Thursday, August 27, 2009

Big thinkers, big mistakes

I have wondered many years ago, how come that certain really smart and genius people managed to have really big and clear mistakes. I got a theory.

The human mind is limited. Knowledgeable people and smart thinkers must have shortcuts and coding systems to make their brain able to handle so much information.
These coding systems, I suspect are not like the thinking of regular person.

Now, like all optimizations, these have costs. And they may easily lead to some grand mistakes that can even sound amusing to the regular person.

Another facet. Being unusual, generally means having a very different brain, a different life experience, tendencies, and attending to very different aspects of life. This ultimately creates a very different world, and at times makes the big thinkers not to see what the regular person sees easily and obvviously.

PS. It is somehwat of an exaggaration. Many of these big thinkers' mistakes are realtively small, and reading my text too literally makes injustice to some, althought it may be too gentle to some other really stupid "big thinkers".

PS2. brings to mind Milan Kundera's observations about the professor who wanted to to out from his library and books to live in "the real world"
"but he did not understood that his real world is with the books"

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

agnostism could be the most important after all, i follow karl popper idea "The piece meal engineer".

Anonymous said...

agnosticism idea by popper.