Any newbie Linux forums 4040

Peter T. Breuer

I disagree, Peter.

newbie friendly without sinking into stupidity.

But back to my disagreement. In my view, sloppy thinkers remain sloppy thinkers. It may be possible to teach logic to some degree, but at the best you get small improvement.

There are three factors that make for good problem solvers. The first is logic and causality. This can be taught, or at least most people can be taught that much.

Memory is the second requirement, and its short term memory that is most important. Apparently most people can't remember more than seven discrete items (numbers, names of objects, whatever) without help. Some are even worse than that: how many people do you know who have to write down a phone number they plan to use within moments? Too many.. You can improve memory with effort, but it is with effort, and I'm not sure that memory "tricks" will help with this, because the problem really is the relationships between chains of events: if a, then b and if b then c, etc. By the time you get most people out to "if d", they've forgotten how "a" played into it, and if its "if d and b was also less than f", forget it. They can't follow and never will.

The final thing is inspiration, or the ability to see relationships that didn't exist before - recognizing patterns and similarities. This is what separates great problem solvers from mediocre. Somewhere here I have a book called "The flash of Genius" that talks about that. You can't learn that overnight. You need a lifetime of reading, of learning, of noticing, of analyzing and even at that, person X is going to be better at it than person Y just because their brain works better for this task.

Bottom line: there are poor problem solvers, there are mediocre problem solvers, and there are those who are really good at it. People don't exhibit great movement within those clbuttifications.

-- Tony Lawrence