Basic Concepts for Life

Patrick Henry:

What are the basic concepts and techniques that are important to know for getting through life?

e.g. mindmapping (which i don't actually use myself but it's a good example)

Doctor Thomas:

In today's complex and changing world, the only thing you need is the capacity for self-directed anticipative learning.

That is, you need a generalised ability to anticipate interaction processes and evaluate your performance.

End of story.

Patrick Henry:

You mean, you need the ability to:

1. Guess what you need to learn
2. Learn it
3. Evalutate your performance

Doctor Thomas:

You've pretty much got it.

You need to:

1. Guess what skills you need to learn

a. Guess what will be good ways of performing the skills

i. Guess what the outcome of various alternative ways ofperforming will be

ii. Evaluate your ability to guess the outcome of various alternative ways of performing

iii. Improve your ability to guess the outcome of variousalternative ways of performing

b. Evaluate alternative ways of performing

c. Improve your performance2. Evaluate your ability to guess what skills you need to learn

3. Improve your ability to guess what skills you need to learn

4. Repeat

You'll be so confused that by the time you've figured out what's going on, you'll be dead, and you won't need to worry any more.