revised Insight Matrix? – in complementary pairs:
| Mindfulness | Attention | Path | All | Away | Be | ||
| Nonattachment | Acceptance | Body | Spirit | May | If | ||
| Oneness | Alliance | Love | Kind | Stay | Do |
| sona | lukin | nasin | ale | weka | lon | ||
| pana | jo | sijelo | kon | ken | tan | ||
| wan | kulupu | olin | pona | awen | pali |
| sona | lukin | nasin | ale | weka | lon | ||
| pana | jo | sijelo | kon | ken | tan | ||
| wan | kulupu | olin | pona | awen | pali |
zooming - OUT to transcend (see bigger context) and IN to analyze (discover low-level laws that control or influence) ... like thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, or ...?
Three Things:
- Be Open
- Be Soft
- Be Meta
that is, perhaps:
- ... "Open" in the Zen "vast Emptiness, nothing Sacred" sense – and in the mathematical Empty Set { } sense – "the Universe is build upon Nothing, and sometimes the Nothing shines through" – and the "Openness" dimension of the Big Five Personality Trait system (see [1] etc.) which is so vital especially in this world of false decisiveness and management command-and-control and assertive people who want to tell others what to do ...
- ... "Soft" in the flexible-Bayesian sense of "be a knob, not a switch" – and not clinging to yes/no or always/never or right/wrong or dualistic beliefs – and in the flexibility to bend and respond and relax and accept and gently nudge which is so important in this world of rigid beliefs and binary thinking ...
- great ... "Meta" in the metaphysical "beyond" sense, or maybe the Pali metta lovingkindness sense – transcend, "jump outside the system" to look at things from levels above or below or within – and not being trapped in a single mode of perception, which is so important in this world of stucked-ness and problems that can't be solved from within the system where they exist ...
and above the Three Things:
| BE |
... see also Rumi/Barks poem "The Man Who Wanted to Learn the Language of Animals" which ends with "... the original word: BE."
Learning Anything
first, of course, one must:
- know this method
- choose to apply it
- do it
to learn anything:
- find the fit - what it means in context, how it connects up to other things (the past)
- figure the use - what it is good for, how to execute it properly, what its limitations are (the present)
- feel the joy - what fun it provides, how knowing it makes you better (the future)
- That makes sense.
- I don't know.
- Tell me more.
Three Word Phrases from http://thegetrealproject.com/2017/04/yet-three-little-words-big-trust-impact/ :
If you’ve been tuning in for the past two weeks, you know I’ve been sharing three-word phrases that belong in everyone’s trusted advisor toolkit. So far, those are “That makes sense” and “I don’t know.” The third and last trust-building phrase is “Tell me more.” (We could add “I love you” to the list of word triplets, but then things start to get a little too squishy. Or do they?)
put CSS for "stampRandom" here:
and now put some sample card experiments:
No Goals!
with no purpose,
no method,
nothing to attain ...
This Is How It Is Right Now
Is How It Is
Right Now
</span>
We are Fine and One and Blessed
for all that we have,
all the good in the world,
and all that we can do
for each other ...
and One
and Blessed</span>
to be discussed
- mind mapping software
- Category Theory for Kids
- Tarot card deck of Structured Analytic Techniques (who is "The Empress"?!)
- Metacognition: How to help the World to Think Better?
- Ultra-high-gravitational-redshift cosmic observatory architecture
- favorite poems
- favorite books
- favorite philosophers
CT: Critical Thinking (and Category Theory) for Cats, Kids, and Everybody Else
- "Thinking as a Science" - BLUF = how to weigh evidence for improved beliefs & decisions
- Philosophical Zen - fallibilism, epistemology, falsifiability, and all that
- Quantitative tools - Error Bars, Incomplete Information, Deception, Game Theory, Bayes Theorem. etc.
- Real-world thinking - Systems 1 & 2, instinct and when to distrust it, common cognitive biases, blind spots, ...
