Critical Thinking
Resources
| Topic | Description | Link |
|---|---|---|
| Notational Intelligence, thesephist | ||
| Research Debt (Olah & Carter, Distill, 2017) | ||
| Psychology of Intelligence Analysis (book, CIA) | ||
| Structure of Scientific Revolutions (book, Thomas S. Kuhn, 2012) | ||
| Psychology | Programmer's Emotions | https://blog.sidebits.tech/programmers-emotions/ |
Truth and Preparation
Truth is reality in its past, present, and future. What has been, what is, what could be, and what will be. The world's continuous transition from its now-state to its next-state as structured by the complex patterns of cause-and-effect. A perfectly accurate understanding of change at any scale or perspective.
Truth helps prepare the best possible action. With clarity, ideals settle for possibilities. With realism, ideals ground to the specific experiences of all entities across all time. With accuracy, a clearly-and-specifically considered intent maps correctly to its thread of present-to-future.
Preparation is the completion of good truths. In practice, the full truth of everything is always learned incompletely in pieces. Good truths improve the path, bad truths worsen the path, irrelevant truths make no difference, and non-truths can cause whatever. Some combination of good truths always points to the perfect path; the sufficient collection of good truths for equivalently perfect guidance, at least for a moment, as if possessing the full truth.
Efficient Thinking
Every thought and observation should improve your satisfaction or decision-making. Anything that improves neither is unnecessary/incidental noise.
Guiding Ideas
- Continuous Risk: Stay careful. Something can go wrong at anytime.
- Reversibility: Prefer decisions with reversible consequences.
- Proportional Consideration: Spend more time thinking and getting feedback on more important decisions.
- Possibility Over Probability: Brainstorm and prepare for all normal and abnormal possibilities, especially for high-stakes situations.
- Resilient Value: Prefer resources that continue to produce useful value even after plans and circumstances change.
- Correct X for Y: Use the correct tools for the job. Use the correct parts for the job. Assign the correct people for the project/task. Consider the correct approach to the problem. Consider the correct idea for the question. Think from the correct perspective for the situation. Establish the correct design for the application.
- Full Utilization: Fully leverage existing resources, especially non-consumables such as durable tools and skills.
- Clear Expectations: Communicate what you want. Plan and agree to what should happen when something goes wrong, before something goes wrong.
- Rational Vigilance: Routinely question what you are doing and why you are doing it.
- Completion: Finish what you start, start only what you will finish, and stop what is not worth finishing.
- Optimization: Routinely seek a better outcome or process.
- Balanced Rationality: Stay sharp enough to cut through weak ideas. Stay soft enough to absorb unfamiliar truths.
- Rational Self-Control: Be able to actually do what you know is the best path.
- Time Efficiency: Perform every task with quality and speed, striving to do the best you can with the time you have.
- Useful Learning: Learn with purpose, towards some fundamental combination of mental satisfaction and valuable action. Decide which beliefs you are happy to hold or driven to refine.
- Fundamental Understanding: Master the basics. Deep knowledge is rooted in the truest understanding of the most elementary ideas.
- Incremental Improvement: Skill growth can occur in small steps.
- Comfortable Expertise: Master skills enough to perform superbly with ease.
- Scientific Intuition: Learn ideas deeply enough to be able to think about their conceptual and numerical approximations naturally.
- True Causality: Know what truly causes what. Seemingly small decisions can have actually big consequences and seemingly big decisions can have actually small consequences.
- First-Time Excellence: Do it right the first time. Avoid the frustration and sunk cost of incurring even a single major problem.
- Convenient Action: Set up your tasks to be easier to do and they are more likely to get done.
- Steady Action: Move cautiously to avoid unintended injuries and damage. Slowly signal your action before committing fully.
- Timing: Act at the right time and in the right order.
- Sampling: Try one before committing to more.
- Batching: Do many at once. Leverage economies of scale. Accomplish many goals in one smooth sequence.
- Absolute-Comparative Clarity: Sometimes it is easier to determine the better of two than the quality of one. Or the reverse.