told me the story of their lives while I asked them to go into more detail about their more disturbing experiences, taking copious notes all the while. No one had ever paid such rapt attention to them and tried so hard to understand how these experiences affected them, or accepted everything they said without criticism. It was on the basis of this method of interviewing that Carl Rogers built his notorious career, he giving the method names such as ‘non-directive counseling’, ‘reflective listening’, and ‘active listening’. Practicing the method early on and thenceforth gave direction to my career as a counselor of both troubled and troublesome children and their parents and teachers, and as a trainer of those who would practice such counseling, and finally as a writer on personality, counseling, and madness.

I found all ten persons to have the same personality, what I would much later call the Guardian. It was this long study of persons’ lives that set me on my lifelong career course. Thus I became a person watcher. Wrote Personality in Essential Hypertension for my MA degree. [Turning Points]

My father would go on to be a clinical school psychologist for the next 20 years, collecting and inventing corrective intervention techniques and developing Temperament Theory.  We would discuss experiences and his ideas, and many of the ideas that he got from the hundreds of books in his growing library.  Then there was:

The Book

Bates and I wrote three books, one of them titled Please Understand Me, the contents taken from transcriptions of my lectures and conversations with Bates, she the scrivener. When Bates died I gave the manuscript to her sister to have it published. Her sister did nothing about it for a whole year, so I then retrieved and rewrote the manuscript entirely and, finding no publisher, published it myself in 1978—a turning point.

The book had a strange history. It started as sixteen separate “portraits of temperament”, these being expansions of the sixteen “psychological types” of Isabel Myers, a novelist who was devoted to Carl Jung’s ideas on personality. Had the college book store print each portrait separately on typing paper, sixteen sheets clipped together, put in a manila folder and sold in the college book store. Sold five thousand copies the first year (1975). When Please Understand Me was written, the sixteen portraits were in its appendix, probably the reason the book still sells thirty or so years later and has been translated into a dozen foreign languages. [Turning Points]

He would go on the write or contribute to more books: Portraits of Temperament, Presidential Temperament, Please Understand Me II, and Personology.

He never completed Dark Escape, his magnum opus on Madness, a manuscript that he worked on and off for 60 years.  Some day I would like to publish it or a subset in some form.  Some of the work is at his blog site that I created for him,  http://professorkeirsey.wordpress.com

I continue to wander in the library of life, sometimes reading or rereading books that my father wrote or read: with thought in new regions that my father never could go to, but wondered about.

Architecting History

James Madison

Thomas Jefferson, [Architect Rational,] served two terms as President, and like Washington before him decided that two terms of its “splendid misery” were quite enough for any man. He was eager to return to a life of study and to have his old friend, the gentle and scholarly James Madison, [Architect Rational,] succeed him in the White House. There was little opposition to his choice and “Little Jemmy” Madison, who stood about five feet, five inches tall and weighed in the neighborhood of 100 pounds, won the presidential election of 1808 handily, and was sworn into office in early 1809. Though he was pleased to have become President, Madison intensely disliked the ceremony and celebration that attended his inauguration. He was quick to announce to a friend his reaction to the gala inaugural ball: he would rather be in bed.

Another quiet, privacy-loving Engineer Rational had taken the helm of the ship of state. [Presidential Temperament]

Continue reading Architecting History

A New Page

of History.

You’re Hired. You’re Fired.  That’s business.

You’re Fired!  It was Donald Trump‘s phrase, he tried to trademark it.  But it is the old, tried, and true random way: Neo-Darwinism (but do not blame Darwin for he understood his views better than that).

No, how about Margulian Darwinism?

Because, Larry’s plan is different — fundamentally different. His choice.

You’re Hired.

A New Page of History

You’re hired, and your salary is a one time gift, of ~30 billion dollars give or take some billions, no strings attached, but Metaperson tethered.

Are we on the SAME PAGE? Not likely.

Larry Page
Continue reading A New Page

They Couldn’t Have Been Friends

They were too much alike. They were contenders.  Strategic Contenders.   Not contending with each other.  Their ideas were similar, and they questioned the “authorities”: where ever or whom ever, they may be. Their enemies were the same: mediocrity — the banal, the unquestioning conformity.  For they were exceptional.

Brilliant. Sui generis.

stalin-hitler

That is the problem. They couldn’t have been friends. Even though both were combating the elite Intellectual Mob Totalitarians.

And the herd majority.

They had seen it with their own eyes: the systems that demanded conformity: Nazi Germany and Soviet Union.

And there were those who fully embraced that conformity and propagated it, without thinking, because it is to their short-term advantage to travel with the herd.

Nothing is more obstinate than a fashionable consensus.
— Margaret Thatcher

They both had fled to America as emigrants. They found those in the elite establishment in their new country would not like or ignored of much of what they had to say — at least, in the beginning… Continue reading They Couldn’t Have Been Friends

Lean In Slowly

BUT SURELY.

“You don’t choose your passion, your passion chooses you.”
— Jeff Bezos

Passion requires Temperament
— David M Keirsey

He said to her: “If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, you don’t ask what seat. You just get on.”

When companies grow quickly, there are more things to do than there are people to do them. When companies grow more slowly or stop growing, there is less to do and too many people to be doing them. Politics and stagnation set in, and everyone falters. 

When debating her next career move, Sheryl Sandberg made a spreadsheet comparing the roles and responsibilities that would come with each position and company she was considering. Google was on her list (a relatively unknown company in 2001), and ranked lower than all of the other options in categories like security, salary and responsibilities, but when Sandberg presented her dilemma to Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO at the time, he managed to change her mind with this simple piece of advice:

“[Eric] covered my spreadsheet with his hand and told me not to be an idiot (also a great piece of advice). Then he explained that only one criterion mattered when picking a job—fast growth. When companies grow quickly, there are more things to do than there are people to do them. When companies grow more slowly or stop growing, there is less to do and too many people to be doing them. Politics and stagnation set in, and everyone falters. He told me, “If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, you don’t ask what seat. You just get on.”

Sandberg made up her mind that instant and joined Google, which as we all know was one of the fastest flying rocket ships ever created, to date.

Continue reading Lean In Slowly