Thinking About Thinking
Indy Neogy and
Thinking About Thinking
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
Lots of being smart is working out when you’re... See more
Tom Stafford • Complex Problems and the Rush to Judgement
andrea and
how to make a complete map of everything you think
Lion Kimbro’s classic! Mapping everything in your brain
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
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
Carcinisation • Against Automaticity
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
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.
Steve Jobs explains the importance of both thinking and doing:
“The doers are the major thinkers. The people who really create the things that change this industry are both the thinker-doer in one person.”
sari and
Intelligence Evolved at Least Twice in Vertebrate Animals | Quanta Magazine
Yasemin Saplakogluquantamagazine.org
("JP") 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