I watched Shin Godzilla the other evening. It was the first time I'd ever seen the film. For anyone who hasn't seen it, and without too many spoilers, the central foci of the film isn't the giant monster ravaging Tokyo and Japan writ-large, but rather the bureaucratic response to the disaster (in the movie this is humanities first encounter with Godzilla). Ever since watching the film, I've been mulling it over -- I've been especially caught up in thinking about what separates the protagonist and his team from the larger bureaucracy that they work within. It is framed as rebel outsiders v establishment, but I think what it boils down to is different modes of thinking:
The larger bureaucracy is swept up with attempting to solve the problem (Godzilla destroying Japan) by applying what I'll call *technical* thinking. Whereas the group of rebellious losers attempts to solve the problem by applying *critical* thinking.
- "Technical thinking" is concerned with finding solutions. I think of it as being akin to puzzle solving.
- "Critical thinking" often raises more questions than it answers.
I think one of the issues with “tech” is that a lot of folks in tech confuse or conflate technical thinking for critical thinking, and because they spend all day applying technical thought to problems they assume they’ve thought critically about it, when, in reality, what they’ve done is solve a puzzle…which is well and good, but not the same as critical thinking.
Critical thinking includes the larger ecology of a problem (the “big picture”) and isn’t necessarily about coming to a resolution. Technical thinking answers the question while critical thinking raises more questions.