- V(aled)ictory
– z 2018-03-20 08:56 UTC
starter page to accumulate notions for:
| Book of Hours |
- maybe 1 word/page? ("Attention" ... "Peace" ... "Breathe" ... "Smile" ... "Cookie" ...)
- maybe possible foreword like this (from Zen's Chinese Heritage: The Masters and Their Teachings)?
Zhaozhou asked a monk, "How many sutras do you read in one day?"
The monk said, "Sometimes seven or eight. Sometimes ten."
Zhaozhou said, "Oh, then you can't read scriptures."
The monk said, "Master, how many do you read in a day?"
Zhaozhou said, "In one day I read one word."
- see Book of Hours for other ideas?
- maybe a deck of cards (pick one!) ... or a smartphone app? ...
footnotes
"Attention"
"Grace"
"Be"
"Breathe"
"Smile"
"Think"
"Soften"
"Now"
"Peace"
"Mercy"
"Emptiness"
"Release"
- "Sing"
- "Leap"
- "Hug"
- "Pause"
- "Open"
- "Doubt"
- "Empty"
- "Yes"
- "Just"
- "Justice"
- "Bend"
- "Now"
- "Know"
- "No"
- "0"
- "1"
- "-"
Book of Four Letter Words
- Open
- Free
- Soft
- Kind
- Wise
- Good
- Love
- Real
- Meta!
| 0 | Open → Emptiness |
| - | Soft → Doubt |
| 1 | Meta → Transcendence |
– z 2018-03-20 09:01 UTC
extension to Oddmuse that could parse a "card" description, by analogy with the "image.pl" [2], e.g.:
and then the image is created with Suit, Mantra, and Commentary overlays, style governed by a CSS ...
– z 2018-03-20 11:29 UTC
experiment with [3] syntax described as:
You can also write some text on the image:
[[image/class:image]]{
class/left top width height Some text
}
For example:
[[image/class:image]]{
10% 15% 50% 20% Do not try this at home!
mybold/10% 40% 50% 20% You has been warned!
}
You can specify coordinates in any other unit like px or em, but % are more convenient if the image is resized. You can see this feature in action here (pure css, no javascript used).this looks EXTREMELY promising!
– z 2018-03-22 01:41 UTC
Three Things
- Meta - mindfulness - transcendence, awareness, attention - "no watcher, only watching" - ∞
- Open - nonattachment - emptiness, vastness, silence, spacetime existence - "being itself" - ∅
- Soft - oneness - change, accept, let go, connection, release - "grace and love" - ↔
– z 2018-04-01 09:53 UTC
Just Three Things
If you only have time for this much, remember three things:
- be open ⟶ Accept
- be soft ⟶ Respond
- be meta ⟶ Connect
The rest? Mere details ...
Introduction: The Vision
Brains are limited. To think better takes a richer mental vocabulary, a more powerful toolbox of methods. Each one must bring clarity, and together they must work across vast domains.
Tools to think better aren't hard; they're easier than being sloppy, once one gets used to them. At first, though, some feel strange, exotic, especially in their abstraction. They transcend — they level-up, to higher planes where horizons recede and entire landscapes suddenly are sharp, where a single step crosses whole continents or even galaxies.
Three Things are the magic keys, and they're easy to remember. Expanding on the bumper-stickers on the first page, and preparing for deeper analysis:
0 ⟶ Emptiness ⟶ Be Open
- accept new ideas
- don't cling to past judgments
- analyze — break things down to fundamentals, go deep, seek fundamental principles
- ⟶ Change ⟶ Be Soft
- (almost!) never be certain
- see (most!) things as continuous ranges of maybe, not true-or-false dualities — like knobs, not switches
- tune — adjust estimated likelihoods of beliefs, up or down, as information comes in, based on the strength of new evidence as compared to the weight of prior knowledge (generally!)
