Reframe E-Book

Eric Knight

• Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Seitenzahl: 290

Beschreibung

Why can't we eliminate terrorism by killing terrorists? Why can't we learn anything about climate change by discussing the weather? And what do fishermen in Turkey have to teach us about international relations? Often we compound our problems by focusing on the apparent crux of the matter. In Reframe, Eric Knight encourages us to step back and observe our world from afar. By tackling problems from original perspectives and discarding the magnifying glass, we will discover hidden solutions. A remarkably innovative and compelling book from one of the world's most exciting young thinkers, Reframe illustrates how we can cast a fresh eye on seemingly insoluble difficulties by seeing the wood for the trees.

Leseprobe

For my mother and father, with love and gratitude

Table of Contents

Title Page

Dedication

INTRODUCTION WHY PEOPLE ARE SMART but act so dumb…

CHAPTER 1 THE WALL STREET BANKER GENE and why we all have it…

CHAPTER 2 HOW TO SPOT GUERILLASin the mist…

CHAPTER 3 CROSSING THE BORDER into Tea Party America…

CHAPTER 4 MEDIA MAGNATESand intellectual magnets…

CHAPTER 5 FREEDOM FIGHTERSin lab coats…

CHAPTER 6 THE ALL-YOU-CAN EAT GUIDEto carbon slimming…

CHAPTER 7 THE VALLEY OF DEATHand how to climb out of it…

CHAPTER 8 HEDGEHOG VERSUS FOXwhy nimble is better…

CONCLUSION CHANGING THE WORLDone frame at a time…

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS…

INDEX…

Copyright

INTRODUCTION

WHY PEOPLE ARE SMART

but act so dumb

I first realised I was missing a part of the world during the summer I spent in the jungles of Costa Rica. Hidden beneath the giant arms of the ceiba tree, I felt at peace. Costa Rica offered my twenty-year-old self a refuge from the pace of the modern world. There was a thrill that came with anonymity. I had spent my first two years of university learning Spanish and, with a carefully cultivated tan, I now delighted in being mistaken as tico. I loved bartering with locals at the market for fruit and vegetables. I savoured the simple taste of gallo pinto, rice with beans. Whenever I could, I would carry a day’s supplies in a small string bag. The idea that I might get lost and be able to survive on the bare necessities was my ultimate escapist dream.

In Costa Rica I was posted to a little village called Grano de Oro as a volunteer aid worker with a group of eleven other Australians and Canadians. Grano de Oro, we were told, needed a community hall. The Cabécars, the local indigenous people, would rest there after days of journeying through dense jungle before making their way to the regional markets in Turrialba. The hall would offer shelter and a chance to mingle. Every few months the US government organised a helicopter drop of food, toys, clothes and other supplies at a spot nearby. The hall would also make it easier to distribute these things up into the mountains.

Our modest mission that summer never happened. The building materials for the hall never arrived. Warm tropical rain set in and the road into the mountains became impossibly treacherous. Bored and restless to change the world, I began spending more time at the pulpería, the corner shop where people from the village and the mountains hung out and played pool. As my Spanish improved and the people at the pulpería went from being strangers to friends, I learnt something that profoundly changed the way I saw the world.

The thing was, no one in Grano de Oro wanted this community hall. They wouldn’t say no if you offered it to them for free, but they already had one which more than did the job. The reason they had signed the government papers and what they really wanted was people to help mentor the kids in their community – the ones my age. The world was changing and these kids were missing out on the benefits of economic progress. Solving the economic challenges facing Grano de Oro was more complicated than building a new community hall. But seeing this required more patience and a different approach than first met the eye.

As I went to the pulpería day after day, playing more pool than I liked and speaking more Spanish than I knew how, I began to realise that my Costa Rican friends didn’t want the life I had imagined for them. It did them no favours to put up a few planks or clean up their gardens so they could grow vegetables and settle into life in the jungle. When I asked them what they wanted to do with their lives, their answers shocked me. Alejandro wanted to become an accountant. Henry wanted to be a banker or a businessman. Nazareth wanted to study international relations, and the rest wanted to be lawyers.

“Why on earth would you want to do that?” I asked them indignantly. “I’ve tried it, and believe me, what you’ve got is much better.” It was only later that I realised the mistake I was making. In projecting my own dreams for them, I was robbing them of the freedom to have their own.

Solving the economic challenges of Grano de Oro was about education and mentoring, not about building something you could bounce a ball against or take a photo of. The building was an obvious answer to Grano’s problems, but it wasn’t the best one. My friends eventually went to university in San Jose, but I was the one who learnt the lesson that summer. By seeing the problem from one angle, I had missed the answers lying just out of view.

1.

This is a book about our trickiest problems, how they have answers, and why we miss them. I’m interested in political and economic problems, mainly. In the chapters ahead we will travel through history: from the spectacular financial bubbles which plagued Dutch finance in the seventeenth century to Lawrence of Arabia’s great campaigns in the Middle East, from the fears of ecological catastrophe in eighteenth-century England to the f low of Mexican migrants crossing the US border every day. Each of these problems is very different, but I want to persuade you that we make the same mistake in each case. We focus on what’s immediately apparent and we miss the bigger picture.

To see what I mean, take a look at the drawing below. It is a picture of a table resting against a wall, with several objects sitting on it: a box of pins, a candle and some matches. How would you light the candle and attach it to the wall so that no wax drips onto the table?

