Dictionary of thinking tools.
‘Every word in your vocabulary is a simple thinking tool, but some are more useful than others. If any of these expressions are not in your kit, you might want to acquire them; equipped with such tools you will be able to think thoughts that would otherwise be relatively hard to formulate. Of course, as the old saw has it, when your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and each of these tools can be overused.’
– Daniel Dennett. 2013.
Index: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
A. ^
Accumulation – nothing less than the key to long-term anything.
Alternative cost – anything, everything, comes at the cost of something else.
B. ^
Bias – systematic deviations that you make consistently when it comes to estimating reality.
C. ^
Change – ‘people don’t change’ is the single most erroneous platitude ever, change is the only thing that is certain, if you’re not cringing at your 6 month previous self you’re not evolving fast enough.
Confirmation bias – you’re hard-wired to constantly look for, interpret, and recall information that affirms your previously held beliefs and belief-system(s).
Consistency bias – you consistently think your past self(s) resemble your present self in terms of behavior and attitudes, when in fact they often don’t (Safer 2002, Williams 2016). *
D. ^
Delayed gratification – possibly the most important ability, besides timing and luck, for success in modern western life (see also: marshmallow experiment).
Dunning-Kruger effect – if you’re unskilled, you overestimate yourself compared with more highly skilled individuals who do the opposite, however, the gap between reality and perception is the largest for the bottom performers (Dunning & Kruger 1999).
E. ^
Empiricism – the only method for discerning what’s true is with the scientific method, the key to which is experiment. See also: science.
Evolution – if you have (i) variation, (ii) selection, and (iii) heredity you must get evolution. A rich and deep understanding of the theory of evolution is essential if you want to understand anything of substance, from physics and biology, to human consciousness and social hierarchies. * *
Extinction – (in behavioral psychology) when a previously reinforced behavior or thought pattern–all obsessions are–no longer produces reinforcing consequences the behavior stops occurring.
F. ^
Failure of imagination – the ability to understand something seemingly complex because you fail to imagine its mechanism, e.g. consciousness, evolution, quantum physics, AI, etc — does not mean it does not or can not exist.
Failure of vision – lacking the vision to predict how some seemingly unlikely future outcomes can turn out otherwise, and vice versa. *
Flailing – is repetitive, ineffective action. If you have technical failure your four main options are: retreat, reconsider, use alternative options, or retry with a change that improves your chances.
FI – Financial Independence: the key is saving more than you spend, (at least) 50-75% of your income, investing the surplus into low-cost index funds and letting compound interest do the rest, and avoiding debt. *
G. ^
GTD – a system for capturing, processing, organizing, reviewing, and executing everything that needs to get done, ‘all the stuff that is coming in needs to be externalized (David Allen 2012)’. See also: Journal.
H. ^
Happiness – is overrated. Be rational above all. Who told you you should be happy? Don’t fall for the lies, ain’t no happiness happening nowhere.
High-yield – find that which gives the most return for time and effort invested, like frequently returning exam questions, or frequently seen diagnosis, or any useful pattern of importance.
Hindsight bias – you’ll think you could predict events that have already happened, that you ‘knew it all along’ (Hoffrage 2003).
Human – building blocks: elementary particles → atoms → amino acids + nucleic acids → proteins → cells → tissues → organs → organ systems → humans.
Humor effect – you’ll remember funny things better than not so funny stuff (Schmidt 1994). *
Hydrogen – in a long enough timeline hydrogen will turn into talking primates. *
I. ^
Intuition pumps – stories designed to provoke a aha!-felt intuition about whatever thesis is being advocated, e.g. Plato’s cave (Daniel Dennett 2014).
J. ^
Jootsing – ‘jumping out of the system’, creativity isn’t just about novelty, it’s about jumping out of an established system; being novel in relation to something (Hofstadter 1979, & Dennett 2013). *
Journal – thyself will change and to keep up, to evolve and adapt, to avoid regression, to get out of your head, you need to keep (external) track of who and what you are and where you want to be going. See also: GTD.
K. ^
L. ^
Learned helplessness – you being unable/unwilling to avoid unpleasant stimuli because you think previous failures to do so have determined the outcome of future attempts (Seligman & Maier 1967).
M. ^
Marshmallow experiment – children aged 4 to 6, put in front of a marshmallow, and told if they could wait 15 min before eating they would be rewarded a second marshmallow, the successful ones (approximately a third) also did better later in life (Walter, 1972).
Mastery – is the progress of knowledge/skill in a field from knowing the basics and knowing what you don’t know to being able to rethink and create novel and useful knowledge in the field in an efficient way (see also: the Dunning-Kruger effect), the three-step algorithm for mastery in any field: knowledge/skills and knowledge of knowledge/skill gaps → play/work/solve level knowledge/skill → ability to create and refine knowledge/skill in the field.
