Graduated Certification for Applying Common Sense by James Dunn

Hi James,

Very interesting essay, thank you! Teaching common sense is a honorable goal but teaching people who don't have the capacity to have such a skill is useless I'm afraid ;-)

Jim,

Not knowing what isn't done is a re-application of predicting consequences. In the profession of "Project Management" and "Program Management" (supervisory) these advanced skills are called "Requirements Management" and "Risk Management". The following is just a rough overview off the top of my head.

When a program manager first is introduced to forming a project, a representative group of experts get together with the customer and their team to define a "Project Charter". This defines the central intents of what is to be accomplished and design decisions map back to this Project Charter throughout the project until deliverables are finished and delivered. Otherwise wasted time is spent wavering in determining what the customer "might" want, or can do without. The Project Charter becomes customer approved.

From the Project Charter the List of Requirements is built by a team of experts. These are all things that become implicitly stated from the Project Charter. For example: SAE Standards related to the build, Federal Government Guidelines, IEEE Standards ... Phases of development and related milestones, payment schedules, required reporting, detail depth of documentation, customer specific requirements ... list of deliverables.

Asset Management from the status of the previous and present projects in development are referred to help determine a timeline for development. Typically a Gantt Chart and/or Project Management Software is implemented.

Requirements Management and Risk Management worksheets are implemented to capture details of requirements and their costs and risks and their potential costs and related delays. Asset Management is referred to for estimating availability of resources.

So far, all of this has occurred without getting paid by the customer so previous profits from other projects must pay for these efforts. Cost estimating is done based upon past experience. This is where experience plays between profit, losing the bid, and law-suits/bankruptcy. The Program Manager is only partly responsible for cost estimating. Built into the cost is labor for covering some number of other project estimates where the customer will choose another company to do the work.

The Customer pays for Phase I and no further payment will be received until the first milestone and related deliverables are conveyed to the customer.

Next the Program Manager assembles a team of Project Managers. The team assembles a Statement of Work (SOW). The SOW details every step and every Work Order down to the largest reasonable effort that one person can reasonably accomplish with their known skill set and experience. The Team updates the Requirements Management and Risk Management worksheets as they discover new potential issues.

Then the team of Project Managers under the direction of the Program Manager schedule the expertise and material and begin development.

The coordination of Requirements Management, Timeline, and Risk Management are tightly monitored throughout the development to ensure what isn't yet done is completed on-schedule.

What you asked is an advanced skill of Common Sense where self-esteem in that environment in-part comes from practiced application and developing experience.

We all, including myself, can always improve our Common Sense skills related to the Social Group in which we are involved. Common Sense is Group-centric. For example, Common Sense between a Program Manager and a team of General Electric national defense contractors is very specific.

The Common Sense component of Self-esteem in that environment is based in a developed set of thumb-rules to deal with the emotional condition of team members, developed social etiquette that does not fully transfer to other companies, and systems of communication processes that are expected. These components can be documented so that a new Program Manager can come up to speed quickly in dealing with the specific National Defense Contractor to ensure that risks in obtaining the bid are minimized.

This is one application for having a certification program to help ensure selected Program Managers can quickly develop the "practiced" skills to engage in these high level negotiations.

However, for smaller projects just keep the equivalent of a grocery list. :.)

I tend to disagree. We all have deficiencies as compared to others in specific situations. But I think you meant someone who is handicapped or a drug addict.

I have not as yet considered tools to address drug addicts as yet.

However, a person with ADHD has certain challenges to overcome. Typical symptoms include, but are not limited to: chronic tardiness, sloppy work, hostile to authority, procrastination, working harder not to accomplishing some task than just doing the task, hiding out ...

In the Common Sense structure that is being developed at www.UA-KiTS.com, are the beginning of tools to address certain personal challenges that people have.

One tool for those with ADHD is that when reading, every time a person notices their mind has drifted they should make a small mark at the top of the page. Use a Post-it if the page cannot be marked, or even put a Post-it on the top bezel of the computer display. The conscious act of making the mark over time will tend to train the mind to remain focused while reading.

This is just one of hundreds of techniques that are available to be taught to help persons with professional disabilities to compensate for their perceived lack of common sense.

A tool for the average person is Refereed Debate, and can be easily used in classrooms and meetings to multiply interactive experiential learning. A teacher/lecturer normally stands in front of a room and infrequently engages students/participants one at a time. The students/participants have no hope of sharing respect with their peers. Referred Debate can be set up with 3 to 10 participants in each group. The object is to find and support the best pathway to achieve a common goal.

