In David Burn's book "Feeling Good", a CBT self-help book, he teaches how to identify 10 cognitive distortions in our thinking patterns and develops practices for counteracting them.

Among the distortions he identifies are all-or-nothing-thinking (i.e. splitting). I don't remember if he says anything about projection specifically, but another of the distortions is mind-reading/jumping-to-conclusions, which at least is in ballpark of falsely attributing mental states to others.

The context of the book is to alleviate your own depression, but it is also really interesting from an anti-biasing perspective.

What you're describing is the difference between recall and recognition, if you want to google it.

E.g. the question "What is the atomic number of Oxygen?" is a recognition task if you're given multiple choices "a) 1 b) 6 c) 8", and it's a recall task if you're just presented a blank space in which to write down your answer.

Recognition tasks are generally easier.

"Your Memory: How it works and how to improve it" by Higbee is an excellent book on memory. It dispels some common memory myths, clarifies concepts (e.g. short vs long term memory), teaches general principles on how to remember information (meaningfulness, organisation, association, visualization, etc.), as well as specific memory techniques (method of loci, peg mnemonic, first letter mnemonic, etc.).

I don't have any hard and fast answers, so I cannot be completely sure.

My guess is that a "spirit" person is more likely to believe in free will, while a "gear" person is more likely to believe in the absence of free will. What free will means precisely, I'm not sure, so it feels forced for me to claim that another person would believe free will, when I myself am unable to make an argument that is as convincing to me as I'm sure their arguments must be to them. I haven't thought much of free will, but the only way I'm personally able to conceive of it is that my mind is somehow determined by brain-states which in turn are defined by configurations of elementary particles (my brain/my body/the universe) with known laws, if unknown (in practice) solutions. So personally I'm in the "it's gears all the way down" camp, at least with the caveat that I haven't thought about it much. But there are people who genuinely claim to believe in free will and I take their word for it, whatever those words mean to them. So my guess at the beginning of the paragraph should interpreted as: if you ask a "spirit" person he will most likely say, "yes, I believe in free will", while a "gear" person will most likely say "no, I do not believe in free will." The factual content of each claim is a separate issue. Whether either world-view can be made self-consistent is a further issue. I think a "spiritist" would accept the will of someone as a sufficient first cause of a phenomenon, with the will being conceived of only as a "law unto itself".

When it comes to determinism, I think a "gearist" are more likely to be determinists, since that is what has dominated all of the sciences (except for quantum physics).

"Spiritits" on the other hand, I don't know. If God has a plan for everything and everyone, that sounds pretty deterministic. But if you pray for him to grant you this one wish, then you don't know whether he will change the course of the universe for your benefit or no, so I would call that pretty indeterministic. Even if you don't pray, you can never really know what God has in store for you. If all your Gods are explicitly capricious, then there are no pretensions to determinism. I think a "spiritist" is more likely to believe in indeterminism.

The animistic view with respect to natural phenomena feels very religious to me as well. I use the word "feel" here because I have no precise definition of religion and maybe none exists. (See the very beginning of my comments in this thread.) If you believe that the river is alive, that the wind can be angry, and the waves vengeful, is that (proto?) religious? Or is it simply the pathetic fallacy? What if you believe, with Aristotle, that "nature abhors a vacuum"? That is animistic with out being, I think, religious. Or what of Le Chatelier's Principle, in which a chemical reaction "resists" the change you impose on it (e.g. if you impose an increased pressure, the chemicals will react to decrease the pressure again)?

don't know if it's a good separation as stated.

As stated, my comment is more a vague suggestion than a watertight deduction from first principles.

What I intend to suggest is that just as humans vary along the dimensions of aggression, empathy, compassion, etc., so too do we vary according to what degree, and when, we give either explanation (animistic/clockwork) primacy over the other. I'm interested in these modes of explanation more from the perspective of it being a psychological tendency rather than it giving rise to a self-consistent world view.

In the mental operations of humans there is a tendency to say "here, and no longer, for we have arrived" when we explain phenomena and solve problems. For some this is when they have arrived at a kind of "spirit", for some it is when we arrive at "gears". For some it is gears six days a week, and spirits on Sunday.

