First Blog

  Int uition. It is sort of like a back stage brain, working on problems you’ve left pending. It shoots ideas up to you of the sort “What if this? Or What if that?   Most of the time it’s unimportant, but sometimes it scores big. That is why intuition is so important, for suggesting ideas that haven’t fallen naturally as you’ve worked on the problem.  Sometimes, after working long and hard, you hear it offering up an idea as if to say, “Try this, stupid.” Intuition - I Is that patient caretaker in your mind, Helping you with problems big and small, Guiding you with family and friends, Giving insights when needed most, and Warning you off the wrong path. As a trusted friend, Intuition is not always right, but It pays to listen, if not to obey, Intuition II Intuition is something like a powerful App. With access to all your data, Memories, acuity, biases, beliefs, knowledge, Some hidden from conscious access. Intuitions contain all of these, but Insights hopefully surprise,

In my teens I worked many part time jobs.  All of us did.  Nowadays, we see fewer teens working such jobs, particularly in the summer.  To me this portends long term consequences.  Why?  Because those part-time jobs were an inspiration.  How?  They inspired me to study hard and find better employment as an adult.  They helped me grow up. This hit home hard decades ago, when as a college freshman I got work at Allen-Bradley, a local electronics company in Milwaukee.  Sitting next to me at a heat-press to make resistors was the dad of one of my neighborhood friends.  We made the same wage, about $2.70/hr*, a fortune for me, a living wage for him.  I knew this made him uncomfortable, and me too.  Here I was doing exactly the same thing on a job that took only a few days to learn.  For me, it was study money; for him it was the last stop in personal advancement. Inspiration comes in diverse forms.  Sometimes in life, inspiration comes from discovering where you don’t want to be.

It may be widely believe that knowledge progresses gradually, in small steps, in gentle increments, or in slight gradations.  It may be not so, even for us as individuals.  New knowledge or understanding often begins with insights.  When you gain an insight, and it is true, it becomes applicable and remains so from then on.     This changes one’s problem solving game. This insight provides a new tool or rule, but importantly   it creates a discontinuity in your problem solving methods.    So, we might ask whether insights can come gradually?   In some cases, probably yes, though examples are difficult to furnish.  The emergence of infinity, often credited to Cantor, took centuries of dancing around the edges by philosophers.  The germ theory of disease so often attributed to Pasteur was anticipated almost with the invention of the microscope.   On the other hand plate tectonics seemed to arise by a simple insight by a single person, Alfred Wegener, in 1912 and took a mere half