Today's session (29 August 2016)

Hi everyone

Today we started by looking at critical and creative thinking.

Critical thinking is typified by a logical, sequential, analytical and reasoned approach. We are looking for proof and specific, quality answers to our questions. Reasoning follows 'if ... then' logic (‘if this happens then that will probably follow’).

Creative thinking is lateral, expansive, imaginative, innovative and disruptive. We are less interested in the probable answer and more interested in generating interesting possibilities (often the more the better).

While we sometimes think of these two types of thinking as being mutually exclusive, it can be useful to use them in tandem (and sometimes some problems may not clearly require one type of thinking over the other).

Some things may need critical thinking:

* If I sell 100 widgets at $100 profit each then how much money will I make? (Method: 100 x 100)

* Mondays are my busiest days at work. Should I roster more staff on Mondays? (Method: Number of customers? Ratio of staff to customers? Number of staff needed?)

* My bank manager tells me that interest rates will rise this year but my mother says that they will fall. Who do I believe? (Method: Who has access to the most accurate information?)

Critical thinking should result in sound decisions, based on evidence and logic. However, critical thinking also has its limitations. For instance, many routine decisions are NOT taken rationally, due to:

* Non-deliberative decisions (e.g. choices made without extensive thought)

* Missing information (e.g. lack of information)

* Mental errors (e.g. mistakes, assumptions, bias, etc.)

In contrast to this, some things may need creative thinking. For instance:

* What business shall I start?

* I want to show my customers that I care about them. How can I do this?

* A new supermarket is opening across the road from my supermarket. What should I do?

The answers to these questions may not be obvious and they may require some complex and non-linear thinking.

So, with all this in mind, we tried a practical exercise in which we used our thinking skills to find both critical and creative solutions to the business problem: ‘My profits are falling … what should I do?’

A critical thinking approach might suggest that we examine the data, sell more product, increase prices, cut costs or find more customers. A creative thinking approach might result in questions such as ‘what else can we do?’, ‘can we sell different things?’, ‘what about non-consumers?’ and ‘what do people buy / need?’

Most thinking is a combination of the two types and the challenges can be to decide when (and why) we should use each type.

We then tried one more exercise, involving different ways to find a job. Most people tend to use rather straight-forward logic and they look for a job by using a job agency, looking at job vacancies or asking around. A more creative real-life approach can be found in the Powerpoint slideshow, where the job hunter hired a local person to scout out opportunities and use local knowledge to find employment for the job hunter.

Lastly, we tried using a combination of critical and creative thinking skills to find an alternative descriptive title for the Problem Solving and Decision Making paper. One possible solution is: Problem solving and decision making = Solution finding and option evaluation / selection.

We then took a short break and when we came back we looked at ways that the human mind (and sensory system) can sometimes make it difficult for us to arrive at correct decisions.

We started by talking about a classic piece of work done by Loftus and Palmer in 1974. These two researchers showed their test subjects a short film clip of two cars involved in an accident. Then they asked some questions about the accident, including a question about the speed of the vehicles when the accident occurred. Loftus and Palmer varied the question by changing the verb from ‘smashed’ to other words such as ‘collided’, ‘bumped’ or ‘contacted’.

Just by changing this one variable, Loftus and Palmer could influence the estimates of speed that people gave them. The mean estimates of speed were highest in the “smashed” condition (40.8 mph) and lowest in the “contacted” group (31.8 mph).

Obviously, this has huge implications for eye witness testimony in court cases as well as for making correct decisions about situations which we may encounter every day. Research such as this suggests that we can be influenced in very subtle ways without being aware of it (more about this below). You might like to read a bit more about this area of research (including some more up-to-date stuff) as part of your weekly readings.

We then looked at situations in which our brains can be conflicted over the correct response that we should give. We already know that we use short-cuts to help us to make sense of things and sometimes this leads us to be imprecise about what we see and say. For instance, we might say that we see a vase when all that we are actually seeing is a two dimensional representation of a vase. Normally this isn’t too much of a problem as we expect other people to ‘know what we mean’.

More significantly, conflicting information can lead to incorrect conclusions and it may contaminate future evidence through biases, assumptions, presumptions and distorted perspectives.

To see how these conflicts work in action, we looked at a series of pictures of ambiguous scenes. The first few pictures were well-known examples of double images such as the black-and-white face profile / vase image and the picture of the old / young woman. We generally know what to look for and the images weren’t overly surprising as they were so familiar. Most people in the class had no difficulty in resolving the conflicts as they were ‘in’ on the visual jokes.

We then moved on to some less-well-known examples such as the headland which looks like a horse’s head (or rather, it has a shape which reminds us of a horse’s head) and the black triangle which isn’t really there (it ‘appears’ because of the images around it and the assumptions which we make).

