I don't tend to find my coding skills useful outside of programming, but my debugging ( analysing ) skills are occaisionally useful.

____________________
Jeremy
I didn't believe in evil until I dated it.

You've identified that the people of the world are not analytical enough. Maybe another way to state this is that people don't think enough. Thinking is considered painful and to be avoided.

"You think too much," is heard all too often, but that's a dangerous thing to say, because when you stop thinking for yourself, someone else will do your thinking for you, and they may not have your well-being in mind.

So what shall we do about this problem?

How can people be persuaded to try to see the world and all its people as they really are?

Besides not thinking enough, are there other barriers to comprehension?

If so, how can those barriers be destroyed?

So many questions, so few answers; yet we must search for them. If we are capable of helping people come to a better understanding of the world, then we should try to help where we can.

If you really want top-down analysis for everyday's problems maybe you should apply for a immigration visa to the Vulcan planet.

Top-down is part of the solution. It is not the solution.

EVERY problem can be simplified in a top-down scheme.
Read this:
It's like zooming out in a map. Suppose I need to get to California(CA) from Texas(TX).
In the extreme detail, I can descrive the journey like an endless turning and stopping and crossing (3500 elements, for example).
If I zoom out a little, I understand I need to cross different countries (35 elements).
If I zoom out even more, I understand I need to cross New Mexico(NM) and Arizona(AZ).
I believe this is not just an exception. Planning, and 'top-downing' an every day's life problem is possible (even if you sometimes are required to do some left-to-right and forward'n'backward(fuel, health, lodging, etc.) :).
I hope I got the point, and made myself clear, anyhow.

dict granularity
--- [from wn] ---
granularity
     n : the quality of being composed of relatively large particles
         [syn: {coarseness}, {graininess}]

--- [from foldoc] ---
granularity

   <jargon, parallel> The size of the units of {code} under
   consideration in some context.  The term generally refers to
   the level of detail at which code is considered, e.g. "You can
   specify the granularity for this profiling tool".

   The most common computing use is in parallelism where "fine
   grain parallelism" means individual tasks are relatively small
   in terms of code size and execution time, "coarse grain" is
   the opposite.  You talk about the "granularity" of the
   parallelism.

   The smaller the granularity, the greater the potential for
   parallelism and hence speed-up but the greater the overheads
   of synchronisation and communication.

   (1997-05-08)
[download]

I believe what Ole was trying to say is that you need a uni-directional attack, a checklist if you will. It's anyone's guess why he chose to say Top-Down, but it makes sense seeing how that's how i'm typing this right now, top down ;)

Combine cold calculcating ruthless logic with great methodical rationalising and analytical powers and a good coder you are.

Problems is in the real world order breaks down and we descend into chaos where communication, emotion and instinct rule.