dthunt comments on Open thread, Dec. 29, 2014 - Jan 04, 2015 - Less Wrong

4 Post author: MrMind 29 December 2014 11:10AM

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Comment author: Sarunas 29 December 2014 07:29:42PM 3 points [-]

Cognitive Bias research gives us a long list of situations where System 1 may fail to give you the best answer, giving a biased answer instead. Therefore, learning about cognitive biases teaches one to notice if one is in a dangerous situation where they should "halt" one's System 1 and offload their decision making to the System 2. Naturally, the next question is, how to train one's System 1 and System 2 themselves?

How does one train one's System 1? If you spend a lot of time analyzing data in your field, you can develop a domain specific intuition. Is it possible to train your "general intuition" (if such thing exists) or your capability to develop domain-specific intuitions more quickly and more reliably? Mathematicians often talk about beauty, elegance as good guiding principles and importance having a good mathematical taste (e.g. Terence Tao briefly mentions it here). But why do some people have better taste than others? How do you train your taste? Is a good taste (or good taste for ideas) an example of intuition that is somewhat less domain specific? Or is it still too domain specific? By the way, is developing a good taste for art or music helpful for strenghtening your "general intuition" (if such things exists)? If so, a taste for what kind of art is the most helpful for aiding the development of the aforementioned "general intuition"?

Is System 1 simply a shorthand for "everything that isn't System 2" and intuition is a shorthand for " the ability to acquire knowledge without inference or the use of reason", thus you cannot train your System 1 in general, you can only train specific parts of it?

How to train your System 2? There is a famous quote by Alfred North Whitehead:

It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle — they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.

It seems that "finding better ways to organize your knowledge" is one way to train your System 2? Coincidentally, the quote also suggests that we improve our thinking by developing reliable ways to offload mental burden to System 1, therefore the quote is not, strictly speaking, just about System 2 (of course, concepts of "System 1" and "System 2" belong to a map, not a territory). What are other ways to train your System 2, besides the aforementioned "finding better ways to organize your knowledge" and finding ways to reliably offload some of the work to System 1? Developing axiomatic systems? Learning to use logic and Bayesian inference? Are there any others?

Comment author: dthunt 30 December 2014 04:51:19PM 1 point [-]

If you have some sort of decision-making process you do a lot that you expect is going to become a thing you build intuition around later, make sure you have the right feedback loops in place, so that you have something to help keep that intuition calibrated. (This also applies to processes you engineer for others.)