Returning again to more familiar examples, we looked at some shapes which appear to be different sizes, mainly due to perspective cues which fool our brains. In reality, we are trying to apply sets of logical rules about three-dimensional perspective to two-dimensional representations.

We also looked at a couple of examples where it takes an extraordinary amount of will-power to force ourselves to reject the evidence that our eyes and brain have gathered. Two good examples of this include the two rectangles which appear to be of different size and the contrasting colour squares on the chess board (which are, in fact, the same colour). If you go to the last two slides in the Visual Illusions powerpoint (under Session 6 in Moodle), then you can click on the relevant parts of both images and drag them around to make comparisons.

We also looked at some photo illusions (non-Photoshopped!) which again challenged our visual expectations. These images included the brightly-coloured parrot (which was, in fact, a woman in body paint) and the tiny-man-and-giant-dog in the Ames Room. Read up about the Ames Room this week, if you are interested, and tell me about what you learned, in your weekly assignment.

We then looked at some amazing two-dimensional drawings (again, using forced perspective) which create the illusion of being three-dimensional. These include waterfalls, rapids and bottomless pits drawn onto streets and also a combined scene of an artist working on his own two-dimensional picture.

Finally, we took a look at the infamous dress which went viral on the internet a few years ago. Most of the class seemed to opt for black-and-blue but others saw it as gold-and-white. With all this in mind, we have to ask ourselves how much of the sensory evidence that we see and accept is really what we think it is?

We then took another short break and when we came back we pursued this line-of-thought a bit further. I suggested to you that while it can be quite unnerving to see how fallible we can be in some situations, it is also amazing how marvellous we can be in other situations. Despite the drawbacks of some short-cut strategies that we use, we have still managed to achieve all the good things that we have today (such as technology and medicine) as well as some massive problems still to be solved (such as booming populations and climate issues).

Some people even have the capacity to far exceed what we normally expect to be the limitations of human abilities, and this raises questions about whether we might be able to engineer better solutions by manipulating human abilities in some way. As an example of this, we had a quick look at Scott Flansberg (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgIICQvhqMc) who is recognised as the world record holder as a human calculator. Quiet amazing! Scott has also devised a mathematics system which he believes can help other people to make calculations quicker (although not in the same way that he naturally does).

We also looked at the way that some people can combine brain and body to achieve amazing feats of dexterity. Richard Turner, for instance, has quite extraordinary abilities to feel, recall and manipulate cards despite being blind (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKfmzu6kqQk). This is based on years of skill development (although it is interesting to speculate whether he has a natural aptitude which helps in this skill development).

Returning to our central theme of whether we can rely on our senses, we then turned our attention to people who combine skills with benevolent deception. In this case, we are talking about stage magic performances where the objective is to amaze us (rather than to prey on human credulity).

We began with a classic performance by Penn and Teller, in which they perform the cups and balls routine. This act involves moving balls from one inverted cup to another and (in typical Pen and Teller style) they tell you exactly how it is done while still fooling the viewer through sleight-of-hand and misdirection. This performance shows that it isn’t always easy to make correct judgements even when the viewer knows what to look for.

We also looked at two clips of British performer Derren Brown. Brown is an illusionist and mentalist who uses a combination of techniques to perform mind-reading tricks and mental manipulations. He also has a few card tricks up his sleeve and we saw him fool Stephen Fry with an amazing mental / illusion trick (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QI5-NDiY7IM#t=170.473343). Brown also performed a neat trick involving a random supermarket purchase (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UR81VZXVR6U).

As always, the powerpoints used for today’s session are up on Moodle for you to review. Think about what all this might mean for our ability to make critical and / or creative choices and see whether it has any relevance to your choice for Assignment 2.

Next Monday we will meet our first industry guest, Simon Jones from Thermoplastic Engineering Ltd. (http://www.thermoplastic.co.nz/). Have a look at his website and familiarise yourself with what his business is about. Simon will be with us from 2:00pm next week and he should have some interesting exercises for us, based on his experiences at Thermoplastic. This will be a practical session and you will be given some real-life problems to solve. Simon will then tell you about Thermoplastic’s decisions for each of the five problems which he has set for you.

Please make sure that you arrive on time to meet our guest. This particular session may go through to 5:00pm, depending on how well the discussion goes so please stay around to the end!

By now you should have decided on your business problem for Assignment 2 and be well under way with your research. Remember that you will need to take an academic focus for this assignment and I need to see the use of some in-depth resources.

Remember to also visit the jellybean jar during the week and to try some different strategies to calculate the number of jellybeans in the jar.

Cheers

Phil