Significantly, your examples are all within the domain of analytical—and I would suggest, reductive—mathematics-science-coding. In my experience, it is often the case that one who has ascended this ladder is quite blind to, and unable to conceive of the importance of, context and perspective to meaning-making.
Apropos, there was a period during my childhood when I tried to question my elders regarding my observation that entropy, probability, and meaning were inherently subjective—meaningless without reference to an observer. Similar to the misnomer of Shannon “information” theory when it is actually about the transfer of data, rather than information through a lossy channel. In virtually every case, they could not understand my questions.
People generally fail to understand that “subjective” does not imply “arbitrary”, but rather, perspectival and necessarily within context. And of course when it comes to agreement, we share a great deal of (hierarchical) perspective.
One concrete example: Back when I was a technical manager in the field of analytical instruments, I tried to convey to our support team that the key metric of success was customer satisfaction, followed, if necessary, by whether the instrument met standards for precision, sensitivity, stability, etc. Of the members of that team, the one who I knew and relied on to be the most rigorously analytical could not accept that definition of success, and was therefore weaker (overall) in terms of achieving customer satisfaction.
As for your potential item #10—remaining within the analytical paradigm you have established—I would suggest “the ability to think in terms of evolutionary processes and strategies, especially in regard to production of meaningful novelty.”
Similar ladders exist in other domains—drawing, for example. But I have not observed such hard ceilings on one’s performance in drawing. Effective training seems far more important. The same goes for routine physics, entrepreneurship and foreign languages.
I like where you are going with #10. Perhaps it could condensed into “informatic creativity”.
Yes, I think evolutionary processes are the only generator of meaningful novelty, and this is also key to the nearly always neglected question of “hypothesis generation” in discussions of “the” scientific method.
If one person is talking analytically and the other is talking about meaning-making, then you’re each trying to have different conversations. One of you is talking about how to do something and the other is talking about how to motivate people to do something. If at all possible you should let the first person lead; if they’re diligently working on the problem then they’re motivated enough.
To consider your support team example: they seem to be assuming that if their product works well, customers will be satisfied. That’s not a terrible strategy, and it puts the focus on something they can control (the product). If you could point to something else about the customer experience that’s causing customer dissatisfaction, they would probably understand the problem and deal with it. But if there’s nothing specific that needs addressing otherwise, it’s probably best just to let them focus on getting the instrument to work as well as possible.
And of course, maximizing customer satisfaction is itself a strategy toward achieving your real goal, which is profit. Companies don’t give their flagship products away for free*, no matter how much it would please the customers.
*With the exception of some loss leaders that are carefully calculated to grow revenues over the long term.
Significantly, your examples are all within the domain of analytical—and I would suggest, reductive—mathematics-science-coding. In my experience, it is often the case that one who has ascended this ladder is quite blind to, and unable to conceive of the importance of, context and perspective to meaning-making.
Apropos, there was a period during my childhood when I tried to question my elders regarding my observation that entropy, probability, and meaning were inherently subjective—meaningless without reference to an observer. Similar to the misnomer of Shannon “information” theory when it is actually about the transfer of data, rather than information through a lossy channel. In virtually every case, they could not understand my questions.
People generally fail to understand that “subjective” does not imply “arbitrary”, but rather, perspectival and necessarily within context. And of course when it comes to agreement, we share a great deal of (hierarchical) perspective.
One concrete example: Back when I was a technical manager in the field of analytical instruments, I tried to convey to our support team that the key metric of success was customer satisfaction, followed, if necessary, by whether the instrument met standards for precision, sensitivity, stability, etc. Of the members of that team, the one who I knew and relied on to be the most rigorously analytical could not accept that definition of success, and was therefore weaker (overall) in terms of achieving customer satisfaction.
As for your potential item #10—remaining within the analytical paradigm you have established—I would suggest “the ability to think in terms of evolutionary processes and strategies, especially in regard to production of meaningful novelty.”
Similar ladders exist in other domains—drawing, for example. But I have not observed such hard ceilings on one’s performance in drawing. Effective training seems far more important. The same goes for routine physics, entrepreneurship and foreign languages.
I like where you are going with #10. Perhaps it could condensed into “informatic creativity”.
Yes, I think evolutionary processes are the only generator of meaningful novelty, and this is also key to the nearly always neglected question of “hypothesis generation” in discussions of “the” scientific method.
If one person is talking analytically and the other is talking about meaning-making, then you’re each trying to have different conversations. One of you is talking about how to do something and the other is talking about how to motivate people to do something. If at all possible you should let the first person lead; if they’re diligently working on the problem then they’re motivated enough.
To consider your support team example: they seem to be assuming that if their product works well, customers will be satisfied. That’s not a terrible strategy, and it puts the focus on something they can control (the product). If you could point to something else about the customer experience that’s causing customer dissatisfaction, they would probably understand the problem and deal with it. But if there’s nothing specific that needs addressing otherwise, it’s probably best just to let them focus on getting the instrument to work as well as possible.
And of course, maximizing customer satisfaction is itself a strategy toward achieving your real goal, which is profit. Companies don’t give their flagship products away for free*, no matter how much it would please the customers.
*With the exception of some loss leaders that are carefully calculated to grow revenues over the long term.