Much of this material is sourced/summarized from Deliberate Performance: Accelerating Expertise in Natural Settings and “The Power of Intuition”. Both contain much more than what is written here. An earlier draft/version of this was posted as "Productive Use of Heuristics and Biases". Based on feedback in the comments, much has...
The main point If we are naturally biased and limited in how rational our decision making can be, it might be more effective to improve intuition and manage biases rather than trying to completely eliminate them and focus on unbiased thinking. I’m not advocating irrationality, instead I’m interested in how...
There are a couple chapters in there on the subject, but it's probably not the best book specifically for that subject. I haven't read it yet, but "Working Minds: A Practitioner's Guide to Cognitive Task Analysis " looks pretty good. One of the people behind the method wrote several books for a general audience and one of them, "The Power of Intuition" (not what it sounds like) has a few tips on how to learn from experts:
... (read more)*Probe for specific incidents and stories. This is not the same thing as listening to war stories. It means selecting incidents where intuition was needed, and expertise was challenged, and then digging into the details.
*Ask about
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"
Here a couple reviews/summaries/etc of How To Read A Book: http://www.oxfordtutorials.com/How%20to%20Read%20a%20Book%20Outline.htm http://www.thesimpledollar.com/review-how-to-read-a-book/ http://www.artofmanliness.com/2013/06/17/how-to-read-a-book/ http://sachachua.com/blog/2012/03/visual-book-notes-how-to-read-a-book/ http://www.farnamstreetblog.com/tag/mortimer-adler/
These links might also be of interest: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/05/chase-your-reading.html http://pne.people.si.umich.edu/PDF/howtoread.pdf
That is a good point, I've only just begun to look into it, so I don't have any general recommendations. It just seemed like as I was coming up with a reading list on reading, some books seemed to pop up in Amazon's "people also bought" section. I think part of it is because the guy who wrote "How to Read a Book" was heavily influenced by Thomas Aquinas. I also looked up hermeneutics afterwards and it seemed appropriate for what I was trying to do. One key takeaway seems to be looking at reading as work...
One book that I was looking at was "Inductive Bible Study: A Comprehensive Guide to the Practice of Hermeneutics" by Traina, as the table of contents looked interesting (survey of books as wholes, survey of parts as wholes, selecting questions and formulating premises, drawing inferences, evaluating and appropriating, correlation,...). Haven't got to it yet though.
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... (read 431 more words →)
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.
The problem is that we don't know if Einstein not being neuortypical is the cause of his genius, or the result of a lifetime of thinking in a certain way. Brains aren't static and can change over time, it's entirely possible he was born with a neurotypical brain that became aytpical over the course of his life.
Much of this material is sourced/summarized from Deliberate Performance: Accelerating Expertise in Natural Settings and “The Power of Intuition”. Both contain much more than what is written here. An earlier draft/version of this was posted as "Productive Use of Heuristics and Biases". Based on feedback in the comments, much has changed. Feedback is appreciated, as are any other ideas on how deliberate practice can be applied.
How does someone incorporate something like deliberate practice into a typical job and everyday life? Deliberate practice is meant to be challenging, and because of this, it is draining. Much of the expertise literature describes a limit of a few hours of deliberate practice per day.... (read 1313 more words →)
After doing a bit more reading here and thinking about your comments, I think I'll focus on the 7 methods and eliminate much of the low quality fluff that make up the intro/conclusion for the next version.
I think some of my confusion was due to unsubstantiated assumptions about the standard views of LessWrong. What I've been thinking of bias is closer to Inductive bias than the standard definition, which refers to error patterns. I then interpreted rationality as "overcoming bias". Inductive bias can be useful, and the idea of overcoming bias of that type seemed to be taking things too far. That doesn't seem to be what anyone is actually advocating here though.
Again, thanks.
I agree that the only way to practice decisions is to make them, but I think there is more to it than that. The deliberate part of deliberate practice is that you are actively trying to get better. The deliberate performance paper I linked to touches on this a bit, in that deliberate practice is challenging for professionals and that something else might work better (they advocate the first 5 methods in that paper).
Beyond making decisions, you need to have an expectation of what will happen, otherwise hindsight bias is that much harder to overcome. It's the scientific method: hypothesis->test->new hypothesis. Without defining what you expect ahead of time, it is much easier to just say "Oh yeah, this makes sense" and normalize without actually improving understanding.
The main point
If we are naturally biased and limited in how rational our decision making can be, it might be more effective to improve intuition and manage biases rather than trying to completely eliminate them and focus on unbiased thinking. I’m not advocating irrationality, instead I’m interested in how to deal with bounded rationality. How can we improve our ability to satisfice? How can we productively use and develop our intuition?
Caveats
While I intend for this post to be informative, it may not be, and I suspect I’ll learn more from writing it and feedback than others will get from reading it.... (read 1985 more words →)
I've read his newest book, "Meditating Selflessly: Practical Neural Zen", that seems to be aimed more at a layperson than "Zen and the Brain". It also talks a bit about his speculations about what meditation does in the brain, along with some recommendations on meditation. It might be too speculative though.
He also has a third book, perhaps that is a happy medium? Depending on how motivated you are, you might even try one of those Human Brain coloring books...