I'm interested in the ways people think. The ways different minds operate and apprehend the world. The sheer range of intellectual types is fascinating, with some people thinking in such different styles as to make them almost different species.
You can see this all over our beloved Daily Kos.
First, a bit about my own mind. I have always been drawn to theory: big ideas, connecting different systems, trying to tease out what makes the whole thing work. I interpret the world through metaphor; I'll recklessly apply Goedel's incompleteness theorem to epistemology, for example, or use the Big Bang to think about the start of the Cold War and the resulting solidification of the national emergency into bureacratic forms (like stars and planets forming after the Big Bang). I'm not so good with math so I've always used language as my primary intellectual tool - as with any way of thought, it has its benefits and drawbacks. I'm sure certain Kossacks would consider such a mind frustratingly sloppy at times.
At one job I worked closely with software engineers, and was struck by how different was their thinking from my own intellectual approach to problems. I was impressed by their attention to detail, the methodical, linear way they attacked problems. Yet I was also frustrated by their inability to see the big picture. For example, they had no idea about the basic business model of our startu. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't get them to think strategically about our competitors or customers. At times, we could hardly communicate.
Kossacks, too, span the great range of types of minds. Some are of the engineering, detailed, data-driven type. They effectively attack individual issues, teasing out the evidence, building excellent, logical arguments for their points. Great for, say, delineating the arguments in the runup to the Iraq War, then destroying them one by one. Or great for making a tight argument against a Supreme Court decision or nominee.
Others are more like me: they see the actual manifestations of republican/conservative polices as trivial, and proceed from the overarching conviction that conservatism is a charade that masks a transfer of wealth to elites via and endless number of subterfuges. Each individual outrage is merely an outgrowth of this central truth.
Still other people on Kos enjoy casting their minds to the future, fusing current data, trends, and a measure of discontinuous thought to create a model of what may come. To some extent, these minds are a synthesis of the theoretical and detail-oriented types I mentioned above.
For a diary on thinking, I've hardly made a rigorous categorization of modes of thought. Perhaps if I were more certain this diary would persist (ah, game theory) I would be far more exact. But then again, that's not my style.
Well, it's an interesting topic and I'd love to hear your different takes on it.