The trivium, grammer , logic and rhetoric

Intellectual Self Defence & Developing Critical Thinking Skills

Developing Critical Thinking Skills

This is not something our educational system or cuture seems to value. However nowadays we have access to more information than ever before, but at the same time we are more confused. This make developing critical thinking skills a higher priority for everyone. I covered problems and the causes of this problem in a previous blog post called “Education or Instruction?”. Poor critical thinking skills are so endemic that many people have lost confidence in their own ability to make decisions. Most people outsource the majority of their most important thinking to other people believing themselves incapable. I believe there’s huge room for improvement in most people , including myself and for this reason I was very excited when I came accross the Trivium and the Peace Revolution Podcast. Lacking in the ability and confidence to scrutinize information makes a person an easy target for scoundrels.  The Peace Revolution Podcast aims to provide information and tools to develop skills needed for  “intellectual self defence” by developing critical thinking skills.

 

The Trivium is one of those tools . Today the trivium is taught only in a small group of elite educational establishments.  The fundamentals  of the trivium are ancient, they were developed by  Aristotle. The Latin word “Trivium” means “from the three ways”

1. General Grammar (Answers the question of the Who, What, Where, and the When of a subject.) Discovering and ordering facts of reality comprises basic, systematic Knowledge

2. Formal Logic (Answers the Why of a subject.) Developing the faculty of reason in establishing valid [i.e., non-contradictory] relationships among facts, systematic Understanding

3. Classical Rhetoric (Provides the How of a subject.) Applying knowledge and understanding expressively comprises Wisdom or, in other words, it is systematically useable knowledge and understanding

Reference http://www.triviumeducation.com/

The mastery of the Trivium allows for an individual to quickly assimilate information, judge its quality and turn this information into wisdom. Wisdom being knowledge that has useful application. In studying the trivium Formal Logic is a good place to start as it deals with the identification of lies, which is something we are bombarded daily. Using Formal Logic to Identify fallacies   The study of Formal Logic helps understanding by rooting out contradictions and fallacies. Fallacies are not the same as lies they are information that is either deliberately or unknowingly misleading.  With the trivium you can you identify fallacies and also name the type of fallacy that is being perpetrated. For a list common fallacies that you could pop in your wallet see this Mental Antivirus checklist. To see some fallacies in action see below

I currently have the Mental Antivirus checklist in my wallet and have already brought some logical rigour to some pub conversations. I provided some friends a copy of the Mental Antivirus Checklist and found that using the common approach meant we had much more meaningful dialogue than normal.

Final thought

The word trivia is derived from  singular for the Trivium.  It is interesting how something so important has come stand for something so…………….trivial. I’d love know how you get on with the Trivium – Drop me line in the comments! Paul

lifestyle_150

My top 3 Internet Business Podcasts

I listen to a lot of podcasts and thought the readers might be interested to know what my favourite were. They all feature stacks of detailed actionable  information and are also all really motivating.

Five minutes with Jack

Jack runs a successful business based around The survival podcast and based on this experience he also has alot of great stuff about about setting up community by using podcasts that I haven’t heard anywhere else. This is a business podcast on all manner of internet marketing topics. Recently he had a really good show on some very low level advice about how to effectively use keyword research. The shows are about 5-15 mins long and there is a new show every day.

The lifestyle business Podcast

This is the journey of two smart location independent entrepreneurs. These guys have a number of profitable interesting business ventures which they tell their story on the podcast. They also have tips and tricks and great stuff about outsourcing and working internationally , working with chinese firms and even (shock!) selling real physical products. The shows are fun and they have bags of energy and I’ve been listening to their adventures since more or less the start.

 

The Smart Passive Income

Pat Flynn has had this the smart passive income website going for a few years he has built a successful business around various passive income streams coming from his various websites and social media presence. He is completely transparent and open about his progress and publishes some great instructional videos on his blog. He also was one of the first people ever to publish his monthly income statements online which he continues to do today. I have just listened to his podcast where he actually went through his yearly income statement which I found very interesting. Recently he has also been conducting a series of interviews with different entrepreneurs using the internet in different ways to improve their businesses which I found very interesting.

