Thinking About Thinking

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

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

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

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. Think of the old... See more

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

There is, unfortunately no good word for “skill at solving poorly defined problems.” Insight, creativity, agency, self-knowledge—they’re all part of it, but not all of it. Wisdom comes the closest, but it suggests a certain fustiness and grandeur, and poorly defined problems aren’t just dramatic questions like “how do you live a good life”; they're... See more