The degree to which you seek spirit-explanations depends on the size and complexity of the physical system (a spec of dust, a virus, a bacteria, a single celled organism, an ant, a frog, a mouse, a cat, a monkey, a human), and also the field of inquiry (particle physics, ..., sociology). And it probably depends on some personal nature-and-nurture quality. Sometimes explanations are phrased in terms of spirits, sometimes gears.

I'm also not saying that the world-views necessarily contradict each other (in that they deny the existence of phenomena the other asserts), only that each world-view seeks different post-hoc rationalizations. The animist will claim that the tectonic plate moved because God was wrathful and intended it. The clockworker will claim that God's wrath is superfluous in his own model of earthquakes. Whether either world-view adds something the other lacks is beside the point, only that each desire to stop at a different destination, psychologically.

In real life I once heard, from an otherwise well adjusted member of society, that the Devil was responsible for the financial crisis. I did not pry into what he meant by this, but he seemed quite satisfied by the explanation. Let me emphasize this: when being told that the cause of the financial crisis was the Devil, he was quite content with simply nodding his assent. I have not researched the crisis myself, but I am confident I would phrase my explanation in terms of "externalities" or "perverse incentives" or some such. The two explanations would agree to every detail of what actually happened during the financial crisis, but for some psychological reason what he and I find to be a psychologically satisfying explanation differs.

It's perfectly fine to say that "Alice wants coffee". The question is whether a person is more likely to believe that Alice's "wanting something" is what sets in motion her biochemical reactions, or whether it is the biochemical reactions which sets in motion her "wanting something". Whether the cart pushes the horse, or vice versa.

I don't think any world-views (as implemented in real humans) are self-consistent (or even deduced from first principles), but a person's gear/spirit tendency can probably predict additional beliefs that the person holds. For example, which person is more likely to believe that ghosts exist? If a person tends towards gear/spirit-explanations, in which is he more likely to say "when I'm in a room with only my teddy bear, I no longer feel alone"? I'm not necessarily saying that these beliefs are necessary consequences of each world-view, only that certain ideas are associated with each world-view for one reason or other.

As to the "by nature" part of my comment, I mean that those who tend towards spirit-explanations are more likely to believe something approximating "we descended from the gods", while those who tend towards gear-explanations are more likely to believe "we ascended from the beasts". The former tend towards utopianism, the latter tends towards the "tragic vision" of life. (See: A Conflict of Visions ). The utopians/spiritists take it for granted that we should be friends and wonder why we aren't. Those with the tragic vision of life/gearists take it for granted that we are in conflict and wonder why we sometimes aren't.

Essentially, the world is a system of gears. To understand some activity that happens in world, look at the gears, what they do, and how they interact. Don't search for a mysterious spirit responsible for the activity, if the activity can be fully explained by the gears.

You put your finger on something I've been attempting to articulate. There's a similar idea I've seen here on Lesswrong. That idea said approximately that it's difficult do define what counts as a religion, because not all religions fulfill the same criteria. But a tool that seems to do the job you want to do is to separate people (and ideas) based on the question "is mind made up of parts or is it ontologically fundamental?". This seems to separate the woo from the non-woo.

My mutation of this idea is that there are fundamentally two ways of explaining things. One is the "animistic" or "intentional stance (Cf. Daniel Dennett)" view of the world, the other is the "clockwork" view of the world.

In the the animistic view, you explain events by mental (fundamentally living) phenomena. Your explanations point towards some intention.

God holds his guiding hand over this world and saved the baby from the plane crash because he was innocent, and God smote America because of her homosexuals. I won the lottery because I was good. Thunderclaps are caused by the Lightningbird flapping his wings, and lightning-flashes arise when he directs his gaze towards the earth. Or perhaps Thor is angry again, and is riding across the sky. Maybe if we sacrifice something precious to us, a human life, we might appease the gods and collect fair weather and good fortune.

Cause and effect are connected by mind and intention. There can be no unintended consequences, because all consequences are intended, at least by someone. Whatever happens was meant (read: intended) to happen. If you believe that God is good, this gives comfort even when you are under extreme distress. God took you child away from you because he wanted her by his side in heaven, and he is testing you only because he loves you. If you believe in no God, then bad things happen only because some bad person with bad intentions intended them to happen. If only we can replace them with good people with good intentions, the ills of society will be relieved.

In the clockwork view of the world, every explanation explains away any intention. The world is a set of forever-falling dominoes.

