Lone Gunman

You may know gap­ingvoid from Hugh MacLeod’s “car­toons drawn on the back of busi­ness cards”. Now he’s telling us How To Be Cre­ative.

So you want to be more cre­ative, in art, in busi­ness, what­ever. Here are some tips that have worked for me over the years:

• You are respon­si­ble for your own experience.
• Every­body has their own pri­vate Mount Ever­est they were put on this earth to climb.
• Don’t try to stand out from the crowd; avoid crowds altogether.
• If you accept the pain, it can­not hurt you.

The lengthy arti­cle was picked up by Seth Godin and is now avail­able for free in a won­der­fully for­mat­ted PDF from ChangeThis. Also worth a read is Hugh’s How To Be Cre­ative book pro­posal.

Thoughts — or specif­i­cally the men­tal processes enabling us to think — allow beings to be con­scious, to make deci­sions, and to imag­ine. Thoughts are what define us as individuals.

This list of thought processes is a (big) list of think­ing styles, meth­ods of think­ing (think­ing skills), and types of thought. When you have some spare time, it’s worth perusing.

I’m soon to read Six Think­ing Hats, and I believe this could be an invalu­able resource once I have the moti­va­tion to improve my own think­ing processes. This book looks like it may be inter­est­ing too.

Pre­vi­ous lists this week: List of Cog­ni­tive Biases, List of Log­i­cal Fal­lac­ies, List(s) of Unsolved Prob­lems, List of Com­mon Misconceptions

The 2005 Global Intel­lec­tu­als Poll is a list of the 100 most impor­tant liv­ing pub­lic intel­lec­tu­als […] com­piled in Novem­ber 2005 by Prospect Mag­a­zine and For­eign Pol­icy on the basis of a reader’s ballot.

Top five:

1. Noam Chom­sky
2. Umberto Eco
3. Richard Dawkins
4. Václav Havel
5. Christo­pher Hitchens

For­eign Pol­icy requires (free) reg­is­tra­tion to access the list. It’s avail­able hassle-free at Wikipedia.

This news report comes as no sur­prise.

While in the past, adults would have helped chil­dren in dis­tress or rebuked those mis­be­hav­ing, there was now “a feel­ing that it is best not to become involved”, it said.

Report author Prof Frank Furedi, of Kent Uni­ver­sity, said: “From Girl Guiders to foot­ball coaches, from Christmas-time San­tas to par­ents help­ing out in schools, vol­un­teers — once regarded as pil­lars of the com­mu­nity — have been trans­formed in the reg­u­la­tory and pub­lic imag­i­na­tion into poten­tial child abusers, barred from any con­tact with chil­dren until the data­base gives them the green light.”

This is the con­se­quence of fear-mongering at its finest col­lid­ing with years of poor news report­ing. Give the pub­lic some­thing to worry about, and they will — tak­ing it out of all pro­por­tions in the process.

Instead of rely­ing on Crim­i­nal Records Bureau (CRB) checks, adults should be allowed to use their “dis­cre­tion and pro­fes­sional judg­ment” to decide who should work with children.

Bravo.

The list of com­mon mis­con­cep­tions includes this clarification:

The word “the­ory” in “the the­ory of evo­lu­tion” does not imply doubt in main­stream sci­ence about the valid­ity of this the­ory; the words “the­ory” and “hypoth­e­sis” are not the same in a sci­en­tific con­text (see Evo­lu­tion as the­ory and fact). A sci­en­tific the­ory is a set of prin­ci­ples which, via log­i­cal deduc­tion, explains the obser­va­tions in nature. The same log­i­cal deduc­tions can be made to pre­dict obser­va­tions before they are made. The the­ory describ­ing how evo­lu­tion occurs is a “the­ory” in the same sense as the the­ory of grav­ity or the the­ory of rel­a­tiv­ity.