What
are the typical student thinking?
Student thinking is the typical “playground” mode, and as a qualified adult, you should adjust the mode to “wilderness survival”. The essence of the
amusement park model is not only that it is a place to enjoy fun, but also that it is composed of a series of established amusement projects, each of which has a definite starting point, end point, path and duration. When you are in
a project, your joy, excitement, surprise and fear are all pre-designed, and sometimes you need to face some advanced challenges, but these challenges themselves are just a simulation of limited complexity.
In wilderness survival mode, you have nothing to rely on.
You will encounter unexpected and unexpected troubles, such as hunger and beasts, and you must do your best to solve the difficult problems that come to you independently, and then the next problem, and a series of problems.. No instructions, no strategy, no tips. The
two modes cultivate different thinking qualities.
Playground is like a utopia, in which there is no need to solve practical problems.
So the teacher only needs to impart knowledge, and you only need to accept it.
Teachers will always teach you, “When in doubt, turn to the textbook!”! Check the literature! Or come and ask me at any time! The subtext of these words is that your predecessors have prepared the answer for you.
So in school, when you think about a problem, you always start from a theory: so-and-so came up with so-and-so at so-and-so time, “Wow, I learned something new today!” ; To the end of the theory: Through some thinking and exploration, you have verified the theory again, or (even better) have a new expansion or deepening of the theory, “Wow, another good paper!” But have you ever thought that the original origin of the field in which this theory is located is to solve a real problem or to be triggered by a real phenomenon. By the time
you come to the theory, the real problem is no longer there or not important, or it is still important, but you don’t care.
Therefore, you may unconsciously follow the path paved by your predecessors, but you don’t know where the path is going. In his book The Sociological Imagination
, sociologist C. Wright Mills (C. WrightMills) sharply criticized the research concept of “abstract empiricism.”.
The idea is that social science research emphasizes scientific accuracy and follows strict statistical methods, but when complex social reality is abstracted into numbers, the meaning of “structure, history and psychology” is placed under the surface. But it was taken out of time.
He believes that the current mainstream method of social science “refuses to comment on contemporary society unless it has gone through the small but sophisticated procedure of statistical rituals,” and that the accuracy of such numbers is only a kind of pseudo-accuracy, because it cannot accurately depict the complex and changeable nature of the world.
Unfortunately, despite Mills’ protests, the academic world continues to follow the mainstream trajectory of abstract empiricism.
This research orientation of pursuing the internal accuracy of theory at the cost of being divorced from the real world is projected into university education, which makes countless students feel confused: “What is the use of the knowledge I have learned?”?
！」 Of course, many pedants in the ivory tower often tell their students in all earnestness that what they teach is “useless learning” that people are proud of, and that “truly noble knowledge is useless.”.
And in my eyes, it’s just a kind of talk.
As scholars, they already have an academic position where they can settle down. Of course, they can take the “uselessness of knowledge” in stride. But for the vast majority of students, only a very small number of people have the opportunity to engage in academic work, while the vast majority of people must go to society and survive in the real world of sudden changes. Is it not too self-centered and irresponsible to
use “useless learning” to prevaricate students? Alfred North Whitehead, the
great philosopher, mathematician, and educational thinker, in his book The Purpose of Education, said bluntly: “Empty and useless knowledge is insignificant and actually harmful.”. The significance of
knowledge lies in its application, in people’s active mastery of it, that is, in wisdom.
It is customary to think that knowledge by itself, rather than together with wisdom, confers a special dignity on its possessor.
I have little respect for this knowledge. The value of
knowledge depends entirely on who holds it and what he does with it.
He cited the teaching of “quadratic equations” as an example to illustrate the reality that education is out of touch with reality.
He said that in schools, the knowledge of quadratic equations is taught abstractly, and students are not guided to connect this knowledge with the real world. Students have not established such an understanding that “quadratic equations are part of algebra, and algebra is an intellectual tool created by people to clearly describe the quantitative world.” So he complained, “Algebra has degenerated into meaningless so-called knowledge, both on the surface and in fact, which provides us with a sad example.”.
