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The Thursday Thesis - 30/4/2020
I love teaching guitar! This won’t surprise any of my guitar students – they’re used to me grinning and laughing during lessons. What does surprise them though is the simplicity of many of their favourite songs. It’s a funny thing, but it keeps on happening. Heads are shaken, brows furrow, and "it can't be that easy..." is regularly heard. It's as though I'm breaking some kind of rule, making playing guitar so simple and easy... But that's because there's a type of thinking error known as misattribution – the assigning of qualities to a person or thing which has nothing to do with the real qualities they possess. I did it myself for years – decades actually – and it really didn’t help at all. These days, not so much. Here's how the misattribution error goes for music fans and wannabe guitar players, singers, and just about everybody else:
Obviously, there’s no causal link between liking a piece of music and it being a technical challenge to play. In fact, the more popular a piece of music is the less complex it tends to be. If you don’t believe me, just listen to the mainstream radio stations: most of what you’ll hear are short loops of a few simple chords, assembled into blocks (usually called introduction, verse, chorus, middle 8, bridge and outro) and produced to make them more interesting and variable than their deep structure really is. I’m not knocking it – I’m just pointing out that the reality of music is not what we think it is, most of the time. So reflect on this little thought: before music became something you bought – as a recording of some type – music was something you did; something you made for yourself, just for the fun of it. Back then, almost everyone would get up and sing, play something and join in with whoever else was playing. Back then it was easy and commonplace – so how did so many of us get convinced that we needed to have a “gift” or a special talent? We fell under the hypnotic power of marketing, hype, bullshit, and the loud voices who seemed to know what was what. Did music get harder, or did we get stupider, less “talented” and less musical? Or did we just allow ourselves to be deceived by charlatans - and our own assumptions? © Neil Cowmeadow 2020 Please Like and Share The Thursday Thesis with your friends, family, and your chosen deity. I’d love to hear your comments, along with any ideas you’d care to hurl at me. Info@NeilCowmeadow.com
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 The Thursday Thesis - 23/4/2020
Warren Buffett – the World’s greatest investor – has a very simple way of sorting out the wheat from the chaff in his life. It obviously works, because he’s grown his company, Berkshire Hathaway, from nothing to billions, so we might be wise to take a tip or two from him. And that’s the thing – most people take advice from their peers. Big mistake. Huge. Why is it a mistake? Because your peers are more or less your equal, and are often less informed than you are. They are also navigating from their own map, applying their own prejudices and biases to your situation – making judgements based upon their values and principles. A far better plan is to get your tips from people who are doing better than you in the area of life you are concerned with. So – if you want to be financially successful – don’t take the advice of poor people. If you want to get into great shape – don’t take diet and exercise advice from fat people. Got it? Good. So, what did Warren do to keep his mind ON what he wanted and OFF what he doesn’t want? He made just two lists. List One is the DO list – the half-dozen most important things in his life. Half a dozen, max. List Two is everything else – the plethora of things that he absolutely didn’t want to do. He lives by List One. How simple is that? I wish someone had told me this when I was a spotty, long-haired kid. D’oh! © Neil Cowmeadow 2020 Please Like and Share The Thursday Thesis with your friends, family, and your chosen deity. I’d love to hear your comments, along with any ideas you’d care to hurl at me. Info@NeilCowmeadow.com  Episode 200 - Content V. Principles
The Thursday Thesis - 16/4/2020 There are two kinds of teaching, as far as I can tell: first there is the simple spoon-feeding of one fact after another into the student – old fashioned, monkey see, monkey do teaching based on content and regurgitation. This approach works well for simple academic “jump through the hoop” examination schemes of the type used in most schools. Then there is the second type of teaching, based not on the ability to memorise and recall facts, but on the ability to absorb and apply principles. Type One, content-based teaching lies in disrepute as teachers are compelled to teach the test or face the wrath of OFSTED and the threat to their jobs. The content teacher’s job is to successfully prepare the student to pass the exam – not to teach them to think. That’s the state system – which is not surprising, since no state wants its populace to be educated and capable of thought. As one head teacher told me “...