Maxi’s Toolkit Vol.6 - Systematic Intelligence
Or “Thinking Really Hard About the Box I’m Supposed to Be Thinking Outside”
Welcome to another instalment in Maxi’s Toolkit. In the toolkit I outline a number of epistemological techniques — or ‘epitechs’, tools for thinking — that will be of some interest to the discerning digital humanist in navigating a world of ever-increasing complexity.
In a better-, though more homogeneously, educated world where the average means to the expression of intelligence is (happily) increasing, the number of ways and instances in which intelligence can be misused is increasing in direct proportion. From the bottom to the top of the intellectual totem pole, opportunities for mistaken, indisciplined thinking are rife — and perhaps the most insidious attribute of inexact, corrupt, or misinformed thought is that such thought often goes unnoticed.
The toolkit is an effort to put more equipment at our disposal for identifying errors in thought — our own and others’ — and correcting them. Each piece devoted to a tool will usually be brief (unless the tool itself is highly complex), containing a definition, notes on application, and a short analysis.
You can find Vol.5 — on the MacGregorism, otherwise known as the foolish person’s favourite way of fooling themselves — here. Today’s volume concerns the notion of systematic thinking.
Systematic Intelligence
Def. — A predominating mode of thinking and reasoning which is inclined to closed, logical systems. Systematic intellects tend to model large concepts as interconnected systems of function. They conceive of a given object intellectually based on its relations to those things nearest to it. They tend to be exhilarated by efficiency and marginal optimisation. The internal logic, real or superimposed, of a multi-part whole is a thing of compelling beauty to them — indeed, they tend to orthodoxy relative to the systems they prefer, find elements that contravene their preferred systematic logic offensive, and find interpolation of unusual elements into their thought process difficult. They are often specialists, and watching the performance of a very high-level systematic intellect in full flow in their chosen discipline — imagine Bjarne Stroustrup assembling the logic of C++, or Magnus Carlsen coming up with yet another opening — is often a thrill. Because they tend to feel something of a discomfort with elements that contravene the workings of their system, and instinctively vie to create a worldview that is orderly, systematising thinkers are often more rational than empirical, taking an ‘idea’ and imposing it upon the world.
Antonym. — Abstract intelligence. The natural opposite of intellects that instinctively tend to impose order on what they survey are intellects comfortable with higher degrees of chaos and of contingent relations between things. They are more minded to interpolate radically and without need of intensive prior justification, and find this as pleasurable as a systematiser finds putting things in mutually agreeable order. Given their deeper level of comfort with chaotic pictures, abstract intellects are often more reliably empirical than systematisers. Instead of working towards understanding the world through ideas, they generally build knowledge piecemeal based on their observations of real world events, and wield a more trenchant scepticism. Often people can be seen to be markedly more abstract or more systematic in their intellectual modes, but many of the most remarkable people show strong traits of both types.
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