I just got to thinking a couple of minutes ago, and it dawned on me.
In school, one of the most common messages they teach you is to "think outside the box". Yet when it comes to employment, what most companies want is someone who is willing to do what is asked, and only voice his/her opinion if it seems to be called for.
The "think outside the box" attitude is dangerous in other ways, too. Society demands that someone obey the law unerringly, yet almost no one obeys traffic laws (generally as it conveniences them -- no one deliberately breaks traffic laws to be antisocial), and crime -- though obviously not universal -- is a very present element. A fault in human nature? Or the result of conflicting messages?
And finally, the "think outside the box" ideal doesn't apply at all to logic and computer programming, where all of your thinking can't extend to "what should I tell the computer to do?", but rather must extend to "how do I make the computer do what I want it to?"
Curiously enough, the belief that school teaches children to be independent is just as prevalent as the belief that school teaches children how to be functional members of society...
ID:187226
 Jan 18 2005, 6:46 am
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Right and that means that it could never be true because people always spend their lives writting books just for the sake of future generations to read them and get grades in school because of them... i mean after all, its not like when a book has a message the author actually wanted it to impact us after all, right? it's been three years since i joined byond, i quit everquest 2, im quitting world of warcraft, im quitting nexus, my girlfriend left me, i dont want another one, i hate devry, and star wars got nerfed. I'm done with everything...
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CloudMCStrife wrote:
i mean after all, its not like when a book has a message the author actually wanted it to impact us after all, right? wrong. much of the works of fiction (particularly sci-fi from the 60's in my opinion), philosophy, and debate are written with a core message in mind. Look at Fahrenheit 451 (about cenorship), I, Robot (about technology's rights when becoming sentient), and various works of Plato and even Shakespeare - all stuff with messages about the state of humanity. | |
Fiction historically functions on two levels- the obvious story and the hidden true meaning. This was a necessary conceit because the true meaning was often considered controversial or dangerous and needed a less volatile shell to carry it. Plato, for example, learned from the example of his master what happens when you speak hard truths too loudly, even in a "free" society. In our own culture, we have a history of suppressing points of view that question those in power, labelling such as subversive, communist, traitorous, or terrorist. Look at the controversy over Fahrenheit 911. While certainly a slanted piece, the bile spewed from those who disagree with its author was alarming (especially considering they are entrenched in the halls of government power), despite it being a perfect example of free speech. Fiction cleverly avoids this by attacking an effigy rather than the actual target and instructs through parallel and analogy. Thus 1984 has yet to inspire ire, despite it being an attack on a society alarmingly close to the the one we now live in.
But such is the nature of power, I suppose, and those who wield it. They seek their to consolidate their own interests and to keep down any who would muster their own resources. I could go on for hours about it (and point out how flawed modern concepts of "free society" and "capitalism" are- as Adam Smith would agree), but that would be too Off-Topic :-) | |
i think you took my message backwards but thanks for supporting my point... oh well, schools only care about bottom lines and money. (which converseley YWYWYY is money so...)... im saying i think its crap how you can .. eh whatever... just delete me, in not good enough for anyone..
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Perhaps it's easier to reconcile by viewing it this way: those in power want loyal servants. But an open mind is often better at solving complex problems. So they want you to "think outside the box" only to the degree that it helps you solve their problems and not question their methods. This is why they want free thought for say math, but get in a huff anytime you talk about teaching about the government lying, business abusing the system, and the wealthy generally staying on top regardless. They want you to know the truth as they have decided it, not the Truth as we all must come to understand individually.
And some of the discrepency is because different groups have different goals with regard to education and business. Some educators genuinely want free thinking, well-informed citizens. Other simply want indoctrination camps that produce obedient workers and consumers that patriotically support the America and all its acts. A very few business leaders actually want happy, clever workers who innovate and find new solutions to meet the needs of its consumers. Most just want workers who buy lots of company stock and go quietly when their jobs are slashed. | |
Perhaps they just want to encourage students not to be morons like their peers. :P
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Interesting thoughts, Spuzz... I agree that it's a strange conflict, and often I think that the school is doing it without knowing anything about the outside world. In my eyes, they give ideas that are "free thinking, but not TOO free thinking". Just like JMurph said, free thinking in the right areas.
Sometimes I cannot believe that teachers/schools are that naive, but I've both seen and experienced it, from both student and a teachers perspective. It's like teachers want to help the students with good intentions, but they don't see that: A) The society is much better at promoting the opposite. B) They're doing it in the wrong areas, and C) 95% of the students don't want to be helped. They want to follow the trends like everyone else. /Gazoot | |
Creativity is about the only thing that can land you millions without trying to climb a long series of ladders to reach the same goal.