Math – math is hard, math is a skill; thinking tools will only get you so far, in the end to go further in basic science, i.e. physics, you need (advanced) math.
Memes – language-based information-replicator with different degrees of fitness.
Meritocracy – a system that rewards skill and where progress is based on ability and talent rather than on class, privilege, or wealth.
Mise-en-place – ‘the religion of all good line cooks, meaning their set-up, their carefully arranged supplies of sea salt, rough-cracked pepper, softened butter, cooking oil, wine, back-ups and so on (Anthony Bourdain 2000).’ *
Mistakes — ‘the chief trick to making good mistakes is not to hide them—especially not from yourself. Instead of turning away in denial when you make a mistake, you should become a connoisseur of your own mistakes, turning them over in your mind as if they were works of art, which in a way they are (Daniel Dennett 2013).’ *
Moist robot – ‘think of your body as a moist, programmable robot whose outputs depend on its inputs, not magic (Adams 2013).’
Money – as a rule the more money you have the better is your mental and physical health until money is no longer an issue or, in absolute numbers, until an annual income of 75 000 dollars (Kahneman & Deaton 2010).
N. ^
Narrative – the race-centered and the self-centered and the self-pity centered narratives bore me, I’m much more interested in the meritocratic narrative: how good, how far, how much can individuals excel and become masters in their field?
Name – apparently there is 8 years worth of work-experience in a white name compared to a black when applying for jobs (Bertrand & Mullainathan 2004). *
O. ^
P. ^
Parenthood – when it comes to your well-being it’s worse than divorce, it’s worse than unemployment, it’s even worse than the death of a partner (Margolis 2015). *
Patterns – we are pattern-finding machines, we look for patterns in nature and in social games, among things, learning to find useful patterns gives us an advantage.
Primacy effect, Recency effect, & Serial position effect – you’ll remember items at the end of list best, items in the beginning second best, and all the stuff in-between least well (Murdock & Bennett 2012).
Q. ^
Questions – we ask questions because we want true answers, we make maps to find out way from A to B, we make plans to follow them through, and when we fail, which we will repeatedly, we should adapt, revise, adapt.
R. ^
Retrieval – is the mother of all learning, repeating that retrieval enforces your long-term learning (Karpicke & Blunt 2011).
Routine – ‘if you have a routine you can always deviate from it if something comes up, but if you don’t have a routine then everything is stuff that comes up (Don Winslow 2006).’
Running – ‘Running day after day, piling up the races, bit by bit I raise the bar, and by clearing each level I elevate myself. At least that’s why I’ve put in the effort day after day: to raise my own level. I’m no great runner, by any means. I’m at an ordinary – or perhaps more like mediocre – level. But that’s not the point. The point is whether or not I improved over yesterday. In long-distance running the only opponent you have to beat is yourself, the way you used to be (Haruki Murakami 2007).’
S. ^
Science – plays to win. The scientific method is the best (and only) tool we have for finding out what’s true. Being scientifically literate is our best defence against deception and charlatans. Science is a vaccine against blind belief, pseudoscience, and general woo-woo. See also: empiricism. *
Sibling-order psychology – systematic reviews show that there is ‘no birth-order effects on extraversion, emotional stability, agreeableness, conscientiousness, or imagination’, however, firstborns score higher on self-reported and objectively measured intelligence (Julia Rohrer 2015). *
Sunk-cost fallacy – the tendency to keep investing in things you’ve already invested in and that can not be recovered, thus failing to accept that they might be beyond saving, because you’re not able to let go of the personal cost.
Surf the urge – pay attention to the physical discomfort of wanting something, give it your full attention, and trust that you can tolerate those physical sensations, and if you just wait with patience they’ll go away. This technique can be applied to any addiction or mindstate. See also delayed gratification and the marshmallow experiment. *
T. ^
Thinking – good thinking is hard, because the stony path to truth is always competing with seductive and easier paths that turn out to be dead ends (Daniel Dennett 2013). *
Thinking tool – handy prosthetic imagination-extenders and focus-holders that permit us to think reliably about problems, e.g.: labels, intuitions pumps, examples, analogies & metaphors (Daniel Dennett 2013).
Thin-slicing – the ability to find accurate patterns in a thin window of experience or ‘how to make correct snap judgements’. *
U. ^
V. ^
W. ^
Weekly review – a designated time-slot each week to go through past, current, and future commitments in order to keep yourself above water and keep focus on what matters. See also: GTD.
Work – ‘I work hard, doggedly, almost relentlessly. The joke, which I only now get, is that work is fun (Ryan Avent 2014).’ *
X. ^
Y. ^
Z. ^
TRIAD TRIAD 