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

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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

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. Think of the old... See more

Falk Lieder, Ming Hsu, and Tom Griffiths showed that the ‘rational’ solution to this computational constraint is to over-sample extreme outcomes. That is, you should apply something like the availability heuristic by calling those more extreme (easily accessible) outcomes to mind. The result is a biased estimate, but one that is optimal given the... See more