Don’t worry if you find this tricky. The experiment was invented more than half a century ago by Karl Duncker, a German psychologist, to examine the way we think through puzzles. The most common answer is to pin the candle to the wall at an angle so that the wax runs down the wall. The correct answer is to empty the box of pins and use it as a candleholder. When you pin the box to the wall and place the candle inside, there is no risk of wax splashing on the table.

The Duncker candle problem isn’t an intelligence test. It doesn’t reflect how well educated you are or how big your brain is. Young children are among the best at getting the right answer. The reason we struggle with it is that we are so used to seeing the box in terms of one purpose – as a container for pins – that we miss the other way of using it. Once the solution is revealed to us, we get it. No one makes the same mistake twice with the Duncker candle problem. You will now never forget to see a box of pins as a potential candleholder.

The Duncker problem is a neat party trick. But in this book I want to pull it out of the realm of puzzles and apply it to the world of politics. My contention is that we often struggle with our trickiest political problems because of how we see them. We tend to view the world in set ways. We become so intent on analysing a problem one way that we lose all the subtlety needed to get to the best answer. When this happens, we need to readjust how we interpret the world around us. We can solve seemingly insoluble problems by changing the way we think about them.

I am aware this is an optimistic – some would even say simplistic – view of the world. I’ll justify it as the book goes on. But to fully appreciate why we miss the answers latent in the world around us, we need to go one step beyond the Duncker experiment. It’s not just that we fixate on one thing and not others. It’s that we fixate on certain kinds of things. Let me show you what I mean.

Suppose for a moment that you are a randomly selected person living in the United States in 2006. Think about what you know of the place and ask yourself the following question: which of the following is most likely to kill you next year? Take a close look at each line and select which cause of death, in column “A” or “B”, is more likely in each case.

CAUSES OF DEATHABAll accidents (unintentional injuries) StrokeSuicideDiabetesHigh blood pressureInfluenza and pneumoniaHomicideAlzheimer’s diseaseWarSyphilis

If you answered “A” to any of the options above, you have illustrated the point I am about to make. These causes of death are taken from the records of the US National Center for Health Statistics for 2007. In each case, the likelihood of being killed by “B” is higher than for “A”. In fact, in almost every case the likelihood of “B” outnumbers “A” by a factor of at least two to one.

The reason why many of us were drawn to column “A” is because it contains all the causes of death we are most likely to see and hear about. We have all read stories of people who committed suicide, but deaths by diabetes rarely make the papers. Some of our relatives probably suffer from high blood pressure, and it seems a whole lot worse than when they last had the flu. As for murder and war, they are the stuff of the nightly news.

Two cognitive psychologists working in the 1970s, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, conducted an experiment much like the one above. They went through a list of causes of death with interview subjects and recorded their reactions. We will learn more about Tversky and Kahneman’s work in Chapter 1, but their conclusions were basically this: people overestimated the likelihood of certain causes of death – murder, suicide, fatal accidents – because these were the most dramatic and easy to see. What they underestimated were the silent killers – asthma, stroke and so on.

In the chapters ahead, I call this impulse the magnifying glass trap. Most people think of a magnifying glass as a visual aid, but I think of it in the opposite way. The magnifying glass trap is the tendency to zoom in and fix on one corner of the universe and miss those elements of a solution lying just outside the lens. Sometimes we are lured into the trap by shiny objects: those parts of a problem which are visually compelling and graphic. At other times we are lured by intellectual trinkets and shiny ideas. Both can distract us on our mission to solve complex problems. It’s only when we cast them aside that we have a chance of making progress.

2.

I’ve presented two ideas so far. One: we tend to view the world through a magnifying glass. Two: we tend to point the magnifying glass in the direction of shiny objects. These ideas should prompt you to ask a very good question. If we look for the answers in the wrong places, what should we do about it?

I will suggest in this book that we should “reframe” the problem. It is important to be clear what I mean by this. Reframing is not a linguistic tool, a trick to disguise or evade difficult problems. Rather, it is an intellectual choice we must make. Seeing the answer to our problem requires us to have the right elements of the problem – the right system – in focus. Instead of a magnifying glass, think for a moment of the lens on a camera. When the aperture is set at one width, we see a f lower. That’s one system in focus. Widen the aperture and we see a meadow – that’s another system in focus. Widen it further and we see the mountains – a third system. Having a particular system in focus alters our ability to see the answer. Focus on the flower, and the mountains are invisible. Reframe the problem – remove the magnifying glass – and we may arrive at the right answer.

In the chapters ahead I will reframe some of our most intractable political debates. I will be ambitious in choosing what we take on: the biggest political headaches of the last decade. We will begin by looking at the way a Wall Street banker did a deal in the late ’90s. We will also examine how a US general fought a war in the Middle East. We will consider climate change, immigration and more. In each case, these debates have become stuck because someone has fallen into the magnifying glass trap.

Reframe is as much a book about human psychology as it is about politics. I’m less interested in telling you what to think and more interested in showing you an alternative way to approach sticky situations. In the end the story I will tell is an optimistic one of how we can make the world more peaceful and prosperous. We can resolve our trickiest problems. In some cases we already are solving them – we just don’t see it. The most common mistake is to search for the answers in the wrong place without thinking to adjust our point of view. Sometimes this mistake is made by others. In this book I want us to ask a different question: when is the mistake our own?