1 ⟶ Connection ⟶ Be Meta
- unify and merge separate entities
- embrace contradictions and consider the possibility that, somehow, they are not in disagreement
- transcend — level-up to view things from higher perspectives, where irrelevant details fade away
As a mystical matrix:
| symbols | 0 | - | 1 |
|---|---|---|---|
| logic | no | perhaps | yes |
| psych | open | soft | meta |
| ? | let go | question | embrace |
| elements | air | water | earth |
| ? | nonattachment | mindfulness | oneness |
| 0 - 1 |
- 0 : Open
- - : Soft
- 1 : Meta
- 0 : Open
AND parallelism of 0-1 metaphor with:
- algebra - esp. logic
- analysis - esp. probability and bayesian thinking
- category theory - esp. metamathematics & transcendence
Three Threads
- Philosophical
- Mathematical-techical
- Self-improvement
(consider: "0-∞" instead of "0-1" ??)
| Think Better |
... Don't Be Too Sure!
... Three Things
... Nothing makes sense — except in the light of Bayes
... Open the Door
Open
- say "Yes"
- let go
- unself
- accept
- empty
Soft
- slide
- glide
- lighten
- refine
- nudge
- balance
- blur /:(make the discrete continuous)
Meta
- invert
- reverse
- negate
- unite
- split
- rename
- flatten
- analogize
- bypass
- lift
Table of Contents
- Three Things
Three Things
| Open: ... to See ... to Doubt ... to Love |
Three aspects of Openness :
- Mindfulness - open to new viewpoints - ready and eager to view things from different directions and scales, zooming out or in, abstracting and particularizing - awake and aware and paying attention
- Nonattachment - open to change - skeptical, full of doubt, nuanced, not-clinging, ready and eager to vary the strength of all beliefs as new evidence comes in or further thinking suggests the need to alter
- Oneness - open to connect - realizing the unity of all things - nonduality in spite of differences - 1 = Yin+Yang - "There Are No Others" ...
... other fragments/forms to consider:
| Meta Doubt Nonduality |
- Meta - abstract, transcend, zoom, rename, ... - 0 - Mindfulness
- Doubt - bayesianism, fallibilism, pragmatism, ... - — - Nonattachment
- Nonduality - invert, conjugate, converse, complement, ... - 0 - Oneness
To think better, there are three big things to remember:
- Belief is a knob, not a switch — be open to uncertainty and aware of the amount of doubt in every judgment
- Weigh the evidence — be open to new information, don't cling to past conclusions but also don't discard them prematurely
- Use the sharpest tools — be open to learning new ways of thinking, but make them the most powerful ones available
The rest of this book is expanding those three things; if you have to stop now, you've got the key point already.
Note in all of the above the key word is open — a key psychological characteristic, and a key concept ...
how about other trios?
- mindfulness-nonattachment-oneness ...
- nothingness-change-universality ...
- earth-water-air ... solid-liquid-gas ... matter-life-spacetime ...
How to decide wisely, when the future is foggy and you don't have compete information? How to avoid getting cheated? How to help those you care about make better choices? How to reward good behavior, not just luck?
The real world is full of foggy situations ...
Toy problems aren't enough...
False precision is like quicksand: people struggle to design an accurate model, wrestle with solving it, and then take its "answers" far too seriously — and ignore the big elephants that it has left out — the wrong assumptions, especially the possibility that something completely different might happen. ...
Believe in Knobs, not Switches
| Beliefs are knobs, not switches. |
Outside of definitions and math (and even within much math) there are degrees of certainty, odds and likelihoods, ranges of numbers rather than specific answers, errors distributed across a zone, a universe of multiple possibilities.
When new information comes in — evidence — it's vital to update beliefs rather than throw them away. "Turn the Knob", more or less, based on the balance between the weight of prior knowledge and the strength of new data. That's Bayes Theorem, in a qualitative nutshell.
