Given the occasion, I'd like to remind everyone that our LW Wiki fell into lack of development of its content for almost a year now. Nobody improves the pages, and I merely perform passive maintenance. It'll move forward only if it gets some people obsessed with improving it.
I think discussion posts like this one are a good way to highlight wiki entries that need work, and to direct attention to the wiki pages in general.
"Cached Thought" wiki entry has been copied below for you connivance.
The above entry focuses only on the negative sides of cached thought. Probably because it can be a large barrier to rationality. In order overcome this barrier, and/or help others overcome it, it is necessary to understand why "cached thoughts" have been historically valuable to our ancestors and in what fashions it is valuable today.
'''Cached thought''' also allow for complex problems to be handled with a relatively small number of simple components. These problem components when put together only approximate the actual problem, because they are slightly flawed '''cached thoughts.''' Valid conclusions can be reached more quickly with these slightly flawed cached thoughts then without. The aforementioned conclusions should be recheck without using '''cached thoughts''' if a high probability of correctness is necessary or if the '''cached thoughts''' are more then slightly flawed.
Is this an appropriate expansion of the wiki entry? The words are drawn from my observation of the world. How else should the above wiki entry be expanded?