Thinking About Thinking

@gordonbrander Although perhaps a 2x2 makes more sense per @kevin2kelly https://t.co/55uzti2B17

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

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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.

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.

thinking is an active pursuit — one that often happens when you are spending long stretches of time staring into space, then writing a bit, and then staring into space a bit more. It’s here that the connections are made and the insights are formed. And it is a process that stubbornly resists automation.

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 lookin... See more

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.