Anyone have opinions on James H. Austin's Zen and the Brain and Zen-Brain Reflections? Austin is a neurologist who practices Zen Buddhist meditation, and writes some quite involved neurological speculations about what's going on with the meditation. I started reading Zen and the Brain, but once it got to the serious neuroscience part it started to look like I needed to learn a bunch of brain anatomy to keep being able to follow, so I haven't continued with it yet.

Is the referenced book useful if I'd like to know more about the subject?

Thanks for putting this together. I came across a couple related links recently that I've found helpful : Ryan Holiday's note taking methods Ryan Holiday on "Digesting books above your level"

I've recently made an effort to start getting more out of the reading that I do, I think one of the simplest things to do is to close the book every few minutes and summarize what you've just read. Writing down those summaries is even more effective. I'm sure people who post reviews and summaries (see some of the recent ones posted here for example) have a far better understanding of the material than if they just read it.

One book that might be helpful is "How To Read A Book" by Mortimer Adler. It talks about different stages of reading, questions to ask yourself, and other strategies. If you don't want to buy the book (it's fairly cheap), there are numerous summaries online. If you buy it though, you get a free book to practice on. Here is an excerpt on reading multiple books on a given topic:

I. Surveying the Field Preparatory to Syntopical Reading 1. Create a tentative bibliography of your subject by recourse to library catalogues, advisors, and bibliographies in books. 2. Inspect all of the books on the tentative bibliography to ascertain which are germane to your subject, and also to acquire a clearer idea of the subject. Note: These two steps are not, strictly speaking, chronologically distinct; that is, the two steps have an effect on each other, with the second, in particular, serving to modify the first.

II. Syntopical Reading of the Bibliography Amassed in Stage I 1. Inspect the books already identified as relevant to your subject in Stage I in order to find the most relevant passages. 2. Bring the authors to terms by constructing a neutral terminology of the subject that all, or the great majority, of the authors can be interpreted as employing, whether they actually employ the words or not. 3. Establish a set of neutral propositions for all of the authors by framing a set of questions to which all or most of the authors can be interpreted as giving answers, whether they actually treat the questions explicitly or not. 4. Define the issues, both major and minor ones, by ranging the opposing answers of authors to the various questions on one side of an issue or another. You should remember that an issue does not always exist explicitly between or among authors, but that it sometimes has to be constructed by interpretation of the authors’ views on matters that may not have been their primary concern. 5. Analyze the discussion by ordering the questions and issues in such a way as to throw maximum light on the subject. More general issues should precede less general ones, and relations among issues should be clearly indicated. Note: Dialectical detachment or objectivity should, ideally, be maintained throughout. One way to insure this is always to accompany an interpretation of an author’s views on an issue with an actual quotation from his text.

Another book I'm looking into (but haven't yet read) is Cognitive Productivity. Also, if you are open to it, you might consider reading a book on studying the Bible. It's really a series of connected books with lots of self reference and people have been studying it for a long time, so there is a lot on the topic. It's called Hermeneutics, and while I used the Bible as an example (because of the wealth of material on its study) hermeneutics is used elsewhere (other religious traditions, law, philosophy, etc).

Books on studying the Bible tend to have assumptions built into them that aren't appropriate for people reading books they don't regard as The Sacred Word Of God. There will probably be some useful material in there, but I wouldn't expect a great density of it.

There are books on studying the Bible written by people who don't make those assumptions, but I think those books tend to be directed more specifically at theology students, which would reduce their general relevance in other ways. (There'll likely be more attention to issues specific to the Bible, or to particular bits of it -- dealing with the fact that it's usually read in translation from somewhat-uncertain sources, addressing the original context of societies very unlike our own, etc.)

It's entirely possible that there are some Bible-study-advice books out there that are general enough, and treat the Bible enough like an "ordinary" book, that a good portion of their advice is more broadly applicable, and perhaps some of them give good advice. But I don't think just saying "look up some books about the Bible" is going to be helpful; the majority of Bible-study-advice books probably aren't so useful. Do you have a particular recommendation?

I've recently made an effort to start getting more out of the reading that I do, I think one of the simplest things to do is to close the book every few minutes and summarize what you've just read. Writing down those summaries is even more effective. I'm sure people who post reviews and summaries (see some of the recent ones posted here for example) have a far better understanding of the material than if they just read it.