Knowledge originates from practice and from the confusion of people when they interact with reality.
Even in this world, there are countless knowledge that does not exist in books, some of which can not even be expressed in words, but are embedded in people’s actions.
On this point, anthropologists are probably the most vocal.
A book combining anthropology and cognitive science, How We Think That Fish Think: Anthropological Ways of Understanding Cognition, Memory, and Cognition, has a brilliant exposition of this. Author Maurice Bloch, an anthropologist at the London School of Economics, wrote: Another area of interest in both anthropology and cognitive psychology reveals the importance of nonverbal knowledge, namely how we learn practical everyday tasks.
Obviously, we are not teaching a child how to get around a house or close a door by explaining the details.
It seems that a lot of knowledge is transmitted through culture, and we are not aware of this process.
In highly educated societies, people attach more importance to the obvious educational process, which is misleading because it obscures the role of cultural imperceptibility, but in non-industrialized societies, activities that occupy most of people’s time and energy, including how to bathe, wash clothes, cook, plant, etc., are achieved through imitation and tentative participation.
He also said that anthropologists have found that “language plays only the most limited role” in the process of passing on special skills from the master to the apprentice.
For example, when the anthropologist Lave studied Liberian tailors, she discovered what she called apprenticeship learning, which relies on the assumption that “knowing, thinking, and understanding are all based on practice.”.
In fact, in the workplace of modern society, the transfer of knowledge between experienced old employees and novice employees also belongs to this kind of “apprentice knowledge learning”, but in universities, students are forced to separate from the vast real world and practical environment and enter an abstract world composed purely of written knowledge. Lost the opportunity to learn apprenticeship knowledge.
In practice, you will create problems of your own, which may haunt you, torment you, and make you anxious.
So you try to solve it very urgently, and in the process of solving the problem, the old knowledge is stimulated, called and reorganized, and the new knowledge is sprouted little by little.
In the playground mode, the problem you encounter is put forward by the teacher, not from your own inner desire, you lack enough motivation to solve it by yourself, you are just copying a certain answer.
Of course, you need to understand these answers-the essence of human civilization.
However, you should also hone your ability to “dig out problems from careful observation of reality, analyze problems independently and systematically, and even construct new theories to finally solve these problems.”; You should also know how to live in darkness when you have lost all your crutches and torches, when you are faced with an unprecedented new problem, when you can’t find the answer no matter how many documents you have searched.
This is the wilderness survival mode.
It begins with the observation and analysis of realistic problems, and after some analysis and exploration (perhaps at the theoretical level), it returns to reality.
Once in the wilderness, you must understand that there is a completely different way of thinking in this world, and only this way can help you live well. Its main points include: 1. Correct understanding of the problem, rather than simply using other people’s problem expression. Based on the deep and careful observation of the real situation, the problem
can be redefined to approach the essence of the problem.
2. Think about the problem completely independently, without the help of books and search engines, because the problem in front of you is unique and new.
You can boldly propose a number of hypothetical directions to solve, and then try, at this time, failure is normal, but you will get unexpected benefits from it. During my
PhD, I went to a famous Internet company for an internship and engaged in user research. When
I first entered the post, I inherited the inertia of school. As soon as I received a task, instead of thinking with my own mind, I opened googlescholar and searched wildly.
It took a long time to wake up to the fact that the problems given by enterprises are specific and special, and there is no way forward. We must develop the habit of thinking actively and analyzing first, and then find literature or other methods to explore and demonstrate after putting forward some hypotheses through thinking.
3. Continue to think independently, but you can look for relevant knowledge in a more promising direction. At this time, you need to quickly screen and learn new knowledge, and even look for as much knowledge as possible without prejudice, including exchanging opinions with others.
This revelation is not easy, because people’s cognitive model is always preconceived, the early entry of information will form a preliminary framework in the mind, when the latter information intake, the original framework will affect our interpretation of new information, or even intentionally or unintentionally adopt the part consistent with the previous information, and ignore the conflict.
4. In the process of combining knowledge to analyze problems, you may try to come up with some hypothetical theories or models.