 

 

To read more about other internet marketing stuff I
find really useful go to my internet marketing page
Screen-shot-2012-02-27-at-8

Backup and Recovery with Backup Buddy

For backup and recovery of my websites I use backup buddy.

I have recently optimized my webserver configuration to optimize them for speed and safety by using two web hosts and backing up files from one to the other using backup buddy. Unlike the import export tool in wordpress backup buddy backs up all images all databases, everything.

I have setup weekly backups of all my sites using backup buddy. Its actually really easy. I ahve also recently used backup buddy to migrate one of my wordpress blogs to another server.

I also use backup buddy to migrate websites so I can develop them offline.

lifestyle_150

Lifestyle business Lie

Recommended Media
Stanford University Entrepreneurship Podcast
Small Biz Pod Podcasts
Five Minutes with Jack Podcasts
Startups for the rest of us Podcast
Lifestyle Business Podcast
Automate my small business Podcast
Smart Passive Income Blog / Podcasts
Recommended Books
Lifestyle Business Podcast
Crush it - Gary Vaynerchuck
Various books by Seth Godin
Four Hour Work Week
Recommended Applications
O-desk - Outsourcing website
99designs Setup Design Competitions
CoHuman - Team collaboration 
Mailchimp - Free email marketing
Capsule - Free CRM
pixlr - Free online photoshop
Capsule - Free CRM

There are alot of people right now that want to leave thier job and start a “lifestyle business”. The term “Lifestyle Business” was first coined in the book The 4 hour work week. Tim Ferris is very smart and I read the book a few years ago and found it inspirational.

There is alot of useful stuff in there about how to be ultra efficient and get what you want from life. However some people get the idea that it is possible through being clever to build successful a business with little effort. There is alot of hype on the internet that supports this view (mainly from people selling ebooks and training courses on how to get rich on the internet).

Even Tim Ferris didn’t manage to build his first lifestyle business from scratch. He had a business where he spent 70- hours a week building up prior travelling the world and transforming the business into a “lifestyle business”. I have not heard from one credible entrepreneur that really is doing well that hasn’t had to put in alot of work in the startup phase (see recommended media above).

Pat from the excellent smart passive income blog is a good example of someone living that “lifestyle business” but even he admits in his most recent podcast that it took time and effort to setup things to where he is today.

So I guess the message in this post is if you want to build anything thats worth anything it will take time and effort (probably alot more than you expect). Hopefully you enjoy the ride but if you not prepared to put in the work you may as well give up and watch TV instead.

product workshop

Information product Workshop

I facilitated a workshop at the Internet Marketing Business meetup events  at St Kilda yesterday. I had no business cards and there were some pretty cluey people at the events so I pointed people this way If anyone was there and wants to catchup to discuss ideas etc contact me via contact page and we could maybe do lunch in the CBD or meet after work sometime.

All ideas that were thought up during the workshop are public domain and people are willing to give them a go if they want. I think I may have a go at one of them.

If anyones interested I did the slide pack in google presentation at it can be found below

Below are the ideas that came out of the workshop

adminer1

Reporting In WordPress

I have been looking for decent plugins to setup some reporting on my wordpress sites for a while. My search is now over I have found the

best reporting plugins for wordpress

They are Adminer and Exports and reports
Adminer gives a way of quickly viewing and running sql scripts on wordpress tables within wordpress. Exports and Reports gives a way of generating reports from those scripts within wordpress. I have not found anything else like them. I was using them to setup some reports and that was when  I came up with my first problem with queries on wordpress tables it was

How to run a SQL Query to show the post details with the category information.

I was trying to join the wp_post table to the wp_term_taxonomy table so I could find
the categories that match the posts. It took me a while. Below is a diagram that shows how the category information is organized in

the category id is not in the wp_posts table in wordpress

The code I wrote to do the join is below
select a.id ,b.term_taxonomy_id,c.term_id 
from wp_posts a, wp_term_relationships b,
wp_term_taxonomy c,wp_terms d
where a.id = b.object_id and b.term_taxonomy_id = c.term_taxonomy_id
and c.term_id = d.term_id