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

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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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.

Anthea often uses metaphors to develop and convey new conceptualizations. This approach is in keeping with studies about the significant role of metaphorical thinking in creative intellectual processes in science and beyond. In Clash of Paradigms: Actors and Analogies Shaping the Investment Treaty System, for instance, she likened the system to a... See more

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

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

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

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