The problem with AI ..........

 

.........................is its current untrustworthiness and error rate.  If a startup has some crazy glitch on an AI-generated web site, it probably is not that damaging but the stakes are much higher for established companies.  The problem in my mind boils down to the AI's lack of skepticism.

Everyone has heard of Descartes "I think therefore I am," but his actual logic was a bit different.  It can best be summarized as "I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am."  The core of thinking for Descartes was doubt, or as I call it, skepticism.  By Descartes' definition, can AI be actually thinking without skepticism?

This isn't a problem limited to AI -- much of the human race seems to have lost the ability to be skeptical.  It seems everyone is really good at a knee-jerk skepticism of anything originating across the political aisle, but the capacity for skepticism for one's own work or for inputs that reinforce one's core beliefs is limited.

-Warren Meyer, from this Coyote Blog post

writing.....................

 

If you have any doubt, default to writing. It scales better, respects people’s time, and produces better thinking. Writing forces you to define the problem and to admit whether calling the meeting was simply delaying the decision.

-Nicholas Bate, from here

the quest........................

 

     Life is full of experiences—touching and seeing and looking and doing and acting—but you're going to lose the lessons of those experiences if you don't take time to reflect.

     We can all learn to gather up the past and invest in the future.  Gather up today and invest it in tomorrow.  Gather up this week and invest it in the next week.  Gather up this year and invest it in the next year.  Many people simply hang on one more year.  They are just hanging in there, seeing what's going to happen.  I am asking you to choose a different path, to learn, study, and reflect.  This is a major part of personal development: the quest to become better than you are now.

-Jim Rohn

AI and the real estate business...................

 

The tools are getting smarter. The question is how do we get smarter about using them.

-Joe Stampone, from this "writing is thinking" post

Maybe.......................

 

To think independently of other human beings is impossible, and if it were possible it would be undesirable.  Thinking is necessarily, thoroughly, and wonderfully social.  Everything you think is a response to what someone else has thought and said.  And when people commend someone for "thinking for herself" they usually mean "ceasing to sound like people I dislike and starting to sound more like people I approve of." . . .

. . . it should remind us that all of us at various times in our lives believe true things for poor reasons, and false things for good reasons, and that whatever we think we know, whether we're right or wrong, arises from our interactions with other human beings.  Thinking independently, solitarily, "for ourselves," is not an option.

-Alan Jacobs, How To Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds

"an atmosphere of persistent edginess".........

 

By nearly any material or technological measure, humanity has never been so prosperous, so capable, or so close to receiving the full blessings of science properly ordered to human need.

That does not mean everything is fine. It means despair is a distortion of reality. We are so accustomed to hearing what is broken that we forget to notice what is being built

-Jamie Wilson, advocating for some thoughtful perspective

the effects of the effects.....................

 

     In 1963, the UC Santa Barbara ecologist and economist Garrett Hardin proposed his First Law of Ecology: "You can never merely do one thing."  We operate in a world of multiple, overlapping connections, like a web, with many significant, yet obscure and unpredictable, relationships.  He developed second-order thinking into a tool, showing that if you don't consider "the effects of the effects," you can't really claim to be doing any thinking at all.

-Shane Parrish, The Great Mental Models

Pausation........................

 

Reflection requires stillness.

One cost of rushing from thing to thing is that you lose the space to think. Hard work matters, but nonstop motion often hides a quiet truth: you could have used your time better.

If you never pause, you confuse activity with effectiveness. Make time to think. Walk outside. Sit quietly. Create space. Then move again, but this time on purpose.

-James Clear, from this episode

cognitive misers...............

 

Nowhere in the modern world do we see the effects of our emotional behavior more clearly than in markets.  Our emotions lead us to be overconfident when we should be humble, panicked when we should be circumspect, and deeply engaged in seeking information that conforms (rather than disconfirms) our preexisting beliefs. . . .

According to Bernstein, humans are "cognitive misers," relying on simple narratives instead of using complex analytical thinking. The more compelling the narrative is, the more corrosive it becomes to our analytical abilities.

-Barry Ritholz, How Not To Invest: The Ideas, Numbers, and Behaviors That Destroy Wealth—And How to Avoid Them

As has been well-said...........

 

..........a number of times in our corner of the blogosphere, the problem is not too many books, the problem is too few bookshelves.  Judging by this post and list, Barnes & Noble will be sending some additions to the collection shortly.

"I think that someone on the left who went through this curriculum would come away with more admiration for conservatism and some doubts about leftism."

suspicion......................

 

I used to identify as libertarian, but then I would find myself defending positions I hadn't thought through because they're a part of the libertarian canon.  If all your beliefs line up into neat little bundles, you should be highly suspicious.

-Eric Jorgenson, The Almanack of Naval Ravikant

a process of elimination..........

 

Brooks asks Hughes what he most would like to have more of than an average person: power, money, pleasure, or honor. They go through a process of elimination. What does Hughes care least about having in excess of the average person? Power. Then what? money. Then what? pleasure. So Hughes cares most about honor. He wants to be respected by people who are important to him. I also would have eliminated power first and ended up caring most about honor, but I care more about money than pleasure. Money to me represents security for my wife and family.

-Arnold Kling, from here

an enormous refuse heap.............

 

The ideology of progress has led to barbarism, and modern science has become a tool of enslavement rather than a tool of liberation.  In this post-Nietzschean world, the enslavement was not restricted to dictatorships, the usual recipients of the epithet "totalitarian"; it was just as pervasive in the "democratic" countries of the West, where the all-embracing power of the culture industry had nearly buried the possibility of independent critical thought beneath an enormous refuse heap of commodified artifacts and reified minds.

-Wilfred M. McClay, Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America (1994)

Wisdom......................

 

Go find some more options and question some assumptions.

pondering.......................

 

Reading without thinking is as nothing, for a book is less important for what it says than for what it makes you think.

-Louis L'Amour, The Walking Drum

stop right there.....................

 

My only line of thinking right now is the range of outcomes has increased substantially in the past month or so.

-Ben Carlson

On hurry-up thinking..........

 

................Go slow when all around go crazy.

simple.......................

 

You don't have to hire out your thinking if you keep it simple.

-Charlie Munger

idols of the mind...............

Through light shed on the mental process, Bacon wished to reform reasoning across all the branches of learning.  Beware, he said, of the idols of the mind, the fallacies into which undisciplined thinkers most easily fall.  They are the real distorting prisms of human nature.

-Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge 

Thinking on paper......................

338:  The gaps between established truths are where a lot of action is. 

339:  Be wary whenever the eloquent become vague.

340:  Seek distance from coercive people, especially those who long to command you for your own good.

341:  Frequently tally up your assumptions.

342:  Don't look for magic bullets.

343:  The difficult path may be the fastest.

-Michael Wade, Random Thoughts: Brief Reflections and Moments of Clarity