Remember, not only experts, professors, celebrities and authorities are qualified to put forward theories, but also you have the ability to construct theories. The
process of theorizing can help you reach a new depth in your analysis of the problem, as well as simplify the problem to its most essential level, and possibly reuse it to approximate problems in the future.
5. The theory you put forward must be revised. At this time, you can try to use your theory to solve the problem, or you can try to use it in various extension situations. If you find a bug, you can correct it immediately. After
iteration, your theory becomes more and more powerful, and the door to solve the problem is gradually opened.
But because theory is an abstraction of reality after all, you also need to pay attention to all kinds of detailed problems, to consider the reality in an all-round way, to exhaust and evaluate all kinds of factors, so as to get a more complete solution to solve this complex practical problem thoroughly.
7. Usually the solution to a difficult problem is very clever.
If you don’t think this plan is clever enough, try repeating the above steps until you find the clever plan.
In the wilderness mode, you must also understand that there are the following differences in solving practical problems compared with thinking and developing “theory”: 1. Theoretical problems usually conceive an ideal environment in advance and shield many uncertain factors, so they become more “simple”; For practical problems, you have to consider all kinds of complex factors at the same time, and there are few simplified solutions.
For example, many psychological theories are born in the “ideal environment” of the laboratory, so they are often difficult to apply to reality.
On the contrary, the research and teaching methods of American business schools are quite different from those of traditional academics, and they have achieved great success, precisely because they focus on the concept of analyzing complex practical problems.
2. Theoretical problems originate from reality at first, but they will gradually move towards the track of self-growth, and may become farther and farther away from reality, and eventually become the self-playing and self-singing of a small number of people in the academic circle, isolated from the outside world. When solving practical problems, we must always think about what people’s real needs are at this moment and fight for the real value.
For example, most psychological theories have evolved into self-playing and self-singing, but the most creative psychologists in the field of psychology still dig out new phenomena that are not noticed from their insights into reality and construct theories about them. I believe that many other disciplines have similar situations.
3. The theoretical exploration of many disciplines usually seeks and analyzes those general and universal phenomena. On the one hand, this is the need of the development of the theory itself, on the other hand, it is also limited by the rigorous constraints of scientific research on “repetition” and “verifiability”.
However, in the process of dealing with practical problems, the value of analyzing extreme phenomena is often far greater than that of general phenomena.
For example, Taleb’s book Black Swan repeatedly emphasizes the importance of analyzing extreme phenomena. Another important work of Maslow, a psychologist who is world-famous
for his theory of hierarchy of needs, is to study the common ground of the greatest figures in human history, so as to draw very enlightening conclusions and tell us a series of characteristics of “self-actualization”.
In another area, IDEO, a leading company in innovative design, is very keen to study “extreme users” to stimulate new ideas to solve extremely difficult problems.
4. Another characteristic of real problems is that they are often rapidly changing and unpredictable.
Especially in the ever-changing business competition, the pace of change is suffocating.
For example, some time ago, Jingdong’s price war on Suning’s electrical appliances lasted only a few hours since Liu Qiangdong declared war on Weibo. As a third party, Yitao immediately launched targeted price comparison products for electrical appliances, and its awareness and execution of rapid response were astonishing.
In the ivory tower, the publication cycle of an academic journal article is generally two years, and in some disciplines such as mathematics, it can even be more than five years. In a timely textbook, the latest content is at least five years old, and most of the conclusions will be ten or twenty years old.
As a result, universities, which were previously the frontiers of ideas and knowledge, seem to have become too slow and cumbersome in the age of the Internet and social media.
In short, to solve practical problems is to solve complexity, to solve all kinds of unknowns and uncertainties, and to solve eternal changes.
And these are very difficult to get exercise in the campus.
Interestingly, the academic school and the practical school often have the opportunity to compete on the same stage in solving the same practical problem.
A typical example is the field of User Experience, which has emerged in the past two decades. The most influential figures
in this field did not adopt the way of academic research, but explored from practice.