(the current state education system)...is a compliance factory complex, designed to turn out compliant and obedient drones who’ll do as they are told: pass the test, tick the box, move on to the next level.” And then there’s Type Two teaching: teaching based on ideas and principles, creative thought and empowering students to think. This kind of principle-based teaching is harder to do than content-based teaching, usually more expensive, and – of course - it is politically very risky to have a mass of thinking people to keep under control. Principle-based teaching can ignite a passion to understand and to learn, to question and explore. If we are lucky, the passion lasts a lifetime and every day is a chance to learn, grow, and think. But, for many people, learning ends when they leave school, armed only with the narrow ability to regurgitate memorised facts and the acceptable answers to questions. Yet I’ve come to believe that learning really begins when one escapes the narrow confines and the straitjacket of content-based teaching. It is our nature to learn, after all. Humans are curious animals – as a species, we’re into everything. We can’t not explore, test, experiment, or generally get ourselves into mischief: that’s what humans do. © Neil Cowmeadow 2020 Please Like and Share The Thursday Thesis with your friends, family, and your chosen deity. I’d love to hear your comments, along with any ideas you’d care to hurl at me. Info@NeilCowmeadow.com Episode 198 - The Other Operation Paperclip The Thursday Thesis - 9/4/2020 Here’s another little idea I use to help me manage myself and keep a lid on my own stupidity – Operation Paperclip. Now, it’s got nothing at all to do with the real Operation Paperclip: America’s offering safe haven and jobs in government agencies to Nazi scientists at the end of World War. My Version of Operation Paperclip just helps me to manage my coffee consumption and my Wing Chun martial arts drills. Here’s how it works: I have a cup and saucer next to the coffee machine. I place a number of black paperclips in the saucer, equivalent to the number of double espressos I’m allowing myself to drink every day. For each cup of coffee I have, I move a paperclip from the saucer to the empty cup, and – as the beans are ground and the machine whirrs – I perform my Wing Chun drill of the day. If I’m drinking milk I’ll remove a black paperclip from the saucer and add a single white paperclip to take its place – representing my one latte for the day. When all of the ‘clips have moved into the cup, I’ve reached my limit for the day. Simple. To reduce my initial, ludicrous, cup-count, I just reduced the number of ‘clips in the saucer by one a week for ten weeks. The result was a gradual, manageable moderation of my caffeine addiction – without the headaches or cravings which accompany going “cold turkey”. That’s how I got down from fifteen(!) double espressos a day to just five– that’s still a lot, but it’s less crazy than getting wired on thirty shots of seriously strong coffee. You can use this simple idea to ease into or out of any repetitive action or habit – try it for yourself and see how it works for you. © Neil Cowmeadow 2020 Please Like and Share The Thursday Thesis with your friends, family, and your chosen deity. I’d love to hear your comments, along with any ideas you’d care to hurl at me. Info@NeilCowmeadow.com  The Thursday Thesis - 2/4/2020, updated
Am I alone in noticing that the BBC has abandoned any pretence of being anything other than a single-issue propaganda channel? If you apply what I call “Precision Listening” it’s obvious. All you have to do is listen very carefully to what’s being said. Listen to the words used to convey the underlying message, because the words are often deceptive, and this is no accident. State broadcasters employ the best writers to carefully craft news scripts: the words are carefully selected, ordered and tickled to do a very particular job and to convey a very particular message. So – for those who understand that the words used (what Noam Chomsky called the “surface structure” of communication) can greatly modify the message conveyed (the “deep structure”) these are interesting times. For weeks it has been ramping-up COVID-19 stories, progressively giving over more and more time in bulletins until we’ve finally arrived at today – where every minute of the BBC’s “news” coverage is scary stories and inflammatory opinion on the speed, severity and deadliness of this bogeyman virus. If you ever suspected that there was an agenda being peddled by our state-funded (state-controlled) broadcaster, Precision Listening and recent events will confirm your suspicions. Listen closely to the weasel-words in the scary stories and you’ll begin to notice that daily mortality figures are now referred to as “connected with COVID-19”. Hang on a second – only a couple of weeks ago this COVID-19 was being portrayed as a deadly killer, but now it seems to be only a component in a death. This sinister shift to weasel-words looks like a guilty person backing away from what they’ve done; for whatever reason, the Beeb has moved its position by changing the words of its carefully-prepared script. And here’s a little quote from the Office of National Statistics, from their bulletin dated 7 April 2020: “Looking at the year-to-date (using refreshed data to get the most accurate estimates), the number of deaths is currently lower than the five-year average. The current number of deaths is 150,047, which is 3,350 fewer than the five-year average. Of the deaths registered by 27 March 2020, 647 mentioned the coronavirus (COVID-19) on the death certificate; this is 0.4% of all deaths.” (Source: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/deathsregisteredweeklyinenglandandwalesprovisional/weekending27march2020) I kid you not – in the midst of this appalling, scaremongered “pandemic”, FEWER people are dying than the average for the previous five-year period. That’s the overview of REALITY, not the twisted, stilted and distorted story we’re being fed by the state’s media mouthpiece. Consider this fact - from the ONS's figures: deaths from "Flu and pneumonia" are down, whilst COVID-19 deaths are up. The numbers nett-out to the normal rate for this time of year. So the question must arise: is COVID-19 simply a bad strain of 'flu? What do you think? You won't find the answer in the Government briefings, the Fake News or the Weasel-Words of the mendacious bastards at the BBC. © Neil Cowmeadow 2020 Please Like and Share The Thursday Thesis with your friends, family, and your chosen deity. I’d love to hear your comments, along with any ideas you’d care to hurl at me. Info@NeilCowmeadow.com |
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