PSA: Thinking Boxes

[athelind]

Attention:

The phrase "Thinking Outside The Box" is now officially Inside The Box.

Thank you.

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Comments

[iridium-wolf.livejournal.com]

*laughs* I suppose it is, the sentence is even inside a box which is inside an even larger box. ;D

[kfops.livejournal.com]

Thank goodness.

You should've issued that edict years ago!

[taverens.livejournal.com]

What about "thinking outside the circle"?

[hafoc.livejournal.com]

Is it? Nuts. I'm going to have to shift my paradigm.

(Do not try to outbuzzword or out-Bargain Bin Paperback Management Theory Book Jargon ME, buster. I work for the Government. :D )

[jonaswins.livejournal.com]

The new 'in' thing is thinking outside the hypercube.

[toob.livejournal.com]

It WAS issued years ago. Calling the phrase "Thinking Outside the Box" official INSIDE the box is ALSO inside the box.

[foofers.livejournal.com]

How about thinking outside the Klein bottle?

[dewhitton.livejournal.com]

Here I am stuck with thinking inside the Klein bottle.

[araquan.livejournal.com]

Just remember to push the clutch in first.

[cpxbrex.livejournal.com]

The phrase "Thinking Outside The Box" is now officially Inside The Box.

And has been for about twenty years. But, yeah, I dig the urge to remind people how trite "thinking outside the box" is, hehe. The second it becomes a popular culture phrase, a reasonable guy would have gotten it that it's inside the box, but, y'know . . . the people who quote pithy quotes are rarely that intelligent.

[cpxbrex.livejournal.com]

Most paradigms are shifted only because older folks die. *shifty eyes* Hey, that's straight out of Kuhn! Really! *ducks*

[haystack.livejournal.com]

THANK YOU.

I'd rather think outside the can, anyway...

[haystack.livejournal.com]

Oh, and while we're at it...

"WOW factor" is passe. I am SO tired of hearing that from my design professor this semester. I'm not in design to WOW people (though that is nice, if it happens). I'm in it to Get the Message Across in an At-Least Slightly Clever Way.

[haystack.livejournal.com]

Non-linear thought processes know no notions of geometry!

[haystack.livejournal.com]

Outside the Tesseract, even?

[ebony14.livejournal.com]

You know, I don't mind if people think inside the box, outside the box, or even on top of the box. Just so long as they THINK!

[athelind.livejournal.com]

Really? I do some of my best thinking in the can.

[hafoc.livejournal.com]

Of course, it occurs to me that I could be thinking on a Mobius strip. But on the flip side...there isn't one.

[hafoc.livejournal.com]

Same thing my profs told me in college, oddly enough. But that's a general thing. Once people form a coherent world view they spend all their mental strength explaining away any facts that disagree with it. And you know what? I bet I'm just as bad that way as anyone else.

[cpxbrex.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure that it's going to be true with this generation or in the future. Scientists are growing up with the Kuhnian paradigm shift narrative, and many of them want to change the paradigm. And I think that The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and the rest of Kuhn's work to the extent I'm familiar with it, is essentially historical. It's descriptive of things that happened in the past, but will not necessarily happen in the future. Paradigms change so fast that, y'know, we're used to it in a way that previous generations couldn't be.

Also, I think, the teaching of science, itself, has changed. You read someone like, say, Newton and he fully expected that the Principia would be perfect and eternal, like Euclid's Geometry. Nowadays, scientists go into science with the understanding that all knowledge, including their own work, is provisional.

So, I largely reject the idea that people can't change in that way. Maybe I'm falling prey to ego - heaven knows I do enough of that! - but I see no reason why people need to cling to old ideas in the face of new information. I don't see why it has to be inevitable.

[thoughtsdriftby.livejournal.com]

THINK as motto IBM years past, never caught on in corporate US sadly
too common the borrowing of such such buzzwords to re-label past deficiencies without any intent of change

And now, Rush quotes:

[athelind.livejournal.com]

"Changes aren't permanent -- but change is."

Re: And now, Rush quotes:

[cpxbrex.livejournal.com]

I momentarily had a deep terror that you were going to quote Rush Limbaugh. Imagine my pleasure to discover it was a Canadian prog rock band, instead. ;)

Re: And now, Rush quotes:

[athelind.livejournal.com]

When I use "Rush" as a proper noun, it has only one of two meanings. The other is a Coast Guard cutter.