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 almos... See more

Falk Lieder, Ming Hsu, and Tom Griffiths showed that the ‘rational’ solution to this computational constraint is to over-sample extreme outcomes. That is, you should apply something like the availability heuristic by calling those more extreme (easily accessible) outcomes to mind. The result is a biased estimate, but one that is optimal given the f... 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 cli... See more

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.