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James_Miller comments on Rationality Quotes January 2013 - Less Wrong
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Keith E. Stanovich, What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought
For instance, you need analytical thinking to design your heuristics. Let your heuristics build new heuristics and a 2% failure rate compounded will give you a 50% failure rate in a few tens of generations.
Possibly, but Stanovich thinks that most heuristics were basically given to us by evolution and rather than choose among heuristics what we do is decide whether to (use them and spend little energy on thinking) or (not use them and spend a lot of energy on thinking).
What is analytical thinking, but a sequence of steps of heuristics well vetted not to lead to contradictions?
A heuristic is a "rule of thumb," used because it is computationally cheap for a human brain and returns the right answer most of the time.
Analytical thinking uses heuristics, but is distinctive in ALSO using propositional logic, probabilistic reasoning, and mathematics - in other words, exceptionless, normatively correct modes of reasoning (insofar as they are done well) that explicitly state their assumptions and "show the work." So there is a real qualitative difference.
Propositional logic is made of many very simple steps, though.
Sure. The point is that "A->B; A, therefore B" is necessarily valid.
Unlike, say, "the risk of something happening is proportional to the number of times I've heard it mentioned."
Calling logic a set of heuristics dissolves a useful semantic distinction between normatively correct reasoning and mere rules of thumb, even if you can put the two on a spectrum.
Ohh, I agree. I just don't think that there is a corresponding neurological distinction. (Original quote was about evolution).