You know that David Foster Wallace speech about fish? Two young fish swimming along, older fish passes and says "Morning boys, how's the water?" The young fish swim on, then one turns to the other: "What the hell is water?" That's the point. We don't notice what we're swimming in. The Furniture We Sit In … Continue reading Why Fish Don’t Know They’re Wet
Tag: cognition
Finding Your Best Starting Point: A Simple Guide to Personal Growth
The Big Idea Instead of asking "What's wrong with me?" ask "Where should I start today?" This guide helps you pick the best place to focus your energy so you can grow and feel better. Step 1: Look at Four Areas of Your Life Think about these four parts of yourself: Your Body How tense … Continue reading Finding Your Best Starting Point: A Simple Guide to Personal Growth
Seven Varieties of Stupidity
"1. Pure Stupidity...2. Ignorant stupidity...3. Fish-out-of-water stupidity...4. Rule-based stupidity...5. Overthinking stupidity...6. Emergent stupidity...7. Ego-driven stupidity...-Ian Leslie, "Seven Varieties of Stupidity." ianleslie.substack.com. May 21, 2022 It's a fun classification exercise. I'd say that 3 is a subset of 2, being in an unfamiliar environment is a variety of ignorance. However, if you think about the kinds … Continue reading Seven Varieties of Stupidity
The Big Here Quiz
30 questions to elevate your awareness (and literacy) of the greater place in which you live:1) Point north.2) What time is sunset today?3) Trace the water you drink from rainfall to your tap.4) When you flush, where do the solids go? What happens to the waste water?5) How many feet (meters) above sea level are … Continue reading The Big Here Quiz
The Understructure of Thought
Language imposes limitations. When we reason, we use language, whether symbolic or natural. But, our understanding, or, perhaps it is better to talk about it as an intuition, runs deeper than our reason. A common example can be found in a terms like "creepy", "janky", etc. We use these terms when there is uncertainty, when … Continue reading The Understructure of Thought
Meditation Without Meditating
"Over the past several decades, studies examining the potential for meditation to curb mental anguish and increase wellbeing have yielded promising, if complicated, results. For patients, complications can arise when meditation is marketed as a ‘happy pill, with no side effects’. This commodification and oversimplification is at the root of a conundrum for Jay Sanguinetti … Continue reading Meditation Without Meditating
Preferring Pain to High Cognitive Effort
"Cognitive effort is described as aversive, and people will generally avoid it when possible. This aversion to effort is believed to arise from a cost–benefit analysis of the actions available. The comparison of cognitive effort against other primary aversive experiences, however, remains relatively unexplored. Here, we offered participants choices between performing a cognitively demanding task … Continue reading Preferring Pain to High Cognitive Effort
The Dunning-Kruger Effect Is Probably Not Real
"For an effect of human psychology to be real, it cannot be rigorously replicated using random noise. If the human brain was predisposed to choose heads when a coin is flipped, you could compare this to random predictions (heads or tails) made by a computer and see the bias. A human would call more heads … Continue reading The Dunning-Kruger Effect Is Probably Not Real
[Question] Is Stupidity Expanding? Some Hypotheses.
"To be explained: It feels to me that in recent years, people have gotten stupider, or that stupid has gotten bigger, or that the parts of people that were always stupid have gotten louder, or something like that.I’ve come up with a suite of hypotheses to explain this (with a little help from my friends). … Continue reading [Question] Is Stupidity Expanding? Some Hypotheses.
Cults: Dissociation, Group Psychology, and Cognitive Dissonance
""How does cult psychology work? How is it possible to persuade human adults to enter a weird cognitive landscapewith no basis in reality? To enter a fantasy realm so profound that they’ll willingly die for whomever has been selected as the local Messiah?"--Matthew J Sharps Ph.D, "Cults and Cognition: Programming the True Believer." Psychology Today. … Continue reading Cults: Dissociation, Group Psychology, and Cognitive Dissonance
Brain.fm
"...our music [is] unique, purpose-built to steer you into a desired mental state. In other words, we’ve found new ways to create music that helps you do what you need to do."—https://brain.fm
Dunning-Kruger Effect = Satisfaction
"...people with the biggest gap between their abilities and their view of [themselves] say they have the highest levels of satisfaction with their life, career and relationships. “People who report being more adjusted are those who have a combination of relatively lower true abilities and actual higher views of themselves,” says Stéphane Côté, a social … Continue reading Dunning-Kruger Effect = Satisfaction
Can A.I. Think Ethically?
Source: Cyber Security Degrees
Simpson’s Paradox
"Simpson's paradox (or Simpson's reversal, Yule–Simpson effect, amalgamation paradox, or reversal paradox), is a phenomenon in probability and statistics, in which a trend appears in several different groups of data but disappears or reverses when these groups are combined. —s.v. Simpson's Paradox, Wikipedia. An example using arithmetic from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: 1/5 < … Continue reading Simpson’s Paradox
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