The Referee is initially the person most experienced in critical thinking and predicting consequences. In grade school, this is the teacher. In a company meeting, this might be a program manager.

As certain participants reliably express themselves logically and with well-developed predicting of consequences, then they are rotated in as Referee.

The Referee verbally guides the expressions of debate participants to cite three categories of weakness: logical, path of consequences, sustainability. Additionally, the Referee verbally guides the expressions of debate participants to cite three categories of strength: emotional connectedness, social connectedness, and Clarity of processes. A list of points given or taken is provided to each participant before-hand.

Types of issues in each category might include: logical inconsistencies, holes in considerations, vagueness ... and points are charged to the participant.

The result is the sharing of Respect between participants as they teach each other useful relationships. The process is practiced experience. The educational platform is Project Based Learning (PBL). An entire rudiment project can mentally be planned in a few minutes by thinking through the needed requirements, risks, resource availability, and processes. Practiced expression quickly builds these skills where reading about it does little to change engrained behaviors.

These are just examples of what can be done with people who appear not able to learn common sense.

Please keep in mind that the non-profit 501(c)3 corporation is at present just a place-holder until I can find other people who have the philosophical, psychological, and logical skills to augment my own. I do not know everything .... yet :.) No really, knowledge is a continuous learning process.

Every certification agency (SAE, IEEE, AMA, ABPS ...) have all started with an Articles of Incorporation and incrementally grown. A complete solution is not needed up front. Continuous asserted effort builds resources quickly.

I am seeking persons that can contribute to development. I can perhaps obtain a grant to pay for the first phase of development and implementation if I can find persons with related recognized qualifications in philosophy, psychology, human resources administration ... support@ua-kits.com

Additionally,

The Referee in Refereed Debate is in a different position than the participant and continuously learns techniques and relationships. So the Referee is learning every bit as much as the participants.

For those visiting this essay, I would appreciate if you would rate the topic as it relates to being able to take action to Steer the Future of Humanity. This topic is more than viable, there is a market need and funding resources to create a distributed self-sustaining implementation.

If you have any recognized qualifications and an interest in contributing to development, a grant application can be submitted to ED.gov and other organizations to pay contributors for their efforts.

support@ua-kits.com

UA-KiTS

Unlocking Aptitude - Knowledge in Translational States

Dear James,

Thank you for the score you gave to me. You are right about the missing part of providing sustainable support of investigative efforts. However, my article, being written by a physicist, hardly could deal with such items, and I wanted to put the accent on the epistemological attitude facing the legitimate unification of knowledge, of realities and, mainly, of humans. Indeed, I think that attitude is first; economics is later. As a matter of fact, one can find quite often such confusion in most of the western countries, namely, that prosperity in education comes from prosperity in economics; I think it is exactly the opposite.

You say well that we don't even teach common sense at schools (neither public nor private): common notions are completely oriented to making money, to generate and utilize technologies, to worship the body, to be as popular as possible, to reach wealth at any price, and so on and so forth. In other words, we have consciously organized our world on an egoistic basis and, as a consequence, rather that dignifying the human individual by making him more responsible of the world, humans within, we block the natural volition of humankind to live with the others, to live for the others as the best possible self-service, to back feed a healthy self-esteem, ... That's why I believe science can become an area of hopefulness for humankind in the future, provided we actually understand the crucial role of self-critique in science generation and the importance of learning other ways of thinking the world and the whole reality. ¿Don't you think so?

Best regards,

Alex

P.-S. I shall read your paper in detail. Only then, I will be able to making comments to you; however, I can see in advance that it will be an enjoying experience.

I understand scope of practice has a lot to do with scope of publication. Your profession is interesting for me. Physicist?

Regarding why teaching Common Sense broadly is important to the future of physics.

If we are living in a construct that allows for simulation/virtual-consideration, then we ourselves may be able to use the underlying construct in Building Universes - Relativity from Quantum Causality.

http://vixra.org/pdf/1402.0041v1.pdf

This is repeatedly implied elsewhere. What are the implications for intelligent life?

