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:
...*Probe for specific incidents and stories. This is not the same thing as listening to war stories. It means selecti
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 ...
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, question...
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...
You are indeed abusing Gödels Incompleteness Theorem.
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.
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...
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 th...
Something like this was discussed by Kelly McGonigal in "The Willpower Instinct". A couple things that might help:
Avoidance - Complete avoidance is probably impossible, but you might try limiting your exposure to such things, particularly when you are vulnerable to making poor decisions. The old advice "don't go to the store when your hungry", might be related to low glucose levels (which affect decisionmaking).
Controlled exposure w/ reflection - I remember wanting toys when I was younger based on what was shown in commercials. After a...
tracks progress on those goals, and charts overall utility.
I don't think it works very well for what you are envisioning, but something like spaced repetition software might help.
With SRS, the idea is that the software tries to figure out when you are going to forget something and prompts you at that time, when the reminder will be most effective.
An alternative to improving your intuition and removing your biases would be to find other and better processes and tools to rely on. And then actually use them.
I think that is part of what I was attempting to get at, though I probably didn't do a very good job. In a sense we are biased to use certain processes or tools. The only way to change those "default settings" is to deliberately practice something better, so that when the time comes, you'll be ready.
Thanks for the comments, criticism is welcomed.
I think the standard font-size on LessWrong is smaller. Most people would prefer it if you used that.
Apologies for the font size, I was editing in Google Docs rather than the post editor...
...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 an
Simon's writing style seems a little strange to me for what its worth...
There are few others who have worked with with him and described their impressions of how he worked. Those might be more readable, but Hamming's lecture/paper is hard to beat in my opinion.
http://web.cs.dal.ca/~eem/gradResources/HerbertSimon.pdf http://www.isle.org/~langley/papers/has.essay.pdf
I attempted to summarize the three papers and incorporate a few other things a while ago, inspired in part by a post by Cal Newport of StudyHacks on the methods of Feynman and a few others. Incid...
Hamming's "You and Your Research" and Herbert Simon's "The Scientist as Problem Solver" are good "How I do research" papers. Hamming's paper was described in the other comments. Simon won both a Turing award and a Nobel prize.
Simon's paper is here: http://repository.cmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1425&context=psychology Hamming's: http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html
I'm not sure there is a study about directing attention to pain, but there is a video game being used to reduce pain, presumably by directing attention away from it.
http://www.hitl.washington.edu/research/vrpain/
Edit: From the page:
...Patients often report re-living their original burn experience during wound care, SnowWorld was designed to help put out the fire. Our logic for why VR will reduce pain is as follows. Pain perception has a strong psychological component. The same incoming pain signal can be interpreted as painful or not, depending on what the
The concept being described in the article sounds very similar to deliberate practice, which I think might be described as keeping what you are trying to practice at conscious level instead of going on autopilot.
Many of those studies are actually based on chess, so if this describes how deliberate practice changes the brain, it should also map to higher level activities.
Of course, I'm not terribly familiar with all of the relevant science either.
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...