What Was I Thinking?Next is sorting, the important and subtle task of grouping items according to similarities and differences. In a sense, this kind of pattern recognition is the highest level of human intelligence. Seeing patterns where others see confusion is what distinguishes the great chess masters—and the great diagnosticians, historians, philosophers, legal theorists. Recognizing distinctions is the other side of the same skill. Such compare-and-contrast judgments are extremely difficult to produce through computerized intelligence. But computers can help people exercise their own judgment by providing cues, props, and reminders. They do this mainly by allowing you to apply “tags”—identifiers that help in later assessments of data. For 10 years I have used Zoot, even though it is idiosyncratic and somewhat hard to learn, because it is more powerful and supple in such tagging than anything else I’ve seen. If I read an article, I can decide that a certain paragraph is relevant to China—and to a meeting I’ll have next week, and to something I want to see in India. With Zoot I can assign it to all those categories with a few keystrokes. The computer’s role here is to provide a record of my judgments about similarities and differences, so I don’t have to try to keep them in my head. Both sorting and the next step, outlining, take us closer to the point where mechanical processes merge with intellectual ones. Assigning something to a category inevitably affects our conception of that category, and arraying ideas visually, as in an outline, inevitably affects our view of how the ideas fit. The most straightforward computer outliners are cleaner, faster ways of creating hierarchies than is normally possible using pen and paper. NoteMap, now owned by the LexisNexis company, is an elegant PC version of the outlining techniques we learned in high school; OmniOutliner is its counterpart for the Mac. Most of the time I end up using BrainStorm for outlines on the PC: it is quick and flexible and has features the others lack. But after a while the plain old I, A, 1, a–style outlines seem pointless on a computer. They are one way of depicting the connections among facts or concepts, and were the most feasible way when we were working with typewriters. There are many other ways to represent these relationships visually, and many fascinating programs help users explore these possibilities. PersonalBrain, for PCs, shows ideas or items as connected points in a sort of 3‑D representation of space. You can see how it works at TheBrain.com. MindManager, for PCs and Macs, and its free counterparts like FreeMind apply the popular concept of “mind mapping” to show how ideas mesh and diverge. The Axon Idea Processor, the product of more than 15 years’ solo labor by an engineer named Chan Bok in Singapore, offers an unbelievable array of PC tools for visualizing information: flow charts, fish-bone diagrams, and several dozen more. It’s at tinyurl.com/y3gg88. This leads to the newest ambitious entry: Rationale, an “argument processor” from a start-up company in Melbourne, Australia, called Austhink. The firm’s CEO, Tim van Gelder, is a former academic philosopher whose specialty was teaching critical thinking—that is, preparing students to examine the premises of any argument, another person’s or their own. He had a discouraging experience in the 1990s when teaching such classes at universities in the United States. “Despite my best efforts, and maybe theirs, it just wasn’t working,” he told me in a Skype conversation, he in Melbourne and I in Shanghai. He was gracious enough not to attribute this failure to the defects of America’s K-12 school system. Instead, he concluded that people in general needed better training in assessing arguments. After returning to Australia, he raised money to start a company and create a program that could be used by schools for teaching logic. In operation, the Rationale program is quite simple. You state a main contention you are trying to test—I should buy a new house, we should invade Iran—and then systematically list each of the supporting claims for it. Then you list the objections to each claim, and the rebuttals to those objections, and so on until you’re down to first principles—all of which are shown as connected boxes on a map. “To the extent you are perfectly clear about your thoughts, this should be a trivial process,” van Gelder told me. But in reality, he said, people find it more challenging than they expect, and this visual representation of the claims and counterclaims generally provokes a new perspective on the ideas at stake. The more factors there are to weigh in making a decision—and, especially, the more views there are to reconcile when more than one person is involved in a choice—the more helpful this logic map can be. For example, a “tree” view in Rationale can show the full chain of assumptions that lead to a particular conclusion, which in turn helps identify exactly where people with different views disagree. “Everyone knows that complex structure is generally more easily understood and conveyed in visual or diagrammatic form,” van Gelder wrote in an academic paper. “That is why, for example, we have street maps rather than verbal descriptions of the layout of cities.” The same principle applies in complex debates, he told me, because in all but the simplest discussions people have a hard time remembering all the relevant considerations. Van Gelder’s initial sales target was schools and universities, but he increasingly sells to consulting firms, govern‑ ment agencies, and other groups wrestling with decisions, as well as to individuals. The strongest interest has come from U.S. intelligence agencies, which are using the software to train analysts to think critically about intelligence claims. I was gracious enough not to ask van Gelder why he didn’t finish the program a few years earlier. James Fallows is an Atlantic national correspondent.
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