For example, Donald Arthur Norman, who wrote far-reaching works such as Design Psychology and Emotional Design, was originally a cognitive psychologist, but he later joined the industry, worked for Apple and other companies, and then set up an experience consulting company. His works all benefit from his observation and perception of daily life and design practice, not academic writing at all. Jacob Nielsen, another authority in the field of
user experience, is probably the person who has done the most usability testing in the world. Based on his extensive usability testing practice, he summed up usability engineering methods and ten heuristic principles, which have become the most widely used practical tools in this field. Another author of
The Essence of Interaction Design, Alan Cooper, is a veteran programmer, the “father of Visual Basice,” who wrote the foundation book on interaction design based on his long practice of UI programming, rather than finding inspiration in a pile of papers.
On the contrary, the academic community (mainly the human-computer interaction community) publishes many papers every year on the topic of “user experience”, such as establishing a theoretical model for user experience, defining its conceptual connotation, and exploring its relationship with different design factors.
However, these papers have not produced any substantial impetus to the industry.
However, it is ironic that in schools, there may be teachers who have never actually done user experience design teaching students user experience design.
This is a rather absurd part of university education. On the one hand, college students have to master enough skills to enter society and enterprises to solve new and complex practical problems. On the other hand, most of the university teachers who educate them have no experience in solving practical problems. From undergraduate to PhD to lecturer to professor,
they have never stepped out of the campus; their knowledge comes from books, from theory to theory, and they have no idea how to learn from reality. The direct consequence of
this absurdity is that students generally feel that learning is useless, that they are not competitive in finding jobs, and that they rely on their enthusiasm and ingenuity to add points, while educators, on their own, regard training scholars as the main goal of university education, or even just to find human resources for their own laboratories. In his critical book, Education Without a Soul: How Harvard Forgot About the Purpose of Education, HarryR. Lewis, a
former dean of Harvard College (a prestigious undergraduate school at Harvard University), concedes that “faculty and students benefit from academic competition.” But they pursue different goals in life. Few
students hope to become experts and scholars in the future, and most professors certainly do not want (students) to “find another job”.
He also pointed out sharply that “in prestigious research universities, in order to obtain professional titles and promotions, the training received by professors in their own fields has become increasingly narrow, specialized, and deepened.”. In most cases, the qualifications
of tenured professors are awarded to teachers with outstanding research achievements, and rarely to those with outstanding teaching contributions.
In this process, whether teachers have the interest or ability to help students grow is not considered at all.
It’s no wonder that the longer people are immersed in the playground mode, the less they can adapt to the wilderness survival mode.
I studied in school for a few more years, and I felt deeply about it, so I had to reflect on it and scrape the bone to heal the wound.
But I think many people who have entered the workplace are not aware of the constraints of their old thinking.
For example, the domestic Internet industry and even some leading companies, in their product work, there is an important process called competitive product analysis.
This process is the source of plagiarism system, and behind it, it is the result of playground thinking. When
graduate students write papers, most of them do not know how to think fully and independently about the subject first, but look up the literature as soon as they come up, see what methods others use, what theories they use, and immediately imitate them; There is no difference at all between this practice and the thinking mode behind “copying other people’s products through competitive product analysis.”.
Competitive products are like documents. Although they give you inspiration, they also give you invisible restrictions and frame your imagination.
So this is why in the Internet industry, Silicon Valley is the birthplace of endless innovation, while China is the endless race of plagiarism.
A major reason, to put it bluntly, is the gap in the ability of practitioners, and behind this gap is the superiority of the thinking mode that has been learned for a long time: the high one faces the phenomenon directly, dissects the problem deeply, investigates its essence, and creates solutions, while the low one copies the answer directly, and swallows it without understanding it thoroughly.
Perhaps, in this context, if you follow the thinking inertia of the playground model, you may also be able to get along in the workplace, or even get along well.
However, if you are an ambitious young man who wants to achieve something, if you always dream of doing something unusual, or if you never allow yourself to live a mediocre life, then you must show enough courage to break away from your attachment to the playground and jump into the real world. Only by cultivating problem-oriented, practice-oriented, and tolerant of high complexity and uncertainty, can you achieve an extraordinary life full of creativity and exploration.
. Focus on not getting lost ~