Mostly in words:
- Consider how strong a belief is — "unlikely" (e.g., one chance in a million that it's true, one chance in a thousand, one chance in ten) vs "maybe" (e.g., "50-50" more or less) vs "likely" (e.g., nine times out of ten, 999 out of a thousand, one chance in a million that it's false). Then consider how strong a new piece of evidence is that the belief should or shouldn't change. "Strong" new evidence for something isn't redundant with what you already know and wouldn't often be seen if the belief isn't true. "Weak" new evidence overlaps past experience, or could plausibly occur whether or not the belief is correct. ...
<<see "Weigh the Evidence" below?!>>
Mostly in numbers:
- Assign odds to a belief — ... <<Bayes Rule!>> ...
| before * likelihood = after |
Or, as a bumper sticker "mantra":
| Don't be too sure! |
A famous quote about updating beliefs, attributed in various versions to the economist John Maynard Keynes: "When my information changes, I alter my conclusions. What do you do, sir?" or more pithily but less-accurately "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"
Readings & cross-references to ZhurnalyWiki bits: Statistics - A Bayesian Perspective (2010-08-13), Introduction to Bayesian Statistics (2010-11-20), Adventure of the Bayesian Clocks - Part One (2013-12-04), Adventure of the Bayesian Clocks - Part Two (2014-01-05), In the Presence of Oxygen (2017-06-15), Mantra - Beliefs Are Knobs, Not Switches (2017-07-03), ...
Weigh the Evidence
When new information comes it, you need to update your prior beliefs. The simplest and best way to do this is to think about how unlikely – how surprising – the new information is. If it's totally expected, then your previous beliefs don't need to change much. If it's an extraordinary surprise, then that's important new evidence that something is different.
For instance, suppose you watch somebody tossing a coin. It comes up "heads" every time, ten times in a row. That's pretty unusual – about one chance in a thousand. You begin to suspect that this is a two-headed trick coin. Every toss you see that comes up "heads" increases the likelihood that it's a trick coin. After another ten "heads" in a row, that's another factor of a thousand or so. You begin to expect every toss to come up the same from now on, and the confirmation of that has an ever-decreasing effect on your beliefs.
But now, if the coin EVER comes up "tails" that's a HUGE surprise! It refutes the belief that it's a two-headed coin. ...
Soften and Open
The natural human tendency — with aging, when under stress, when facing the unexpected — is to harden and close and
Leaves on the Wind
| Anchors and Leaves |
A good thinker must navigate between two different types of bias (scylla and charybdis!):
- anchoring - clinging to old beliefs too firmly, not changing one's judgments enough when strong new evidence comes in
- flightiness - leaping to new beliefs too quickly, based on the latest information without regard to the weight of established information
...
Use the Sharpest Tools
Besides bayesian probability, better thinking happens with quantitative tools including:
Statistics
think square root of N ~ deviation ... concepts of "normal distribution" and "mean" vs "median" versus "mode" ...
| √N |
How likely is something? That's often easy to estimate. Toss a thousand coins and on the average get about 500 heads, sure. But exactly 500? That's not at all likely! What range is it reasonable to expect?
A great rule of thumb: "plus or minus the square root of N", where "N" is how many things you're expecting to see ...
... see Normal Distribution
Game Theory
think "pure strategy" and minimax and mixed strategy and two-person zero-sum etc. (see John Williams The Compleat Strategyst)
| Rock | Paper | Scissors | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rock | 0 | -1 | +1 |
| Paper | +1 | 0 | -1 |
| Scissors | -1 | +1 | 0 |
Web of Information
think networks of evidence and and graphs
Log Odds
from Bayes' rule: Log-odds form - Arbital
The odds form of Bayes's Rule states that the prior odds times the likelihood ratio equals the posterior odds. We can take the log of both sides of this equation, yielding an equivalent equation which uses addition instead of multiplication.
