Problem Solver

Whitney Gallons

Areas Whitney Gallons is Knowledgeable in:

Math, science, philosophy, social problems

Whitney Gallons's Problem Solving Experience:

  1. Problem solving is an act of mental procreation, and limiting your pool of thinkers entirely to those with the most formal of credentials is creating sad and incomplete generations of ideas. The ground and noble house of Academic Innovation, to put it more brutally, is a Hapsburg-style trainwreck. Formal recognition, while sometimes necessary, heavily filters who will be allowed to swim in the innovation gene pool, and by the time its strict conditions are met, thinkers have spent a majority of their lives steeping in a uniform culture, often to the exclusion of other life experience. (continued)
  2. Compared to their counterparts, it is virtually impossible, for example, for most poor people, most mothers, most blue-collar workers, and most non-neurotypicals to find any path to formal recognition for their abilities. We spend our lives solving scheduling problems for middle management at McDonald's franchises across the nation, and getting quietly fired from Wal-Marts for, naïvely, proposing ways to increase customer satisfaction. We iron the kinks out of desperate budgets, solve problems that end marriages, and work around broken mental healthcare systems. There are no accolades in such a life. (continued)
  3. Is the solution to this to allow everyone at the table? Of course not. But making no exceptions is hardly a safe gamble, as it virtually guarantees an echo chamber. Fortunately, as is the case with genetics, you need only one little shot of diversity to make up for a whole host of problems. And my brain is diverse as shit. The question is, outside of "diversity for diversity's sake," why should you let me try, when I don't even have a PhD? The short answer is: Because I'm fantastic at what I do, and I'm the ingredient you're missing. For the full answer, see the "Education and Training" portion of this profile.