One book that might be helpful is "How To Read A Book" by Mortimer Adler. It talks about different stages of reading, questions to ask yourself, and other strategies. If you don't want to buy the book (it's fairly cheap), there are numerous summaries online. If you buy it though, you get a free book to practice on. Here is an excerpt on reading multiple books on a given topic:

I. Surveying the Field Preparatory to Syntopical Reading 1. Create a tentative bibliography of your subject by recourse to library catalogues, advisors, and bibliographies in books. 2. Inspect all of the books on the tentative bibliography to ascertain which are germane to your subject, and also to acquire a clearer idea of the subject. Note: These two steps are not, strictly speaking, chronologically distinct; that is, the two steps have an effect on each other, with the second, in particular, serving to modify the first.

II. Syntopical Reading of the Bibliography Amassed in Stage I 1. Inspect the books already identified as relevant to your subject in Stage I in order to find the most relevant passages. 2. Bring the authors to terms by constructing a neutral terminology of the subject that all, or the great majority, of the authors can be interpreted as employing, whether they actually employ the words or not. 3. Establish a set of neutral propositions for all of the authors by framing a set of questions to which all or most of the authors can be interpreted as giving answers, whether they actually treat the questions explicitly or not. 4. Define the issues, both major and minor ones, by ranging the opposing answers of authors to the various questions on one side of an issue or another. You should remember that an issue does not always exist explicitly between or among authors, but that it sometimes has to be constructed by interpretation of the authors’ views on matters that may not have been their primary concern. 5. Analyze the discussion by ordering the questions and issues in such a way as to throw maximum light on the subject. More general issues should precede less general ones, and relations among issues should be clearly indicated. Note: Dialectical detachment or objectivity should, ideally, be maintained throughout. One way to insure this is always to accompany an interpretation of an author’s views on an issue with an actual quotation from his text.

Another book I'm looking into (but haven't yet read) is Cognitive Productivity. Also, if you are open to it, you might consider reading a book on studying the Bible. It's really a series of connected books with lots of self reference and people have been studying it for a long time, so there is a lot on the topic. It's called Hermeneutics, and while I used the Bible as an example (because of the wealth of material on its study) hermeneutics is used elsewhere (other religious traditions, law, philosophy, etc).

I've advocated Gary Klein's work here before (Deliberate Practice for Decision Making ), you may find his latest book Streetlights and Shadows interesting.

The problem is that procedures are a system that describes how to react, but the model of reality that those procedures are based on is incomplete and may be contradictory (see Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, though I may be generalizing it too much). The Drefus Model of Expertise lines up fairly well with your final questions, particularly the "Expert" stage. Unfortunately, it describe how one can develop that expertise or the answers to the questions.

Of course, Einstein has since been proved not to be neurotypical. It was all over the news. The ... science news.

Nice post! You didn't explicitly ask for criticism, but I'm going to give some anyway:

I think the standard font-size on LessWrong is smaller. Most people would prefer it if you used that.

I think there's definitely interest on LessWrong for improving intuition, but I would frame it as "Training intuition to make its judgements more rational" rather than (as your post leans towards) "Forget rationality and harness our natural biases!". This is mostly just a terminological difference.

The System 1/System 2 distinction is really between System 1 being (fast, intuitive, subconscious) and System 2 being (slow, deliberative, conscious). Around these parts, the word "rationality" tends to be used to mean something like "succeeding by using any and all means". Under this definition, rationality can use both System 2 and System 1 type thinking. Thus I believe your post could be improved by taking the sentences where intuition is being contrasted with "rationality" and replacing the word "rationality" with something like "deliberate thought" or "System 2".

As I say above, this is really just a terminological difference, but I think that making it will clarify some of the ideas in the post. In particular, I think that the main content of the post (the seven ways of improving our heuristic judgements), is really useful instrumental rationality, but that the introduction and conclusion hide it in poorly backed up statements about how reducing bias is less important than using good heuristics. I find it strange that these things are even presented in contrast; the techniques you give for improving intuition are techniques for reducing bias. The intuitive judgements become more accurate (i.e. less biased) than they were before.

Some bits of the two "Concluding thoughts" paragraphs seem especially washy. A general sentiment of "System 1 should work in harmony with System 2" sounds nice, but without any data to back it up it could just be complete bollocks. Maybe we should all be using System 1 all the time. Or maybe there are some activities where System 1 wins and some where System 2 wins. If so, which activities are which? Are firefighters actually successful decision makers?

One final thought: Do the seven methods really focus on System 1 only? Many of them seem like general purpose techniques, an in particular I think that 4, 5, 6, and 7 are actually more System 2.

Some places, the "deliberate practice" idea breaks down, choosing and decision making is one of them. There is no way to "practice" them except by actually making chooses and decisions; separating practice from normal execution is not possible.