Tags / thinking
-
Critical Thinking
Critical thinking has become a corporate buzzword. Almost no one can define it. This is a painful irony.
-
Descriptions
We do not have direct access to reality. What we have is descriptions — and the gap between pursuing truth and pursuing accurate descriptions is large enough to fall into.
-
Epistemology
Epistemology is the study of knowledge — what we think we know, and why. You cannot reason about anything else without committing to this first.
-
Goodhart's Law
When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a useful measure. This generalises everywhere.
-
Knowledge and Perception
We can only perceive what we have the conceptual tools to see. The doors of perception are built from acquired concepts.
-
Locating Valuable Problems
The bottleneck isn't intelligence. For most people, most of the time, it's what they aim their intelligence at.
-
Logic
Logic is about validity, not truth. An argument can be perfectly valid and entirely false. The distinction matters.
-
Metacognition vs. Intelligence
Most people who have struggled were not undone by lack of intelligence. They were undone by an inability to see their own thinking clearly.
-
On Ideas
Ideas are the only thing that scales. And ideas have consequences — the best and worst things humans have ever done were caused by them.
-
Probability
Expected utility tells you what happens in the long run, not what happens next. Most people have not fully internalized this.
-
Rationality
Most people have a rough idea of what rationality means. Most of those ideas are wrong.
-
The Brain Is Not a Spectator
The boundary between self and environment is porous, possibly illusory. You are not a mind looking out at reality from behind glass.
-
The Efficiency Error
Most productivity advice misses the target. Efficiency is doing things right. Effectiveness is doing the right things. Effectiveness comes first.
-
The Mind Projection Fallacy
The mistake of treating your representation of the world as a property of the world itself — projecting the map onto the territory.
-
The Nuisance of Nuance
A mind that sees only grey is not more sophisticated than one that sees only black and white. Nuance has become a virtue signal.
-
The Typical Mind Fallacy
Assuming other people's minds work more like yours than they actually do. One of the most consistent errors in human reasoning.
-
Truth
To deny truth is to make a claim you treat as true. The self-refuting quality of thoroughgoing subjectivism — and why truth matters.