Thinking About Thinking
Indy Neogy and
Thinking About Thinking
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
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.
like Fran Lebowitz said “words are easy, books are not.”
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, relationshi... 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.
don’t think your way into doing, do your way into 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 almos... See more
The Rational Walk • The Thirty Second Mind
The detriment of going from a multi-disciplinary mindset to an attention vacuum.
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.
phoebe and
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 bounda