Thinking

I find for myself that my first thought is never my best thought. My first thought is always someone else’s; it’s always what I’ve already heard about the subject, always the conventional wisdom. It’s only by concentrating, sticking to the question, being patient, letting all the parts of my mind come into play, that I arrive at an original idea. B... See more

The value of a position in chess consists of its probability of victory for the player. Moves are evaluated according to how they affect this probability of victory.

We can apply this to our thinking: knowledge-based value creation consists of enriching data, information, and pre-existing knowledge with value-giving properties. Value-giving properti... 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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research on intellectual humility has exploded in the past 10 years. Psychologists now have many different ways to assess intellectual humility. Social scientists know that possessing a high level of intellectual humility is associated with multiple positive outcomes, like having more empathy, more prosocial behavior, reduced susceptibility to misi... See more

the brain is commonly regarded as a thinking machine, but it’s more often the opposite: a machine that tries to circumvent thinking. This is because cognition costs time and calories, which in our evolutionary history were scant resources.

it is probably a mistake, in the end, to ask software to improve our thinking. Even if you can rescue your attention from the acid bath of the internet; even if you can gather the most interesting data and observations into the app of your choosing; even if you revisit that data from time to time — this will not be enough. It might not even be wort... See more

thinking has two parts:

1. expanding. generating chaos.


2. collapsing. finding order.