Think of bill gates and everything with how microsoft got started... or the kid that made napster, etc... Creativity is what's going to save you from the typical life grind, and allow you to be free of the constraints of typical society. Just us being here is a simple resault of that think outside the box... if you weren't thinking outside, you wouldn't want to create something new. | |
Jon Snow wrote:
Think of bill gates and everything with how microsoft got started... Unethical practices in a new business domain where the courts aren't sure how to apply the old laws. Gotcha. :) | |
Well simply said, we battle over our ideas and ideas are like swords. Socrates (not plato) expressed his ideas, regardless if they were true or not, other people felt attacked by his ideas and striked out. If his death was the end resault, that is the assumed way of man kind. Regardless if he was right, the majority of people didn't like his ideas and therefore he really has no right to upset so many people, regardless if his views are right (or so he believed). Is there really a "correct" answer to philosophy? So was it really worth dieing for? I guess since his legacy still lives on, he's made quite an impression and his views have spread beyond his death so he was successful and won in the end.
Would we fight wars if there wasn't some idea to fight over? Sure surviving might require such actions to take place... But in the end in a civilized society, we no longer shoot eachother or kill eachother for the sake of killing eachother over the simple idea of killing... we do it over the basis of our ideas. A psycho has the desire to kill, so his idea is that "killing is pleasurable and thus I want to do it" and somehow finds it worthy to do through ideas and rationalizing. He's killing because he thinks it's a worthy cause to do because of the pleasure. Someone who commits suicide commits suicide not because they want to kill themselves, but instead that they find their lives not worth living because the amount of pain they feel exceeds the amount of pleasure they feel and their pain threshold. A child doesn't like the government because his family died because of their one time mistreatment, well guess what... the rest of society doesn't agree with his ideas of the government. He has no place to be speaking out... Or maybe he does, maybe instead free speech comes at a price, that in order to speak your mind you have to deal with the fact that you are essentially attacking other people with your ideas, and if that means death that's the cost. Or perhaps Socrates wasn't as intelligent as we thought, perhaps a truely intelligent person could speak his mind in ways that would have the same outcome as Socrates, but without his own death. Perhaps Socrates failed at what he was trying to do, but by dumb luck suceeded at the same time due to his intelligent lover Plato copying everything he said like a good little boy. So - your opinion = a sword voicing your opinion towards other human beings = an attack on their ideas. (Perhaps can even be related to calling them stupid unintentionally. So maybe they'll agree later on, but because you insaulted them attack back anyways.) so if you hit someone, they might hit back. Just make sure when you speak out, you're speaking to passivists :) | |
he thought outside the bun... I mean box.
what's unethical matter anyways? It's not unethical unless society sees it as wrong through the eyes of the court... in which case Socrates said that majority of people are morons and so the laws themselves are unethical simply on the basis that there may not be a whole lot of logic or positive nature to them, but simply that society views them as right. Sometimes you have to knock someone down in order to bring yourself higher. Look at Wal-Mart. Sure it's wrong, but it works. If you had the choice to be the multi-billionare that bill gates is or the wall mart CEO... you'd probably make the same choices because what does everyone else matter when you have billions of dollars and can simply make up for your unethical deeds by rebuilding a town after a big tsunami hits and destroys everything. Such a great deed you could have never done if you hadn't kicked someone else in the dirt. Just maximizing a little utility aye? | |
Going by that reasoning, Saddam Hussein, Joseph Stalin, and all of the other dictators were just maximizing a little utility.
Ethics and morals are part of what makes us humans what we are. | |
How'd hitler maximize utility? He killed millions of jews, which could have been used for war (and probably would have won). That's not even considering that because of his unethical treatment it brought the U.S. into the war much sooner then they could handle. However it was a brilliant move to blame all germanies problems on a particular group (and thus not his fault), just not one so large that it contributed to the eventual downfall of his reign.
Stalan... if you disagreed with his ideas he shot you. I'd say it was pretty affective except for the point that because he was unethical, he was viewed as a bad person and thus created a mass amount of people that wanted him out of power which in turn was NOT maximizing utility and led to his downfall. Saddam obviously didn't maximize utility because he's left with nothing atm. Except for maybe, a fiddle... He wasn't really that brilliant at all. If he would have let our inspectors come in without a fight, if he would have not tried to develop weapons and just been ruler and became extremely powerful through other means (like maximizing oil production) other then corruption then he might have been more successful. The other people in history who were bad I don't know so well.. A Bad maximizing utility joke: You know, Hitler sent all those jews to heaven... the most beautiful, great place you could possibly ever be. 100% better than life AT LEAST. Not to mention that it's for all of ETERNITY versus just a few 50-100 years if I'm lucky, and without all the pain of life. How is that such a bad thing? Ok ok I know it's a really stupid and bad joke, but I said it to one of the people that came by my door advertising religion and I've never had another guy come since... and another time to a guy handing out bibles. Got a few good looks for it too :) | |
Jon Snow wrote:
He wasn't really that brilliant at all. If he would have let our inspectors come in without a fight, if he would have not tried to develop weapons and just been ruler and became extremely powerful through other means (like maximizing oil production) other then corruption then he might have been more successful. He did let the inspectors in at the end. Bush wanted him blown up anyways, so blown up he was. There are no WMDs. There were no WMDs. All the WMDs that the US gave Iraq a long time ago are long since gone. | |
Got a few good looks for it too :) Maybe that's because they don't believe Jews go to Heaven like good Christians do. ;-) (Their opinion, not mine. =P) | |
It's funny, I had this same line of reasoning last night... after a conversation with a UFO conspiracy theorist, who berated everybody else for not thinking outside the box enough. To his "reasoning", his ideas were different, which automatically made them good. Anybody who didn't think the invasion was imminent is thinking inside the box and is therefore automatically wrong.
