Thinking About Thinking

Jeff Bezos in the Lex Fridman podcast:

efficiency and invention are sort of at odds, because invention, real invention, not incremental improvement, incremental improvement is so important in every endeavor, in everything you do, you have to work hard on also just making things a little bit better. But I'm talking about real invention, real lateral

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Dragonfly Thinking

Our best chance of understanding complex issues lies in seeing them through “dragonfly eyes,” as political scientist and psychologist Philip Tetlock shows in his work on forecasting. Dragonflies have compound eyes made up of thousands of lenses and they integrate the views from these lenses to give them a range of vision of... See more

Anthea often uses metaphors to develop and convey new conceptualizations. This approach is in keeping with studies about the significant role of metaphorical thinking in creative intellectual processes in science and beyond. In Clash of Paradigms: Actors and Analogies Shaping the Investment Treaty System, for instance, she likened the system to a... See more

The first is a weakened focus on the concept of bias. The point of decision-making is not to minimize bias. It is to minimize error, of which bias is one component. In some environments, a biased decision-making tool will deliver the lowest error. For example, statisticians and computer scientists often use a class of procedures called... See more

learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old... See more

Everyone belongs to a tribe and underestimates how influential that tribe is on their thinking. There is little correlation between climate change denial and scientific literacy. But there is a strong correlation between climate change denial and political affiliation. That’s an extreme example, but everyone has views persuaded by identity over... See more

Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.

David Foster Wallace,

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