First Blog

I.                                       I.                 Introduction.                Concerning our general behavior, it’s high about time we all had some understanding of how we operate on ourselves, and it is just as important how we are operated on by others. This is the wheelhouse of behavioral sciences. It is a vast subject. It touches our lives constantly. It’s influence is pervasive and can be so subtle we never notice it. Behavioral sciences profoundly affect our ability and success at problem-solving, from the elementary level to highly complex wicked problems. This is discussed in Section IV. We begin with the basics of behavioral sciences, Section II, and then through the lens of multiple categories and examples, Section III. II.     ...

1. Introduction. The setting is that you have a problem to solve. Not from the textbook, this problem is possibly open-ended and has no straightforward solution. It’s complicated, involving what you know and what assumptions you can make, constraints on resources you can use, and your time to solution. At the beginning, you consider what you can assume is true, you need to consider testing your solutions, and a host of other factors. Let’s look at the assumptions state. This is more familiarly called the "what if" stage.  It is a crucial phase in the creative and exploratory dimension of inquiry. It represents the moment when a problem-solver steps beyond what is already known to speculate, imagine, or hypothesize possibilities. It is driven by curiosity, imagination, and the desire to simplify and explore alternative explanations or pathways. Hopefully, you may discover you already follow these steps. Yet, in real-life problems they happen, almost always without an instruct...

"Before solving a problem, you must first understand it." A.                               A.     Defining Understanding B.     Levels of Understanding C.     More Examples of Understanding from First Principles D.     Conclusions A. Defining Understanding. Understanding is the ability to grasp the meaning of something—whether it's words, concepts, processes, or even the thoughts and emotions of others. For our purposes here, it is to understand the problem. It involves knowing how something works, why it happens, and how to apply that knowledge effectively. Next, before any problems can be solved, it is necessary to understand what is asked or posed. This means understanding the problem as posed, not some variation or misinterpretation of the problem, not some problem you can understand, but understanding what is given. Students all...