The Intelligence Trap says: The more intelligent a person is the less likely they are to be a good thinker.
Why? Because very often the more intelligent a person is and the more articulate they are (if they are trapped in the right/wrong thinking method) the more they will defend the ‘rightness’ of their cvs. The more they dig-in to defend their cvs the less able they are to escape from their cvs box and find a much better one. This is one of the most serious problems of human thinking. It makes us very slow thinkers.
Bias toward criticism
To make matters worse, in our society there’s a strong bias towards criticism because it’s easier to criticise than to design. If you advocate an idea, you make yourself vulnerable to the criticism of others. On the other hand, if you just sit back and pick the faults in the ideas of others you get to be the one who showed others they were wrong. This fault-checking behavior can often be rewarded by the nodding approval of the peanut gallery.
It is also self-reinforcing: once you’ve been the critic for a while, you may realise others will do the same to your ideas and so you may be less inclined to put forward new ideas of your own. This also makes us very slow thinkers.
Fault-checking
Fault-checking is important but it’s not a substitute for innovation. Picking all the faults in a stagecoach may lead to the perfect stagecoach, but it won’t give you a motor-car. We need a different kind of thinking for that.
Of course, not all intelligent people get caught in the intelligence trap. Some are are able to escape from their cvs box instinctively, or some have been taught the specific thinking skills to do so.
The 59 Second Course
The last lesson was about – cvs2bvs – what I have called, ‘software for your brain’. Here’s a quick summary. Click here to watch the 59 Second Course in Thinking …
… https://youtu.be/WMSDj9GA4qw
DFQ #03 – What is the most important insight that you now have about ‘thinking’ that you’ll want to take away and think a lot more about?
Tomorrow’s Lesson #4 – Rate Your Own Level of Thinking. A 5-minute questionnaire.
Bonus Poster – Here’s a poster that summarises the cvs2bvs software for your brain. If you like you can print it out …
No one can define exactly what is the intelligence but thinking is a process which we can follow; it’s driven force is to always create a bvs
Moving forward, thinking out of the box, and to be creative, without fear of failure.
How many bvs opportunities have been missed by defending a long held cvs on a topic?
I’m thinking – ‘how many cvs’s am I trapped into defending?’
‘The more intelligent a person is the less likely they are to be a good thinker’. Sound great and gives great insights if you try to observe intelligent person you can see how truly this statement sound. Well an intelligent person thinks he knows so much and he try to be right at any given moment and he get trap in it he most often get away with this habit if the auduance are all educated in the right / wrong system. But someone who has enhance his or her thinking may think through and see this facts. Experiments by observing others can really teach us more. Quite an interesting insight. Thanks
Think outside the box.
Unchecked, both our intelligence and criticism can lock us into one CVS and prevent us from comprehending or considering other views (BVS).
The absolute necessity for critically examining one’s thinking on an ongoing basis. The need for developing the capability to escape from the CVS.
An outsider thinker will be a target of criticism but are the most likely to be innovators and create the impossible.
This is an interesting concept, it IS easier to criticise, or to build on another idea (or CVS)… so now I know that might be my default, I can be alert to it. I can choose not to defend, but ask what might be a better solution – a BVS or maybe even 2 or more!