Thinking Well Makes a Difference

Tiny changes in our thinking create a wide variety of consequences.

So why help each other think? Does it matter that much how well we think? Doesn’t life play out somehow anyway?

The older I get, the more I have begun to appreciate the fact that even slight alterations in what we think can make significant differences to our lives and those of others. The first example that comes to mind is medical. If that doctor had not spotted something that triggered him to have a closer look, I might not be here now. Several times over, even. And likewise, a doctor not thinking well can and has lead to years of continuing health problems, only to discover much later that I was on the wrong track.

How does that work? Isn’t life better when we use a variety of ideas and creative approaches? In some ways, yes, but the core of an argument for good thinking rests on the correlation between our specific thinking and reality, some of which turns out to pretty non-negotiable. For example, I was raised and educated among engineers, so I am particularly conscious that if you don’t design your bridge well enough, it falls down and makes a total mess. Engineers by and large must conform to the so-called laws of physics and chemistry, and any thinking that denies or ignores those specific realities can cause trouble. Likewise, any medical thinking that ignores or denies the detailed biochemistry of the human body and all the organisms it interacts with, will fall short of consistent wellness. Economic thinking that ignores what people really do, is also doomed to some form of failure.

For me, life has become an endless series of incremental adjustments to my thinking, discarding assumptions that proved wrong and altering my logic and conclusions to closer resemble the physical world that I live in. My simplified models of the world, my body and our society need to get closer to the truth with time, not farther away, or I am bound to suffer unwanted change, loss, disappointment, and disorder. The reason that people can be helpful to each other in improving all our thinking, lies in the added variety of perspectives and experiences and wisdom that can be brought to bear. I am often at a disadvantage trying to think well alone.