The thing is that creativity without intelligent reasoning is like the lottery, in many ways... and even with intelligence it's still a gamble. Maybe most people's perceptions about world events ARE wrong... but that doesn't make it likely that this guy's shot-in-the-dark theories were correct... there's too many other possibilities. Despite what Jon said about Bill Gates and creativity being what lands you millions... it just doesn't work that way. There's only a handful of beaten paths, and an infinite number of ways you could go that take you off the beaten path. Only a tiny, tiny number of them will do you any good. Say you always eat a burger for lunch. Tomorrow, grab the first thing you see after 12:00 noon and eat it. Whoo... maybe it'll be a cookie. Maybe it'll be an active yogurt culture. it'll be a cinder block. That's thinking outside the box! Have to get down the lobby? Well, why take the elevator, or the stairs? Rappel down the side of the building, or base jump, or test out some new human fly equipment. Thinking outside the box! There are times when conventional thinking will fail... and in those times, then you need to be able to come in from a different angle... but if you go through life thinking that a new approach is automatically better just because it's new, then you're not thinking outside the box at all... you're just not thinking. As for what employers want... I don't see any contradiction between them wanting flexible and creative thinkers who do what they're told when they're told. So many people don't seem to grasp that when a company pays you for your time, they have literally bought that time from you. Those hours aren't yours any more. | |
I hope people today don't believe that the "box" is the parameters that society has set upon itself to prevent erroneous actions. I don't doubt it, though, the way people act anymore.
To "think outside of the box" can be thought of in many different ways, as shown here. With most old catch phrases there is a catch(the irony). Everyone thinks differently, its a good thing. The way you perceive that message can be absolutely different from the way ten or twenty other people view it. When I hear "think otuside of the box" I think I shouldn't be limited by whats is common thinking now. The Wright Brothers done just the same and changed the world. Then some people view it as "I can be a rebel!" and get where they are now. | |
Well I guess we'd have to explain what thinking outside the box is...
since to me it's merely thinking outside the norm of society. Which could be applied to your cinder block example... That's a good example for someone who's thinking outside the box and not using intelligence. If they use intelligence however they'd probably do something like, "Oh wow I always eat fred myer chicken, why don't I try at least organic chicken this time." Or, "lets go vegetarian this time and save a few animals." I don't know how popular vegetarian or organic foods are anymore, but the majority of people I'd say don't eat them all the time, so it would be thinking outside the box. I think the idea is to not get stuck in a continual path or cycle in life... which is the goal I think of teachers. If everyone was thinking the same way (the normal way), the world would be boring. Weird is good right? Only to the extent that the weird person is intelligent enough to be able to tie it into the acceptance box of society. a bad example of weird would be to get a bunch of body piercings all over your body and tattoo's, then trying to go get a job with your big hooped earings, your "I killed a man tattoo" and with a wacky sams t-shirt on. It's unlogical, and it's not a good way to be weird and still be intelligent. Creativity really is how you're going to hit it big though... Think of writers, they use simular methods to other writers, since those methods are tride and true and you know they work, but the creativity is still there... and they make money off it... then there's musicians... game designers... etc. we're all different, and we're all good at different things... we just have to find where our creativity is and go from there. Intelligence and creativity mixed like you said are the foundations of everything. If we didn't think outside the box, then we would still be growing food by hand and without plows, etc... and I doubt we would have made it this far as the human race has :) Of course there are some who just prefer the Master Slave mentality... which is fine. I personally don't like being a slave, though. :P | |
*edit*
By the way, these labels came from the teachers, not the kids.
Society is much more like a 'prison-for-your-mind' than you might think.
If you ask someone who is psychotic, they'll say there's nothing wrong with them, granted. Regardless of what is 'wrong' with them, their subjective view of the world is right and correct.
Then, they get sent to therapy and come out 'normal', 'fixed'. They would remember how they used to be, and think of it as being wrong and incorrect.
It's a little too much like the ending of 1984.