Temple Grandin Verbal thinkers over generalize & suck at planning, details & practical solutions
Channel: Visceral Gravitas
Date: 2023-01-07

excerpted from https://youtu.be/XYZP1wuGBD8
@JordanBPeterson 

transcript: 
Verbalizer tends to over generalize 

There was an interesting study, where high school students that came for school specializing in the Arts, Sciences and another one especially in the humanities.  
There were teams of students and their assignment was to create a new planet.  
So the art students heavily visualizing, they made a planet with crystals on it, another one made a skyscraper planet. Then the more mathematical science students, made a round ball and described gravity and the atmosphere you know kind of boring pictures.  
The verbal thinkers started to write it down and then they go oh wait a minute, we're supposed to draw the planet, so they made kind of splotchy stuff on it.  
The arts minds and the mathematical minds they had big planning sessions, on how to design their planet.  
Where the verbal thinkers, they didn't do any planning!  
The verbal thinker would get big broad concepts, over generalized, of something we need to do. 
But how do you actually Implement those concepts? yeah right. 
There's no detail there because the verbalizer tends to over generalize, with big broad concepts, they didn't do any planning, there's no detail there.

Engineers are very good at rank ordering practical priorities.
I'm not interested in politics I would just rank the power stations on expensiveness and difficulty to winterize.
Rank ordering practical priorities 

I have this company my business partner is an engineer and he knows these systems at every level of their machine instantiation.  
If anything ever goes wrong he knows exactly what goes wrong 
say exactly right piece of equipment froze 
He knows exactly what goes wrong and he knows exactly how to fix it 
it's particularized down to the point where that makes action possible.  

and that's part of the problem with verbal abstraction it's like a pseudo knowledge 
because it sounds like you've got the picture right 
but when you actually try to implement it 
you find out that it's really a hollow shell 
it's like a pseudo knowledge a hollow shell 

if I want to get accurate information you don't talk to the managers 
you got to get down in the shop 
when we get rid of all the suits that's gonna be the management the verbal thinkers 
they won't talk in front of suits they're afraid they're going to lose their jobs 
and then they'll take you out there and show you what froze 

So they have this extremely detailed knowledge 
they bring that knowledge up the abstraction hierarchy 
pointing out their hypothetical superiors who lack detailed knowledge
pointing out the lack of detailed knowledge pointing out

they're worried about losing their jobs 
but you really want to solve the problem 
they need to be able to talk to you freely 
because they're the ones who tell you exactly what froze 

Why is there this psychological gap between the practical and the abstract?

You see before it was all an abstraction, spreadsheets numbers 
but when they came out of the office and they saw something bad 
now it was real, now they had to act 
it was no longer abstract anymore 

there seems to be a kind of pride in that abstraction, 
the ones who think primarily in words, 
tend to be rather dismissive of the intelligence of more practical people like working people 

So once you build up hierarchical organizations 
it's very easy for the people who are operating near the top of the abstraction chain 
not to pay attention to the details 
and we could fall prey to the psychological tendency to just dismiss all that 

not to pay attention to the details the details 
because the verbalizer tends to over generalize 
it's like a pseudo knowledge to over generalized 
they didn't do any planning a hollow shell pseudo knowledge 
you see this is the problem the verbal thinker will get big broad concept pseudo knowledge 
big broad concepts of something we need to do 
but how do you actually Implement those Concepts? 
Rank ordering the details 
it's particularized down to the point that makes action possible 
Planning the details Planning