This week a study was published and highly publicized concerning microbes on the human body. Through science and technology we constantly learn that we don’t really know a lot about ourselves. Yet, I find that people talk in absolutes all the time. When presented with problems in the world of IT most if us come up with THE answer. I have personally observed what I call “I know” syndrome. I would venture to say that we don’t even know what is really going on around us http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkANniH8XZE David Eagleman has a pretty interesting perspective on time relative to our understanding of the world around us.
I realize that I keep presenting and asking questions and I don’t provide a lot of answers. This is because as I am getting older things are becoming more clear to me and by clear I mean abstract. We humans really don’t know a lot of anything. We are becoming fixated with technology and what we consider “being smart” but from my perspective becoming smarter narrows our ability to be dynamic. I would say that the more answers we believe we are capable of providing actually limits our ability to solve problems.
A 5 second commercial on the Science HD channel with Morgan Freeman really affected my perspective of things a few weeks ago. He said, “answers are terminus, the questions are where it’s at.” I was taught at an early age to ask questions and the result was initially not great. As a kid, I would ask “why” to everything and then challenge everything. I really can’t speak to my logic although I can say I enjoyed the feeling of walking outside of the group. Now I believe there are times to ask tough questions and there are times to go with the flow. Going with the flow doesn’t mean that going with an answer to a question holistically. It means that we may recognize an answer and question this answer when the time is right.
The answer is that there is no answer, well not 100% because we don’t know what we don’t know. If we stop asking questions we will have a hard time being dynamic and flexible. That is the message for anyone reading this today. Stop being so smart and knowing it all and value your questions more than your answers.
Happy Fathers Day Dads!
The Cohenization Project 
Howie, you are right, it is all about the questions, even Socrates tell his students it is all about the questions. I think questions are like samplings of knowledge, we ask questions to find what other people think is the answers, it shouldn’t mean that others have the answers but by sharing their answers adds to the total sampling of humanity and from there we can find a closer relationship to the dynamic answers of the statistical means of the normal. If the answers are way out of line with other answers we find outliers from the norm, or is it that these outliers are really not outside the norm but part of a larger sample size of a new normal that most of us haven’t even thought about yet. Happy Fathers Day to you and all Fathers too.
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