Just for sharing an unpretentious but (IMO) interesting post from a blog I regularly read.

In commenting on an article about the results of an experiment aimed at "simulating" a specific case of traumatic brain injury and measuring its supposed effects on solving a particularly difficult problem, economist/game theorist Jeffrey Ely asked whether a successful intervention could ever be designed to give people certain unusual, circumstantially useful skills.

It could be that we have a system that takes in tons of sensory information all of which is potentially available to us at a >conscious level but in practice is finely filtered for just the most relevant details. While the optimal level of detail might >vary with the circumstances the fineness of the filter could have been selected for the average case. That’s the second >best optimum if it is too complex a problem to vary the level of detail according to circumstances. If so, then artificial >intervention could improve on the second-best by suppressing the filter at chosen times.

Any thoughts?

Incidentally, the blog InDecision has just published - as part of its "Research Heroes" series - a brief interview with the above-cited experimental psychologist Jonathan Baron (one of his books was described as "a more focused and balanced introduction to the subject of rationality than the Sequences" in one of Vaniver's much-useful summaries) and he stressed again his position that "rational thinking is both learnable and part of intelligence itself."

I'd recommend using Blogtrottr for turning the content from your RSS feeds into email messages. Indeed, as email is (incidentally) the only web-related tool I can (and must) consistently use throughout the day, I tend to bring a major part of the relevant web content I'm interested in to my email inbox - including twitter status updates, LW Discussion posts, etc.

Thanks.

Many thanks.

Thanks!

Bats, balls, and substitution sensitivity: cognitive misers are no happy fools

I suppose he's interested in generally discussing the above-mentioned point.

Trying to get a job and noticing more accurately what the market looks like [I'd be glad if someone pointed to the article in which willnewsome talks about making money, circa 2010]

(Virtual) Employment Open Thread

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2) Cognitive biases and decision support systems development: a design science approach. Information Systems Journal. Volume 16, Issue 1, pages 55–78, January 2006.

3) Cognitive biases in the use of computer-based decision support systems. Omega. Volume 17, Issue 4, 1989, Pages 335–344.

4) Debiasing investors with decision support systems: an experimental investigation. Decision Support Systems. Volume 46, Issue 1, December 2008, Pages 399–410.