... consider this chart from the above?
 |
Haskell and Scheme and PROLOG and thinking better – more powerful mental constructs, different directions to view problems, "nonprocedural" approaches ... maybe see HigherLevelLanguage, DreamSongs, PartingAdvice, StrandsOfTruth, ... and maybe ChandraStories ...
and from ThinkingToolsGoals (preface to Simply Scheme by Brian Harvey and Matthew Wright)
... Computer programs have become too large and complex to encompass in a human mind. Therefore, the job of computer science education is to teach people how to expand their minds so that the programs can fit, by learning to think in a vocabulary of larger, more powerful, more flexible ideas than the obvious ones. Each unit of programming thought must have a big payoff in the capabilities of the program. ...
and in LISP Lover, e.g. "Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it; that experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use Lisp itself a lot." ...
see https://github.com/zonination/perceptions for an interesting discussion of what various probability-terms mean to people in various surveys - might be relevant to Better Thinking via heuristic-bayesianism
from Normal Distribution:
... 68% of the time the result is within 1σ, 95% of the time it's within 2σ, and 99.7% of the time it's within 3σ ...
from Epistemological Enginerooms:
- Probability & Statistics — discrete & continuous probability distributions, means, standard deviations, dependent & independent variables, conditional probabilities, and error propagation
- Combinatorics — permutations, combinations, multivariate experiment design, clustering & similarity metrics, and heuristics for scenario generation
- Logic — deduction, induction, syllogisms, fuzzy logic, logic programming, and idea-mapping techniques to assist in structured argumentation
- Inverse Methods — reverse-engineering, matrix inversion, back-propagation, etc.; see Bypasses by Z. A. Melzak (enlightening reading on these and related topics at the graduate level ... but anyone should feel free to skip the equations and explore Melzak's ideas of metaphor and transformation in literature and language)
- Curve-fitting — data modeling, error estimation, and key variable identification; see Mathematical Methods That [Usually] Work by Forman J. Acton (ideas on numerical methods, readable at the advanced undergraduate level, but with many nonmathematical parables of universal relevance)
- Noise & Random Perturbations — power spectra, correlation functions, and pattern discovery in unclean data
- Game Theory — from rock-paper-scissors to Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), two-person zero-sum & beyond, prisoners dilemmas, minimax, etc.; see The Compleat Strategyst by John Williams (highly entertaining, with many stories and funny illustrations; needs only high-school math or less)
- Information Theory — bits of data, entropy, & evidence; see The Recursive Universe by William Poundstone (fascinating popular-level exposition, with chapters on cellular automata, self-reproducing systems, and deep concepts of information)
- Systems Analysis — sources, sinks, valves, delays, positive & negative feedback loops, attractors & instabilities, critical paths & chokepoints; see The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge (a self-improvement and applied math short-course disguised as a business book ... powerful and important concepts presented in engaging fashion)
consider:
- multiple tracks
Think Better — Three Things
Book of Hours
- Why?
Some Cards
- Trumps
Card Design
- square
- background image
| suit | ↟ | KJ |
| ↞ | ↠ | |
| poem | ↡ | desc |
could these be quasi-auto-generated, e.g., from a table like:
| suit | KJ | image URL | poem | desc |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | Be Open | http://zhurnaly.com/images/open/vast_emptiness | ... | ... |
| - | Be Soft | ... | ... | ... |
| 1 | Be Meta | ... | ... | ... |
... and then "layout happens"?!
Another Think Better Card Design
write Oddmuse Extension to define parameters for a new CSS table style, table.card - with blocks of text for the four corners of the background card image - by analogy with the "image:" Oddmuse tag for images - e.g.:
[[card:http://background.image.url|image-width|image-height|top-left-text|top-right-text|bottom-left-text|bottom-right-text]]– z 2020-01-19 19:57 UTC
Big ideas to write up:
- Graphical languages to capture and share patterns
- Categories of relations:
– z 2022-09-10 21:00 UTC
Biggest ideas - 0-23? – cosmology, particles, patterns, ...
– z 2022-09-24 18:44 UTC</div>