Thinking

Lateral thinking: a method for solving problems by making unusual or unexpected connections between ideas.

People are not rational. They are rationalizing. Once you understand this simple fact, all the oddest human behaviour will suddenly make way more sense.

The first basic component of a philosophical view is epistemology [Erkenntnistheorie], what and how does one know? The second basic philosophical component is ontology, what exists?

Philosophy: Is Water Wet or Does It Just Make Things Wet?

Aleatory uncertainty; about the future we cannot know. Epistemic uncertainty; uncertainty due to (persons) lack of knowledge; what we currently do not know.

People overvalue their knowledge and underestimate the probability of their being wrong.

Mistaking luck for skill is most prevalent—and most conspicuous—and that is the world of markets.

Problem sheet questions

1. The problem statement or frame:
2. The variables that govern the situation include:
3. The complications / complexities as I see them:
4. Alternatives that were seriously considered and not chosen were:
5. Range of outcomes:
6. What I expect to happen and the actual probabilities are:
7. The outcome

Empathy Is Unnecessary

Psychologist David Bloom (Against Empathy) agrees with Arendt that empathy interferes with rational moral decision-making. He argues that the problem with empathy is that it encourages you to be kind, not to be moral. Because you want to see others happy and avoid seeing others hurt, you'll try to keep everyone happy. But sometimes, doing the right thing means upsetting some people. In addition, empathy tends to be limited in scope. We're usually only empathetic toward people close to us, as we can only care for so many people before we burn out emotionally. This means that if your morality relies on empathy, you'll be less inclined to act morally toward strangers. Bloom suggests that empathy may not be necessary for morality at all—people don't just do the right thing because it'll make others feel good. Instead, Bloom argues that you should help other people out of concern for their well-being and your desire to do the right thing. This avoids many of the moral pitfalls of excessive empathy—you're internally motivated to do good instead of being motivated by the feelings of those around you, giving you a more rational,

The first known uses of probabilistic thinking in history goes back to sixth-century (B.C.) Greek Sicily. There, the notion of probability was used in a legal framework by the very first rhetoricians who, when arguing a case, needed to show the existence of a doubt concerning the certainty of the accusation. The first known rhetorician was a Syracusean named Korax, who engaged in teaching people how to argue from probability.

Nassim Taleb certainly offers many opinions that do not affect him personally. However he’s careful to say that he doesn’t want people to believe him uncritically, he offers his thoughts to jumpstart other people’s thinking, not to impel anyone to a particular point of view. His reflections on the importance of non-linear thinking and understanding the differences between complication and complexity are insightful. Particularly in chapter 3 there are amazing perspectives on the requirements for non-linear thinking and more importantly some critical myth busting on predictive analytics

Falsification (Popper)

Zeigarnik effect, our brains tend to dwell on unfinished tasks.

Complexity

Understanding complexity is important because sometimes things are not further reducible. While the premise of Occam’s Razor is that things should be made as simple as possible but not simpler, sometimes there are things that cannot be reduced because they are at an irreducible minimum. Certain things can be properly contemplated only in all their complicated, interconnected glory.

The curious imperative

I'm amazed when I meet hard-working, smart people who are completely clueless about how their industry works, how their tools work…

Now that information is ubiquitous, the obligation changes. It's no longer okay to not know.

• If you don't know what a word means, look it up.
• If you're meeting with someone, check them out in advance.
• If it sounds too good to be true, Google it before you forward it.
• If you don't know what questions to ask your doctor, find them before your appointment.
• If it's important, do your homework. It never made sense to be proud of being ignorant, but we're in a new era now. Look it up.

Five/Seven Why's

An example of a problem is: The vehicle will not start.

• Why? – The battery is dead. (First why)
• Why? – The alternator is not functioning. (Second why)
• Why? – The alternator belt has broken. (Third why)
• Why? – The alternator belt was well beyond its useful service life and not replaced. (Fourth why)
• Why? – The vehicle was not maintained according to the recommended service schedule. (Fifth why, root cause)

Zeven (7) W's

• Wie
• Wat
• Waar
• Waarmee
• Op welke wijze
• Wanneer
• Waarom

Occam' razor or the law of parsimony (meaning extremely thrifty, careful with resources). In philosophy a razor metaphor to shave away any unnecessary ideas or explanations. {William of Occam 14 century English monk)}

Cognitive super position

Shakespeare could think of a person and entertain two things about them at the same time they could be both evil but also have a strain of goodness inside of them. To be able to hold two thoughts in your head at the same time is the essence of being creative. Two thoughts that apparently contradict each other but you can entertain them and not grasp at one or the other. It like a cognitive super position like super positions in physics. When you decide you collapse the super position.

On the other hand there is the Tragic Vision of humankind that believes in the existence of inherent limitations and flaws in the way we think and act and requires an acknowledgment of this fact as a basis for any individual and collective action. This category of people includes Karl Popper (falsificationism and distrust of intellectual “answers,” actually of anyone who is confident that he knows anything with certainty), Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman (suspicion of governments), Adam Smith (intention of man), Herbert Simon (bounded rationality), Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman (heuristics and biases), the speculator George Soros, etc. The most neglected one is the misunderstood philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, who was born a hundred years too early (he coined the term scientific “fallibilism” in opposition to Papal infallibility). Needless to say that the ideas of this book fall squarely into the Tragic category: We are faulty and there is no need to bother trying to correct our flaws. We are so defective and so mismatched to our environment that we can just work around these flaws. I am convinced of that after spending almost all my adult and professional years in a fierce fight between my brain (not Fooled by Randomness) and my emotions (completely Fooled by Randomness) in which the only success I’ve had is in going around my emotions rather than rationalizing them. Perhaps ridding ourselves of our humanity is not in the works; we need wily tricks, not some grandiose moralizing help. As an empiricist (actually a skeptical empiricist) I despise the moralizers beyond anything on this planet: I still wonder why they blindly believe in ineffectual methods. Delivering advice assumes that our cognitive apparatus rather than our emotional machinery exerts some meaningful control over our actions. We will see how modern behavioral science shows this to be completely untrue.