The Cognitive Toolbox
Memes that would make good index cards for a box of important cognitive ideas.
Folksonomies: education cognition thinking tools
Memes
29 DEC 2013
Emotional ABCs
The ABC model of emotion, widespread in contemporary psychotherapy, holds that it is not an activating (A) event, such as rejection by a friend or lover, that causes you emotional consequences (C) such as depression; rather, the linchpin is your invisible beliefs (B) about the event that come in between A and C. Fortunately, it's often easier to intentionally change beliefs than emotions.
Since at least the time of the ancient Stoics, some have believed that our circumstances don't control ...Folksonomies: emotions emotional maturity
Folksonomies: emotions emotional maturity
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ABC model of emotion relates to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in recognizing how our beliefs affect our emotional responses.
29 DEC 2013
E-Prime Communication
Alfred KSCorzybski, the founder of the discipline of general semantics, thought that the verb "to be" could lead to confused thought, confused action, and even fascism. Because so much of fascism consists of vilification of the memy, and because so much of vilification of the enemy consists of calling hem subhuman, identifying them with the forces of evil, and so on, fascists might find it hard to write propaganda without "to be.
Korzybski considered the use of "to be" as an aipciliary verb...Eliminate "to be" verbs and further clarify your statements. A good cognitive tool for detecting propaganda.
24 DEC 2013
The Sensory Desktop
We must take our sensory experiences seriously but not literally. This is one place where the concept of a sensory desktop is helpful. We take the icons on a graphical desktop seriously; we won’t, for instance, carelessly drag an icon to the trash, for fear of losing a valuable file. But we don’t take the colors, shapes, or locations of the icons literally. They are not there to resemble the truth. They are there to facilitate useful behaviors.
Sensory desktops differ across species. A face...Folksonomies: metaphor perception
Folksonomies: metaphor perception
Donald Hoffman on how our sensory perception of the world is like a computer desktop, a representation of things, not how things actually are. We must remember the difference.
24 DEC 2013
We All Experiment
Experimentation is something done by everyone all the time. Babies experiment with what might be good to put in their mouths. Toddlers experiment with various behaviors to see what they can get away with. Teenagers experiment with sex, drugs, and rock and roll. But because people don’t really see these things as experiments or as ways of collecting evidence in support or refutation of hypotheses, they don’t learn to think about experimentation as something they do constantly and thus need to ...Roger Schank describes a world where we are all collecting evidence to test various hypotheses.
24 DEC 2013
Gedankenexperiment
However, the subject need not be an esoteric one for a gedankenexperiment to be fruitful. My own favorite is Galileo’s proof that, contrary to Aristotle’s view, objects of different mass fall in a vacuum with the same acceleration. One might think that a real experiment needs to be conducted to test that hypothesis, but Galileo simply asked us to consider a large and a small stone tied together by a very light string. If Aristotle was right, the large stone should speed up the smaller one, an...Folksonomies: thought experiment testability
Folksonomies: thought experiment testability
Gino Segre on the importance and validity of "thought-experiments," using Galileo's disproof of objects falling at different rates as an example.
24 DEC 2013
Causality as a Conceptual Tool
Causality itself is an evolved conceptual tool that simplifies, schematizes, and focuses our representation of situations. This cognitive machinery guides us to think in terms of the cause—of an outcome’s having a single cause. Yet for enlarged understanding, it is more accurate to represent outcomes as caused by an intersection, or nexus, of factors (including the absence of precluding conditions). In War and Peace, Tolstoy asks, “When an apple ripens and falls, why does it fall? Because of ...John Tooby on how causation is a way we simplify the world to more easily understand it, but it can also over-simplify.
24 DEC 2013
Human Memory, Computer Memory
Almost all of those limits start with a peculiar fact about human memory: Although we are pretty good at storing information in our brains, we are pretty poor at retrieving it. We can recognize photos from our high school yearbooks decades later, yet find it impossible to remember what we had for breakfast yesterday. Faulty memories have been known to lead to erroneous eyewitness testimony (and false imprisonment), to marital friction (in the form of overlooked anniversaries), and even death ...Folksonomies: memory human condition
Folksonomies: memory human condition
Gary Marcus describes how human memory is haphazard, context-specific. We can't retrieve a specific detail easily, but we can if we are in the right context to trigger its retrieval.
24 DEC 2013
The Web of Causation
...complex systems, such as financial markets or the Earth’s biosphere, do not seem to obey causality. For every event that occurs, there are a multitude of possible causes, and the extent to which each contributes to the event is not clear, not even after the fact! One might say that there is a web of causation. For example, on a typical day, the stock market might go up or down by some fraction of a percentage point. The Wall Street Journal might blithely report that the stock market move w...Nigel Goldenfeld explains why the simplistic explanations for market movements so popular in the news media are also so ridiculous.
24 DEC 2013
The Nominal Fallacy
The nominal fallacy is the error of believing that the label carries explanatory information.
An instance of the nominal fallacy is most easily seen when the meaning or importance of a term or concept shrinks with knowledge. One example of this would be the word “instinct.” “Instinct” refers to a set of behaviors whose actual cause we don’t know, or simply don’t understand or have access to, and therefore we call them instinctual, inborn, innate. Often this is the end of the exploration of t...Stuart Firestein explains why naming is not explaining.
