Thinking About Thinking

from Peter Watts: "We're not thinking machines, we're feeling machines that happen to think."

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,

Nix 🕊 • carry yourself lightly

Alara and

Beautifully Biased Brains

Quirks and discoveries about our brains, how we perceive intelligence, and why we can't seem to ever fully understand it.

Charlie Gedeon and • 13 cards

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

alex

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

Tom Stafford • Complex Problems and the Rush to Judgement

Indy Neogy

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

Jason Collins • We don’t have a hundred biases, we have the wrong model - Works in Progress

IIndy Neogy

Minimize error not bias

phoebe

This is why the people who score well on intelligence tests and win lots of chess games are no happier than the people who flunk the tests and lose at chess: well-defined and poorly defined problems require completely different problem-solving skills. Life ain’t chess! Nobody agrees on the rules, the pieces do whatever they want, and the board... See more

Adam Mastroianni • Why Aren't Smart People Happier?

Indy Neogy