If you have a computer model, where there is environment evolved consciousness. Proposed elsewhere is a lack of substantive structure is an indication of a simulated environment. This is the realm of present particle physics and the Standard Model, there is nothing substantive below the size of an atom. Yet artifacts considered as subatomic particles have features larger than an atom; like boson. This contradiction seems to be supported by as yet non-observable systems of causal connectedness.

"Connectedness" is not a proper word. But it is a key feature in describing causality that exists despite and without direct reference to energy.

Energy has a component of m/s or space/time. As long as Qubits are related directly to space/time then energy is a required consideration. However, as in quantum entanglement, energy need not be a consideration related to a logic state. We may yet not have the means of creating an energy-less evolving causal state, but that does not mean it is not possible.

No two things can occupy the same space at the same time; in macro-physics. But in subatomic physics many things occupy the same space at the same time. There is no empty space anywhere in a Universe of Relativity.

Illusion is simply any system that is considered with incompletely considered perspectives. Everything we know is incomplete, so yes, cosmology from our perspectives is an illusion.

Probability, error tolerance, and limitations for approximations mask causality.

The contradiction between the macro and subatomic worlds seems to indicate a structural component of causality. Many more than one set of connectedness can share a causal component. The simple (exaggeration) shift of a causal connection is like the difference in spin observed in quantum entanglement. Seemingly instantaneous propagation. But outside of relativity, it is potentially just a slight shift between similar causal systems; energy-less.

The potential is that Building Universes - Relativity from Quantum Causality can be done without any energy at all except where we want to interface our space/time tools with the universes we build.

The universes we build need not have the same physics constants as our universe. As such, we can build alternate dimensional spaces. When interfaced with our universe; warping of space/time, worm holes, black holes, gateways between locations, quantum cameras ...

I believe we can build a mechanism to Exactly model our universe, and manipulate it to create computational systems. But the physical outcomes will exactly match physics and not the approximations provided by mathematics.

In any "real" physical environment, it would take an extraordinary number of seemingly abstract mathematics relationships to model the systems of relationships that are in constant change within a cubic centimeter. To do so without error is presently and for the foreseeable future impossible. A change in course on a practical pathway to manipulate space/time is needed.

http://vixra.org/pdf/1205.0021v1.pdf

By using the structure of the universe to build a system for analyzing a piece within our universe (quantum camera), then we are not relying upon approximations. Math will likely still be used, to get us into the general area we want to be. But the quantum camera would respond and interact with the our universe exactly.

The quantum camera would be a subset of a universe that we build.

To be sure, this is not pie in the sky relationships.

Billions of dollars in grants are available for this type of research:

https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=7fa50ea731f2aa4529b223b7f5b38987&tab=core&_cview=1

Why is broadly teaching Common Sense imperative?

....

Who will control the technologies developed?

Business Model to Broadly teach Common Sense:

How should we steer the future of humanity?

http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/2045

Method for ethically monitoring and eliminating all corrruption:

Corruption = unethical allocation of resources and/or opportunities

http://eliminate-all-corruption.pbworks.com

These combined methods provide for eliminating corruption from both the Top/Down (management of NSA) AND Bottom/Up (broadly teaching Common Sense).

Broadly teaching Common Sense is vital to the ethical use of technologies developed by physicists.

Common Sense ermöglicht Physik Karriere Straße.

Dear Mr. Dunn,

I found your essay vastly entertaining, and I do hope that it does well in the competition. I do have a minor quibble, and I do hope that you do not mind me raising it.

I have gone to great pains in my essay, REALITY, ONCE, to emphasize the fact that reality is unique. For instance, each real person has unique real fingerprints. Each real person has a unique dollop of real DNA, and each real person has unique real eyeballs. It must follow that each real person must have unique real intelligence. Your contention that: "There are three (abstract) types of (abstract) influence that are part of (abstract) Common Sense: (abstract) logical relationships and (abstract) perspectives, (abstract) emotional relationships and (abstract) perspectives and (abstract) social relationships and (abstract) perspectives. Please understand I am in no way trying to imply that although you appear to have mastered the requirements for understanding what abstract common sense might consist of, you do not seem to know much about reality. I would never really do that.

Top regards,

Joe Fisher

Joe,

I'm asking for a really hard example for me to consider.

Everyone has a unique fingerprint, for all people who have ever lived and who will ever live. Is that your contention?

You are certain that a closed causal system does not repeat. Is that your contention?

Each potential intelligence must have DNA. Is that your contention.

Persons born without eyes are not people. Is that your contention.