Everything that happens can be explained by some rule that neither loves you nor hates you but simply is. Even love is spoken of in terms of neural correlates, rising and falling levels of hormones. Sensory experiences, like the smell of perfume or excitations of the retina, explain love the same way aerodynamics explain the flying of an airplane. We might repackage the dominoes and name them whatever we like, still everything is made out of dominoes obeying simple rules. But even if the rules are simple, the numerous interacting pieces make the game complicated. Unintended consequences are the norm, and even if your intentions are good, you must first be very cautious that the consequences do not turn out bad.

The animist is more likely to parse "China has bad relations with Japan" in the same way as they parse the sentence "Peter dislikes Paul", while the clockworker is likely to interpret it as "The government apparatus of either country are both attempting to expand control over overlapping scarce resources."

The animist is more likely to support the notion that "The rule of law, in complex times, Has proved itself deficient. We much prefer the rule of men! It's vastly more efficient.", while the clockworkers are more likely to bind themselves by the law and to insist that a process should be put in place so that even bad actors are incentivized to do good. The animist believes that if only we could get together and overcome our misunderstandings, we would realize that, by nature, we are friends. The clockworker believes that despite being born with, by nature, opposing interests, we might both share the earth and be friendly towards each other.

The animist searches for higher meaning, the clockworker searches for lower meaning.

Indeed, this story from Polya emphasises the necessity of trying different angles of attack until you have a breakthrough (via squeak time.com):

The landlady hurried into the backyard, put the mousetrap on the ground (it was an old-fashioned trap, a cage with a trapdoor) and called to her daughter to fetch the cat. The mouse in the trap seemed to understand the gist of these proceedings; he raced frantically in his cage, threw himself violently against the bars, now on this side and then on the other, and in the last moment he succeeded in squeezing himself through and disappeared in the neighbour's field. There must have been on that side one slightly wider opening between the bars of the mousetrap ... I silently congratulated the mouse. He solved a great problem, and gave a great example.

That is the way to solve problems. We must try and try again until eventually we recognize the slight difference between the various openings on which everything depends. We must vary our trials so that we may explore all sides of the problem. Indeed, we cannot know in advance on which side is the only practicable opening where we can squeeze through.

The fundamental method of mice and men is the same: to try, try again, and to vary the trials so that we do not miss the few favorable possibilities. It is true that men are usually better in solving problems than mice. A man need not throw himself bodily against the obstacle, he can do so mentally; a man can vary his trials more and learn more from the failure of his trials than a mouse.

Your analog watch can serve as an impromptu compass.

Point the hour hand towards the sun, then true south will be halfway between the hour hand and the 12-o'clock mark. Assuming you're in the northern hemisphere.

E.g. if it's around 2-o'clock, direct the hour hand towards the sun, and south will be in the 1-o'clock direction --- and therefore north towards the 7-o'clock direction.

In what kind of instances do you use it?

Whenever I want to read articles or text, but not on my computer. Either because I want a distraction free environment (no tabs on the Kindle), or because I won't bring my laptop with me, or because I'm outside and need a glare free screen, or because I prefer the soft light of the Kindle screen late at night and in bed, etc., etc.

My most recent sent-to-Kindle article is this one. If I like it, I will import it into my Calibre library and tag it as "read" and maybe "thinking" or "creativity" or some such. As an alternative to bookmarking or Evernote web-clipping.

Congrats on your new Kindle. :-) I keep my Paperwhite 2 with me always and have started buying jackets based on whether or not they have pockets into which my Kindle fits.

2) Don't know how easy they break, since I haven't dropped one. I mean, when was the last time you dropped a book to the floor, or your phone? You'll probably be equally careful with your Kindle.

I had an accident with my Kindle Keyboard, however, where I put it in my backpack without cover and pressure from a corner one of my hardcover books made an indentation in the screen. It slightly discolored the background of the Kindle, but the text is still readable.

The reason I don't use a case is that I carry it with me, and the case makes it slightly thicker and heavier. I would use a case if I had it in my backpack.

1) I don't.

3, 4) Check out Caliber for library management and book-tagging. I much prefer it to organizing books into collections on my Kindle. It will also convert between formats, but if your pdf is a scanned book it won't improve.

Also check out the Kindle add on for Chrome/Mozilla. It sends web pages directly to your Kindle.