Thinking About Thinking

We should all want to cultivate a thirty second mind that can absorb the essence of a problem and come up with insights based on deep fluency with how the world works. However, a different type of “thirty second mind” is far more common today. Nearly thirty years after the internet became mainstream, the majority of people in our society have... See more

Neuroscience research also teaches us that our emotional brains needn’t always operate beneath our radar. Richard Peterson, a psychiatrist who applies behavioral economics theory in his investment consulting business, advises clients to cultivate emotional self-awareness, notice their moods as they happen, and reflect on how their moods may... See more

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.

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

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

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

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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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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