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Passages Of The Day |
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| The Intelligence Trap (i) |
You set a bear trap to catch bears. You set an elephant trap to catch elephants. You use a mouse trap to catch mice. The intelligence trap is the trap that intelligent people sometimes set for themselves.
Why do you need to know about this intelligence trap? Well, you may be a highly intelligent person and you may already be caught in the trap. As I mentioned earlier you may consider yourself so intelligent that you feel you do not need to learn anything about thinking. Once you learn about the intelligence trap you will see that intelligence and thinking are not the same thing.
I often use the analogy of a motor car. Innate intelligence corresponds to the power of the engine and the excellence of the suspension. Thinking skill corresponds to the skill of the car driver. A powerful car may be badly driven and a more humble car may be driven very well. Intelligence represents the innate potential of the mind. The operating skill with which the mind is used is called thinking. We may not be able to do much about our innate intelligence, but we can improve our thinking skills if we make the effort.
It may be that you do not consider yourself very intelligent, but that you have to deal with intelligent people from time to time. You may feel overwhelmed by their intelligence and confuse this for thinking skill. So it could be useful to learn about the intelligence trap.
A highly intelligent person will often take a certain view on a subject and then use his or her thinking just to support that view. This will be done with arguments that make a great deal of sense. But the more able a thinker is to support a point of view the less inclined is that thinker actually to explore the subject. Since the original point of view may be based on prejudice or habit, this failure to explore the subject is bad thinking. The ability to support a particular point of view never removes the necessity to look for other points of view. By choosing our values and our perceptions it is usually possible to construct support for almost any view we like. The only protection we have against fooling ourselves is the ability to explore other views. In the end we may choose to come back to our first view but this is after exploring other views. So we sometimes find that the intelligent person is trapped into one point of view by his or her ability to defend that view. |
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Passage taken from: "Edward de Bono's Masterthinkers Handbook" by Edward de Bono, ISBN 0-14-014594-X Copyright © Mica Management Resources Inc., 1985
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