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The Way I Think > Chapter 7: High Commitment/Low
Commitment, White Box/Black Box, Outside the Box/Inside the Box
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In martial arts, there is a distinction made between high and low commitment styles. A high commitment art puts your full oomph into an action; a low commitment art holds back, and tries to keep options open. High commitment favors decisiveness; low commitment favors freedom. A high commitment blow does more damage, but a low commitment martial artist can more easily recover from a mistake. This distinction has application far beyond martial arts.
In software engineering, white box testing is testing that lets you see what's going on inside a program, while black box testing is testing that doesn't see what's inside -- just what a program is given as input, and what it does as output. (The box is dark inside; you can't see anything.) From this distinction comes thinking about an object in terms of what it is, and what it does. The TV show MacGyver showed a character who knew how to look about what an object is; when he needed to do some climbing, he looked at a garden hose and a rake and did not just see "Means of transporting water" and "means of loosening surface of ground;" he saw, "flexible, hollow tube" and "short wooden pole with pronged iron attachment", and unscrewed the head of the rake, screwed it onto the end of the hose, and used it as a rope and grappling hook.
I think most readers should be familiar with the concept of thinking outside the box, which is as of my present writing a cliche and a fad, so I will not repeat the chorus of "think outside the box." What I will say is that most brilliant minds need to learn to think inside the box. In chess, which I am learning, there are a number of ways in which I naturally think outside the box. I ask what it would be like if I could move my queen like a knight as well, or if I could take two moves. This kind of thinking could perhaps be incorporated into a really cool metagame, perhaps at best a Mao of board games, but it is not helping me to play chess. To learn to play chess, I need to think inside the box, and only make legal moves that appear to move me closer to checkmating my opponent.
Which of these do I favor? In all three cases, I favor and encourage a proficiency in both ways of thinking, and a fluidity in moving between them as is appropriate to the context. I also favor metacognition: evaluating and changing the way one thinks. But I'll leave that for a different chapter.
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> Writing >
Miscellaneous Nonfiction >
The Way I Think > Chapter 7: High Commitment/Low
Commitment, White Box/Black Box, Outside the Box/Inside the Box
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