Thinking About Thinking
Indy Neogy and
Thinking About Thinking
Just like those lines, I think all of our various tests of intelligence aren’t as different as they seem. They’re all full of problems that have a few important things in common:
- There are stable relationships between the variables.
- There’s no disagreement about whether the problems are problems, or whether they’ve been solved.
- There have clear
Adam Mastroianni • Why Aren't Smart People Happier?
But that’s physics, and physics deals with the natural. Engineering, on the other hand, is a science of the artificial , and it would be downright strange to insist that engineering artifacts have no purpose or telos.
Maxim Raginsky • Engineers as philosophers, Part 3
Important point about engineering, but also something I regularly raise about how economics misunderstands itself
This advice may sound familiar; it lies at the heart of books like Blink and Gary Klein’s The Power of Intuition, which promise to help readers harness their gut feelings. But for executives taught to methodically frame problems, consider alternatives, collect data, weigh the options, and then decide, cultivating emotional self-awareness may seem... See more
Gardiner Morse • Decisions and Desire
It is difficult to overstate the advantage of intensely thinking about things in a world coated with a film of unthinking inertia. But it is also difficult to convey.
Simon Sarrisx.comphoebe and
If you did a lot of maths at school you are used to being given problems of the first type, and when you see a problem you want to find the analytic solution. It’s a good instinct, since analytic solutions are efficient. As long as you have the right method you can quickly reach an exact answer.
Lots of being smart is working out when you’re... See more
Lots of being smart is working out when you’re... See more
Tom Stafford • Complex Problems and the Rush to Judgement
There is, unfortunately no good word for “skill at solving poorly defined problems.” Insight, creativity, agency, self-knowledge—they’re all part of it, but not all of it. Wisdom comes the closest, but it suggests a certain fustiness and grandeur, and poorly defined problems aren’t just dramatic questions like “how do you live a good life”; they're... See more
Adam Mastroianni • Why Aren't Smart People Happier?
The metaphors we use shape how we view the world. Is the brain like a computer? Maybe, as Gurwinder says, the brain is the opposite: a machine that tries to circumvent thinking . Cognition costs time, and in a society that is information-rich and time-poor, people will use shortcuts to make decisions - feelings, aesthetics, environment,... See more
sari azout • Things I'm thinking about
No! The brain doesn't seek to circumvent thinking, this misunderstands the optimisation that goes on. The brain seeks to circumvent (where possible) computation - because computation is not only inefficient, but very often ineffective. Incidentally, beware of writers who decide they are PCs and you are an NPC.
One pattern I’ve noticed in all miserable people:
They overthink and underact.
The system I use to escape the cold, dark prison of overthinking:
Taylin John Simmondsx.comexcellent thread
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
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