Intelligence is a set of abstractions that together fit current needs in most social groups. Obviously a social group inside an sanitarium may or may not be open to inclusion of irrational statements. The same for terrorist groups and others who demand compliance with irrational edicts.

But in business, engineering, science, medicine, pharmacology, the military, nuclear power plants ... rational behaviors depend upon the interrelationships of abstractions having to do with emotional, social, and communication processes.

Define one word that has the same exact meaning for all peoples; for all time.

I look forward to hearing of your one "real" thing that is real without contention. Anything that is based in a partial perspective is an illusion, and not real. The best we can do is attempt to provide the greatest useful utility with the broadest systems that we can perceive, and relate, while minimizing contradictions.

Joe,

Perceived Reality only exsists within a subset of consistent perspectives without contradicting relationships.

A reality is a certain type of system of causal relativity.

How come your comments do not appear headed in an orange box like an author's replies ought to do?

Sir, I pity you. You are suffering from a severe case of chronic informania. I have no need to prove that any real object is a real object. I am a real person.

With amicable regards,

Joe Fisher

Mr. Dunn,

I am truly sorry for the comments I have tarnished your essay entry comments boxes with. Please forgive me. My comments were unnecessary and totally uncalled for.

Regretfully,

Joe Fisher

Joe,

I looked for your essay, but could not find one listed. Involved perspectives often have useful information buried within them. I won't necessarily accept everything you have to share, but likely there will be relationships I will find interesting.

Respect is only acquired by the mutual sharing of useful information. As we teach each other something useful, trust is attributed within the context of consideration. This is universally how respect is directly acquired.

The opposite of respect is Disdain. Disdain is attributed when distrust is developed due to telling lies, deceitful omission, negligence ....

The combination of accumulated trust from Respect and Disdain form Self-Esteem within a particular social group.

So I appreciate your apology and remain open to hear your perspectives.

James

James,

Thank you for your tolerance.

My essay is called REALITY, ONCE. It was posted on February 11, 2014.

Joe

James,

Correct me if I'm wrong, but you seem to be advocating a system designed to help humans develop mental discipline; perhaps you would find the paper I reference in my own essay, "Contemplative Practices and Mental Training: Prospects for American Education", interesting. Your program seems rather ambitious and for certain the community of humans could use a bit more ethics and rationality, the recent wars, manipulations, and financial instabilities being evidence of such; however, humans are not computers. Humans are notoriously irrational and occasionally irrational thoughts lead to novel and extremely valuable developments.

I believe this is probably why many organizations, such as IBM and NASA, have been working towards narrow-focused Artificial Intelligence (AI) for so long. These AI systems are built on foundations of probabilistic logic and have proven effective in many situations such as risk assessment (NASA) and, relevant to your example, medical diagnosis (IBM). But what these systems have not been able to improve on, or even mimic (to date), is the doctor's or engineer's creative intuition, an intuition which is often based in illogical thought processes - or so it would seem. Of course no formal proof, or, for that matter, convincing argument, demonstrating the inability of these systems to eventually mimic or exceed the creative abilities of humans has been forthcoming; hence, such a future situation would seem logically inevitable provided current trends continue. Some humans greatly fear just such a thing.

Forgive me for being mischievous, but in your "Trivial Application" you state, "working longer hours benefits both and is not a reason for higher wages;" having worked as an independent contractor and as the production manager of a medium sized manufacturing company, I feel qualified to say this is rarely, if ever, true. Typically, there are two primary situations in which an employer asks an employee to work overtime: when the employer is being incentivized to complete the project in an expedited manner; when someone in management, generally either bidding or scheduling, screws up.

Any employer competent enough to last in the business world has developed tried and true methods for including labor costs in their bid. Most employers actually profit, oftentimes rather handsomely, from their labor, even after all overhead is accounted for. And if a job is being expedited at customer request you better believe it's being incentivized with higher wages factored in; to not pay one's employees higher wages, i.e. time and one half, in such a scenario, would be highly unethical.

In the case of bidding, scheduling, or some other management error, paying higher wages for overtime introduces valuable feedback into the control system; if that feedback dictates, either replacing incompetent personnel (including the boss) or hiring additional employees may become economically justified.

Working longer hours does not always benefit employees; there are activities other than work which add considerable value to an employee's life which could become compromised when working longer hours. In both of the cases cited above, paying higher wages represents "common sense" and, in the case of America, it's also the law . . .

