posted on Aug, 28 2006 @ 06:52 AM
twitchy,
The hollow head thing was interesting. In the early 90's I went through a short training class (when Deming's 14 points were all the rave) and in
it had an exercise about breaking paradigms. A series of slides were shown with playing cards on them and we were to write down each card we saw.
The slides first flashed by quickly and then began to slow down, so we saw all the cards more than once, and for longer periods of time. There were
approximately 100-150 people in the class with me. It was not until the instructor asked "which card was not correct?" and then went back through
the slides that anyone noticed that the Queen of Spades was actually a black Queen of Hearts. Every single person in that class had written down
Queen of Spades, because there is no such thing as a black Queen of Hearts. The mind rejected data that violated a learned paradigm.
And the scary part about this human behavior is that you inherently can't tell when your mind is doing it. It's happening (as the man said in the
hollow head example) from the top down - subconsciously, involuntarily. I think that's why there are strength in numbers when looking and listening
to data - because just maybe you'll incorporate a viewpoint of some one who has a different set of paradigms, and therefore an entirely different
blindspot so that once the different viewpoints come together, they make a complete picture.