October 26, 2011
www.nst.com.my
Unconventional Thinking for Young Malaysians
2011/10/24
By Umapagan Ampikaipakan
LAST Saturday, during a Singapore Writers Festival, a rockstar freakonomist as well as geek-in-chief, Steven Levitt, gave a reduced lecture upon unconventional thinking.
He began with a story, with a story of John Szilagyi, a mid-level worker during a Internal Revenue Service in America who had become roughly obsessively preoccupied with a kind of things which taxpayers listed as their dependants. He had noticed which most of a names of young kids which relatives put down upon their tax forms sounded quite odd: Fluffy, Spike, as well as so on. Szilagyi became increasingly questionable as well as referred to to a IRS which they have it compulsory for taxpayers to not usually put down a name for their dependants, though a social security series as well.
At first, they deserted his thought for being too Orwellian, for being too 1984, though a couple of years later, when "Congress was clamouring for more tax revenue, Szilagyi's thought was dug up, rushed brazen as well as put into law". What happened subsequent was staggering.
When a tax earnings proposed entrance in a following year, 7 million young kids had unexpected dead from a tax rolls. It seemed which a single in each 10 child in a United States was usually finished up, conceived by a pen, a fetish of his or her parents' imagination. And what Szilagyi's elementary thought did by uncovering this national fraud was to enlarge sovereign tax collections by roughly US$ 3 billion (RM9.4 billion) in which single year.
Now there were most good reasons why Levitt regaled us with this story. Two of them, however, mount out. The init! ial was that great ideas have been rare. That they have been generational. That they have a ability to renovate multitude as well as to change a universe as you know it. The second was which a great thought doesn't have to be a formidable one. That it doesn't need to insist string speculation or solve Fermat's last theorem. That sometimes, even a most everyday solutions can be nothing reduced of genius.
Which, in itself, raises a whinging question. Why did it take roughly a century for someone to come up with a solution so simple? How did all of those people poring over those tax forms everyday skip something so commonsensical? Why did no a single consider about it prior to Szilagyi?
The answer, while rsther than straightforward, is nevertheless incredibly depressing. No a single else thought about it because they usually didn't have a time. Heck, it would take Szilagyi 3 decades of staring during tax submissions prior to he happened upon which clever turn himself.
It isn't during all surprising. When we're in school, you outlay all of a time studying. Just memorising contribution to pass exams. When we're finished with that, you outlay a rest of a lives working. So caught up in a day-to-day which you hardly have a time, or a inclination, for anything else. The elementary fact of a matter is which you outlay little to no time during all indulging in thought. Of any kind.
And therein lies a problem. Because somewhere in a journey towards modernity, you usually stopped thinking. We came up with codes, you came up with plans, you came up with production line methods, upon how to live. We believed which if you usually continued along a path we're on, which if you kept upon you do what you were doing, you would not stone a boat, you would not put during risk which glorious status quo.
If anything, it's finished us lazier than ever before. Not physically though mentally. Intellectually. It has l! eft us l ost as well as delirious, utterly incapable when trying to address so most of a problems which plague us as a society.
Maybe a solution lies in a approach you teach a children. Because all of a preparation seems rooted in a past. Not usually as superintendence though as methodology. But usually because we've finished something a single approach it doesn't meant it's a right way. It doesn't meant you go on to do it for right away as well as forevermore.
Maybe you need to start teaching a kids to consider again. To concede for a illusory instead of usually cramming for As. Maybe you need to stop gloomy their innate curiosity by systematically beating out of them what you consider is invalid as well as unnecessary.
Maybe what you need in a propagandize syllabus is for teachers to set aside an hour each day as well as usually let kids come up with ideas. Let them explore. Let them contemplate. Let them embrace a impossible. Because during a end of a day, which kind of creativity, which kind of unconventional thinking, competence usually be a usually thing which saves us.
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