Massimo Curatella

Tag: critical thinking

  • Building confidence with deliberate practice, a CREAZEE Sprint with David Orban

    Building confidence with deliberate practice, a CREAZEE Sprint with David Orban

    I’m experimenting with having unplanned conversations with stimulating people. I record our sessions and I put them online. I want to have at least 10 of them and create a network of notes to use as the source of new ideas.

    I am at the sixth CREAZEE Sprint, now. Four in English and two in Italian. Will I make it to ten?

    David Orban was an enthusiastic CREAZEE Challenger during our Daily Writing Habit Challenge in 2021. I was very proud of seeing his unleashed creativity in following his own rules and prompts (rather than the ones I was suggesting). We had fun, creative ideas, and profound thoughts on life and everything.

    A few days ago I had the pleasure of having an unplanned CREAZEE Sprint with David where we talked about polymathy, learning approaches, failure, correcting own mistakes, zooming in-out, the joy of living, building confidence with deliberate practice, climate crisis and IEA’s mistakes, creativity and surprise.

    The Episode’s web page: CREAZEE Sprint 4.

    Or watch it on YouTube:

  • The Metaverse is a jungle

    Technological systems are becoming more and more like living entities. It becomes increasingly difficult to set the boundaries of a piece of technology. Your computer is not yours anymore, it’s a node of a massive network of other interactive objects. It doesn’t matter how many efforts you make to clean, maintain, set up, fine-tune your dear personal computer, constant updates of software and hardware are creating a continuous change in their running setting. That’s why it makes sense to double-check settings and configuration, to assess the new features before doing an update or an upgrade. Unfortunately, intentionally or not, many software applications are now resetting their configuration selectively or totally at each update or, even worse, they are adding new parameters affecting their execution.

    It’s a constant flux of changes and interaction, it’s a fluid universe, somebody may call it a metaverse, and we should face it as we live in the real world, by trusting the next piece of software only as much as it allows us to do what we need to do and to carefully look around us for hazards and threads like we would do in a jungle.

    It’s a fantastic always-changing fluid technological world and we need to be responsible and careful in living it.

    353/365. Thanks to Alberto Gelpi for the inspiration.

  • How to decide if to rebuild or adapt a new system

    Before considering rebuilding a solution because old, it’s wise to evaluate the differences between the existing system and the new version to be designed. Even if there are many components with several interdependencies it might be convenient to evaluate a piece-by-piece update rather than scratching everything and starting back from zero.

    How shall we decide if we should redo it from scratch or adapt the existing one?

    Plan to invest a limited amount of time to map the most connected and relevant part of the system to the one to be and see if it is relatively straightforward to translate between the old and the new or if there are too many differences or new pieces or a lot of old pieces to be completely removed.

    If you discover that there is a high ratio of unchanged parts or slightly adapted components versus the novelties you might consider updating and upgrading the old rather than starting from scratch.

    In very complicated systems, if you discover that the update is more convenient than the rebuild you might save a lot of time and resources.

    This is my daily post no. 347.

  • Macro and Micro

    I’ve found two extremes in my reflections: big moments to think about big things and little moments to think about small things.

    In the top-down approach of big moments, I can face more high-level and philosophical questions concerning mainly the Why and the What.

    In bottom-up moments, when I am focusing on a specific thing I am devoting my attention to the execution of tasks or their thorough explanation.

    Those two extremes create fertile creative tensions between them. By going back and forth between the micro and the macro I have more occasions to make connections and to have a deeper and broader view of things.

  • The Knowledge Creations Process

    Can we brand a thinking process? Think about a toy brick, a 2-by-4 piece. It’s standard, created with high precision to respects specific dimensions, shapes and feature. Now think about what you can do with that piece. Within its constrained shape it offers infinite combinatorial possibilities with multiple instances of itself. Now take a set of instructions guiding you to use a given set of those bricks to be assembled into the model of a duck. We have building blocks and instructions like we could have ingredients and recipes.

    Now imagine not having any user guide and playing with pieces until you find meaningful combinations. You might discover that three pieces form a leg so you can replicate the discovered pattern to add two or more legs tonyou fantasy creature. If you write done the sequence of steps needed to reproduce the little bear you just randomly assembled you would provide instructions to replicate your model.

    But what happens if you collect the ways and the approaches you came up with to build the leg pattern in the first place? You would offer creative techniques to build more complex shaped out of atomic components.

    And what if you discover how to 3d print your building blocks? Or designing and creating new formats of bricks?

    This is what happens when we analyze the world around us and we transform data into information and then into knowledge. We identify atoms we can clearly distinguish, we recognize patterns of aggregated blocks and we learn how to do it through the process of learning and making.

    I am dreaming about mental building blocks, thinking bricks and processes and techniques to discover new ways of thinking and novel and useful combinations of existing thoughts to innovate what we know and what we can discover.

    How is this thing called? What is it? Who study that? What do we know about it? How can we work on it?

  • Talking With Facts

    It’s not your desires, your hopes, your expectations, your opinions, your impression, your intuition, your experience, your imagination, your fantasy, your speculation, your creativity, your luck.

    It’s the facts doing the talking.

    You need to be humble to read the language of facts in an objective way. What did actually happen? How is that different from what you wanted?

    There, in that difference, you have a chance to learn, adapt, change direction, start from scratch or quit.

    t least, you won’t waste further time.

  • Trust is Expensive and Delicate

    You build trust with continuous investments during long periods of time. You cannot decide when it’s time to earn it. The others are deciding.

    Reducing trust is too easy and it might be difficult if not impossible to rebuild it.

    Working to build trust is a slow and careful process requiring focus and resources, continuously.

  • Creating Choice by Managing your Personal Knowledge

    If I’m lucky I can choose. Otherwise I need to work to create choices. There’s a gap between the moment when I come up with a need and when I need to explore options. It requires slowing down and thinking to understand what to do to create the choices I will need in the future.

    One year ago I ate a beautiful dish but then I was sick with a stomach ache. I am going to go exactly in the same place, one year later: will I eat the same juicy dish?

    Recording the events, in this case, helped me in understanding possible connections between causes and effects. I am more informed. Definitely I would have not been able to realize this context if I didn’t write it down in my journal. 

    To create choices I need information and the capability of making connections between them. That’s a useful outcome of curating my personal knowledge.

    This is my 295 daily blog post in a row.

  • Guest Post: On Patience

    Guest Post: On Patience

    Today I am hosting a guest post by Leo.

    This article will be based on having more patience because if you have more patience you can calm your mind and do things easier. But if you are impatient you can also get nervous and get tired of doing that thing. Let me give you an example: if I want to read, for example, a book, I have to be concentrated and in any case relaxed at the same time. If I am impatient to finish the book and I don’t want to, I get nervous. So in this case you have to avoid doing something pleasant when you are angry.

    Another example: if you want to make a nice drawing, you have to be patient because if you are impatient, you still can’t do that thing. So in my opinion the human being should have more patience in order to be able to do things and in any case respect the rules of both the person or even in this case of Covid, in fact many people are not respectful of the rules or maybe they are impatient, they get bored and therefore they remove the mask risking for the whole population.

  • Change Your Mind

    Einstein had to admit he was wrong about the Universe being static when a lot of studies emerged about stars running away from each other. Regardless of our geniality we need continuous confrontation with others about our ideas. And we would be wise considering them hypotheses until disproved. 

    When even the brightest minds recognize the limits of their capabilities we can only feel more humble in our convictions.

    How will you change your mind today?