24 DEC 2013
The Cost of Irrational Fears
Imagine the typical emotional reaction to seeing a spider: fear, ranging from minor trepidation to terror. But what is the likelihood of dying from a spider bite? Fewer than four people a year (on average) die from spider bites, establishing the expected risk of death by spider at lower than 1 in 100 million. This risk is so minuscule that it is actually counterproductive to worry about it: Millions of people die each year from stress-related illnesses. The startling implication is that the r...Garrett Lisi explains how the stress caused by many of our fears of statistically-unlikely events is more likely to kill us.
24 DEC 2013
Cognitive Load and Working Memory
The amount of information entering our consciousness at any instant is referred to as our cognitive load. When our cognitive load exceeds the capacity of our working memory, our intellectual abilities take a hit. Information zips into and out of our mind so quickly that we never gain a good mental grip on it. (Which is why you can’t remember what you went to the kitchen to do.) The information vanishes before we’ve had an opportunity to transfer it into our long-term memory and weave it into ...Folksonomies: information perception
Folksonomies: information perception
Nicholas Carr on how the flood of information causes us to remember less, weaking our critical thinking.
24 DEC 2013
Pragmamorphism
Anthropomorphism means attributing the characteristics of human beings to inanimate things or animals. I have invented the word “pragmamorphism” as a shorthand abstraction for the attribution of the properties of inanimate things to human beings. One of the meanings of the Greek word pragma is “a material object.”
Being pragmamorphic sounds equivalent to taking a scientific attitude toward the world, but it easily evolves into dull scientism. It’s pragmamorphic to equate material correlates...Emanuel Derman on the habit of attributing properties of inanimate things to human beings, like PET scans to emotion, or IQ to intelligence. Like making a digital representation of an analog system.
24 DEC 2013
Think Bottom-Up
One of the most general shorthand abstractions that, if adopted, would improve the cognitive toolkit of humanity is to think bottom up, not top down. Almost everything important that happens in both nature and society happens from the bottom up, not the top down. Water is a bottom-up, self-organized emergent property of hydrogen and oxygen. Life is a bottom-up, self-organized emergent property of organic molecules that coalesced into protein chains through nothing more than the input of energ...Michael Shermer on how understanding the world in terms of emergence can help us better understand it.
24 DEC 2013
Scale Analysis VS Magnitude Comparisons
There are some subtle facts about scale analysis that make it more powerful than simply comparing orders of magnitude. A most remarkable example is that scale analysis can be applied, through a systematic use of dimensions, even when the precise equations governing the dynamics of a system are not known. The great physicist G. I. Taylor, a character whose prolific legacy haunts any aspiring scientist, gave a famous demonstration of this deceptively simple approach. In the 1950s, back when the...Folksonomies: quantification
Folksonomies: quantification
Giulio on how this technique was used to estimate the power of a secret nuclear blast from a photo.
24 DEC 2013
The Pareto Distribution
The Pareto distribution shows up in a remarkably wide array of complex systems. Together, “the” and “of” account for 10 percent of all words used in English. The most volatile day in the history of a stock market will typically be twice as volatile as that of the second-most volatile and ten times the tenth-most. Tag frequency on Flickr photos obeys a Pareto distribution, as does the magnitude of earthquakes, the popularity of books, the size of asteroids, and the social connectedness of your...Folksonomies: statistics
Folksonomies: statistics
Clay Shirky on what is also known as the "long-tail effect" or "90% of everything is crap" effect.
19 DEC 2013
Measurements Change Dramatically Depending on the Methodo...
Benoit Mandelbrot asked his famous question “How long is the coast of Britain?” long before this symposium was written, but it perfectly captures the sort of puzzle people in this crowd love. The question seems simple. Just look it up in the encyclopedia. But as Mandelbrot observed, the length of the coast of Britain depends on what you use to measure it. If you draw lines on a map to approximate the coastline, you get one length, but if you try to measure the real bumps in every inlet and ba...David Brook's relating Benoit Mandelbrot's experience measuring the British coast.
30 NOV 2013
Anagnorises and Peripetia
OK, I'm still in "Poetics," in Aristotle, and I'm thinking -- out of nowhere, two terms come crashing into my head that I haven't heard since my classics professor in college drilled them there. And they are anagnorisis and peripeteia. Anagnorisis and peripeteia. Anagnorisis is the Greek word for discovery. Literally, the transition from ignorance to knowledge is anagnorisis. It's what our network does; it's what "Dirty Jobs" is. And I'm up to my neck in anagnorises every single day. Great. T...Two flavors of the concept of discovery.
References
29 DEC 2013
Mind Performance Hacks
Books, Brochures, and Chapters>Book: Hale-Evans, Ron (2006-02-06), Mind Performance Hacks, O'Reilly Media, Inc., Retrieved on 2013-12-29Source Material [books.google.com]
Folksonomies: self-help
Folksonomies: self-help
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19 DEC 2013
This Will Make You Smarter
Books, Brochures, and Chapters>Book: Brockman , John (2012-02-14), This Will Make You Smarter, HarperCollins, Retrieved on 2013-12-19Source Material [books.google.com]
Folksonomies: science
Folksonomies: science
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30 NOV 2013
Learning from dirty jobs
Proceedings of Meetings and Symposia>Speech: Rowe, Mike (Dec 2008), Learning from dirty jobs, Ted Talks, Retrieved on 2013-11-30Source Material [www.ted.com]
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