Maxi's Toolkit Vol.9: The Lily Pad Presumption

Or "Why You're All Wrong"

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 there are more means to the expression of intelligence than ever before (wahoo!), the number of ways and instances in which intelligence can be misused is increasing in direct proportion (boo!). From the bottom to the top of the intellectual totem pole, opportunities for mistaken, indisciplined thinking are rife — and perhaps the most damaging and dangerous attribute of inexact, corrupted, or misinformed thought is that it often goes unnoticed. Such erroneous thought can often be bizarrely convincing, even seductive.

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.8 — on Quantum Caramel, and how we feel much longed-for events more intensely in our imaginations than they frequently prove when actually experienced — here. Today’s volume concerns the notion of the Lily Pad Presumption.

Look out at the infinite duckpond around you, and its superabundance of lily pads, offering perspectives of a variety far more numerous than your long and fabulous lifespan could ever stretch to let you sample, and consider this.