Wesley,

Humans well trained in logic do not seem to have a problem expressing themselves through art, music, software creations, culinary works ... The are often preoccupied by priorities, but they can generally teach themselves anything.

But the opposite does not seem to be true. People that dominantly express themselves irrationally, cannot sell their art works for significant profit margins and are unable to maintain productive business relationships. Irrational people are plagued by arrests and law suits, and are not offered as many significant opportunities due their unreliability and related risks they represent.

Regarding your perspective of working overtime as a pursuit by an employee to "create incentive" for an employer to pay higher wages. The complexity involved with that scenario is too involved for the short essay. However, with companies like Walmart, an employee working more than 30 hours a week can get fired because it costs Walmart much more to hire full-time employees than hiring "more" part-time employees. This also means more people are supported by Walmart; the scope of the essay is different than extensive discussion concerning human resources, company policies, and ethics. But, in-general, a management rule of thumb is that you are lucky if you get 6 hours of production out of an employee per day. So restricting an employee to 6 hours of work per day and 30 hours of work per week provides a greater return on investment for the employer. Employee's are often happier by having to work less hours if they live within their means. An employee that watches the clock to punch out is there to make money, not be productive.

I know a physician that makes $160,000 a year. They work 14 hours a day during weekdays, and 6 hours a day on weekends; always. No vacations. They have about $20,000 a year in professional expenses related to insurance, licensing... That is an average of $33/hour. They take home about $22/hour. They paid more than $220,000 in school loans. They worked more than 10,000 hours (5 years of a full-time person's job) for free to pay off their loans and interest. But they love their job! And they have personally helped more than 100,000 people with their health problems over their career so far. More if you include the physicians she has trained.

I "believe" that people with ADHD, diabetes, heart problems, genetic deformities ... all contribute to the diversity of humanity; in much more than just aesthetic inspirations. Systems must often mutate to evolve. Evolving often creates new traits that did not exist previously. Most of them fail to become sustainably supported. But eventually a trait is supported by an environment of relationships and it becomes a vital feature for human survival. Like being able to stand on two legs, articulating thumbs, cognition, geometric processing of the brain in terms of optical and tactile perception ...

Engineers often use Fuzzy Logic, Expert Systems, Neural Networks, Genetic Algorithms ... to "hunt" for more optimal solutions. This is recognized in science and engineering and these systems can be quite complex depending upon the number of degrees of freedom being controlled. Degrees of freedom might be thought of a the number of dimensions being considered.

Artificial Intelligence is a bit of a different beast because of the number of dimensions involved, and the limited computation resources at present. This will likely change in the not too distant future when quantum computers provide access to parallel processing. For the non-technical person, this means essentially the potential equivalent of thousands of computers interactively working with each other to move toward complex systems of solutions; like the human brain.

However, I see a large percentage of high school graduates that are NOT able to deductively consider future potential employment/self-employment opportunities, identify pathways for developing themselves, and then have the determination to teach themselves what they need to know to achieve their goals.

I want to shift the dominance toward humans being able to socially share greater numbers of low-risk significant opportunities with each other. Greater numbers of persons in a group with common sense means more opportunities can be acted upon due to the trust shared by people within a group. This translates to greater national prosperity.

"The great purpose of education is to train the brain to Efficiently teach one's self; to become an expert at anything Passionately pursued." ~JD

James

Ambition is the fuel that drives success.

James,

I greatly enjoyed your essay, and I broadly support your efforts, though I don't know how good a 'common sense' role model I would be. I entirely agree with your assessment about the erosion of the ability for people to think for themselves, and in my essay, I attribute that to a failure to recognize the value of play as a learning strategy. So teaching common sense could help some but not all of the problems you enumerate.

I think part of the problem is an overall erosion of perceptual acuity as documented in the Tübingen study, published in '99. The number of shades of gray or green perceptible by college students at the end of the study was remarkably less than those at the beginning and participants' acuity was tuned in mostly to loud sounds, bright colors, and so on. So teaching common sense may be more difficult than you imagine.

I remember meeting an engineering consultant named James Dunn once, years ago, and having a meal at a German restaurant in PA, talking about a baffle placed in UV fixtures to prevent interference between the light sources. Was that you? In any case; your essay was enjoyed, and it reminds me of a lecture given by my instructor in Metal Shop - back in High School - which I will always remember. Good luck!

Regards,

Jonathan