So, I have a couple of perspectives on my mind. The first has to do with thinking in general, and the modern situation we find ourselves in, or have acquired by habit.

Many of us believe that we are perfectly capable of thinking alone. That is to say that we think (here is the recursion issue) that we are fine thinking about complex matters in isolation. This is a big variable in many modern problems. For thousands of years and billons of human life-years, we made decisions and thought things through in teams. Together. This is largely how our corporations work, even though we have the motif in which one person has executive power. This model implies that we can decide which »single person is »most capable. And inside our minds, we emulate this model.

Now, if I have a simple, familiar problem to solve, I might be able to get away with thinking in isolation. I may have even become used to doing so. But I would vastly prefer being able to have council with trusted others and see »a number of positions and perspectives at once, instead of the one that quickly acquires dominance in my isolated (and often nervous or fearful or confused) thinking.

The other issue is that many ethnic cultures have »traditions in which this necessity is not merely preserved, but regularly »practiced. I could name 10 off the top of my head.

Generally, if I am actually facing a complex problem, I want other intelligent minds with me to work with it. Mostly, this is impossible. (I have a model of a revised internet in which we could all do this all the time together, and remain anonymous while doing so).

The other thing on my mind is a related problem: nearly none of us deal well with »ambiguity in situations or the aspects of situations with which we are either not personally familiar or is actually unknown. In most complex situations, this is 90% of what we’re trying to ‘figure out’ without the expertise to do so. Very few of us were educated to a degree that would allow us to even intelligently examine complex problems (or questions), let alone resolve them by ourselves (or even with the kinds of teams would could assemble within our peer cohorts). The unknown is terrifying to most of us, and we will gladly make terrible decisions with some regularity in an attempt to collapse the ambiguity into something we can more easily deal with… even if that something turns out to be catastrophic.

Again, I have a technical solution to both of these issues, which I call the Knowledge Amp. But it’s unlikely I’ll be able to pursue that extremely innovative and vast constellation of technologies. Meanwhile, however, we can learn to recognize these features of the ways our minds are inclined to misfunction, and try to help each other negotiate better methods, practices and results… because the simple fact is that — with very few exceptions — humans are evolved to solve problems in complexly skillful cohorts… not in isolation.

America today looks like a bunch of single wings flapping around on the ground talking about how great their flying skills are. But what if we remembered how to join those together… into actual »birds again?

Addendum: It is possible to train individuals to think more like a complex cohort, but it’s extremely unusual and requires a relatiely exotic education.