Back to basics

It is the results season. Kids and parents are talking about what they have scored and which college to study next and how much money its going to cost. Lots of courses are talked about. But one thing I am very sure about is no parent or kid is talking about studying philosophy as a course. I am not even sure if BA philosophy is even offered as a degree course in some college. 

We want results and now. Job and immediately after degree. Profit and right after one starts of business. When I read about "First Principles Approach" I just fell in love with that concept. One can say it's a fancy way of saying "Ask Why", which it kind of is.  Nevertheless when we look at the world from a "First Principles" point of view it gives a completely different meaning to even mundane things . Your decisions become much more clear. It also shows how people are completely unable to do simple reasoning on their every day decisions or when they take a political position. Don't get me wrong, this is not hubris. Most people would take a much better decision than me, but I am also certain most people don't have solid reasoning on why they take a particular decision. Social and empirical rules influence our decisions a lot or at least help to get to one quickly. But the problem is that decisions that doesn't have solid reasoning also hampers the society and self in making progress. Irrationality creeps in and costs a lot of money, time, opportunities and creates avoidable problems. I think that's why studying philosophy will train the society to reason right and wrong, ethics and morals, instead of just taking deciding from empirical formulas.

I was extremely glad when I saw the an assignment on Kantian and Utilitarian approaches to ethics in our Information Systems course. I was hoping that we would have detailed discussion. But due to lack of time and probably also due to our aversion of anything philosophy we did not delve into the first principles of ethics of privacy policies of IT companies in our class. I would have enjoyed that session.

I am kind of digressing; it's getting late and you are losing interest. My argument is that we think education and learning is a way to get a job or advance our career or improve the profit as a business. I think it is wrong and counter productive. We need to go back to basics, learn the first principles, and have a philosophical construct. Then one would learn to make better decisions and that will help him/her with better jobs, advance career and help improve profit of their organizations.

I am looking forward to a day when Logic and Categorical imperative is taught in Kindergarten and beyond.

Personality Types

I think it was in 2008. In a two days corporate training program I took the MBTI(Myers-Briggs Type Indicator) test. We had extensive lecture and group work after the test to understand the dichotomies and the personality types. I couldn't recollect now the exact type I classified into. But I do remember that what I got from the test and what I felt about myself pretty much matched except for one dichotomy. The whole program was fun and I vividly remember some of the exercises.

Cut to 2019, in the OB class we had a lecture on Self-Awareness, Social Awareness and as part of that we took the MBTI again. What was striking to me was that this time I have got kind of middle score in three of the dichotomies and in the dichotomy for which the test indicates a strong preference, I think my nature tends to be the other one. Obviously the test has its limitation and I do not think we can bucket so many billion folks into just 16 categories accurately.

But, I do like this exercise. It is a way of looking at and trying to understand self and others. The most important learning though is that personalities are just different types and there is nothing good or bad in itself.  This is applicable for self and for others. So, when dealing with others we can avoid judgements & stereotypes, better understand their point of view and appreciate their contributions.

The actual MBTI test is quite costly, but there are many free equivalent tests. This time I took the one at - http://www.humanmetrics.com/personality

If you want to understand what a given personality type means - check this out https://www.16personalities.com/