Thinking About Thinking
Indy Neogy and
Thinking About Thinking
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one.
-Neil Postman, 2005
I think our starting hypothesis should be that behaviors that spread in the population arise from social learning, rather than from a mysterious unconscious process of thoughtless copying
Carcinisation • Against Automaticity
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
Miranda Forsyth • Creative thinking | Anthea Roberts — Anthea Roberts
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
Jason Collins • We don’t have a hundred biases, we have the wrong model - Works in Progress
Kelly's insight about wine applies perfectly to how we think about personal growth. Just as mindlessly drinking more wine doesn't make us better wine connoisseurs, frantically doing more doesn't make us more successful humans. When we apply Type 2 thinking to our lives, it shifts everything - from how we parent (quality time over scheduled... See more
Perhaps that is why so many of us have half-done tasks on our to-do lists and half-read books on our bedside tables, scroll through Instagram while simultaneously semi-watching Netflix, and swipe between apps and tabs endlessly, from when we first open our eyes until we finally fall asleep. One uncomfortable explanation for why so many aspects of
... See moreCasey Cep • What Monks Can Teach Us About Paying Attention
Can you rationalize why a piece of art moves you? Why you have chemistry with one person over another? Why you like one piece of software more than another that does the same thing? Our decisions are not driven by logic, they are driven by emotion.
Sari Azout • Things I'm thinking about
Homo Prospectus is the best view on this - emotions are how we use the totality of our past and present thinking to make judgements.
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