What's This?

This story is all about how to think less.

Less, but better.

It's all quite easy — at least, easy in the telling. Not so easy in the doing, though, because while thinking you also have to remember to think about your own thinking. It's as if you climb up a ladder and look down at yourself and watch what you're doing. Then you can give yourself hints on how to do it more precisely, faster, with less work and fewer mistakes, so you come out with a better result.

The language in this book is pretty simple, so you can read it to your sisters or brothers (or your parents or kids) and they can understand it (maybe!). If something is really important, then it's important enough to explain using simple words. If something here doesn't make sense to you, then maybe the authors haven't understood it well enough to explain it properly. Once you figure it out, please write us a letter so we can do better in a future edition.

Shall we begin?

Who's Here?

Every story needs to have characters. Ours has three main ones. They help each other figure stuff out, fix each other's mistakes, and explain things to each other. You may really like one of them or really hate one of them, but please try to give each of them a chance. They're different, and sometimes different is good!

• Sneg — who asks questions and sees problems everywhere, and who is really great at finding reasons why something won't work ("Sneg" means "Snow" in Russian)
• Ogon — who thinks fast and offers lots of ideas, but who doesn't always stick with them long enough to make them work, and who sometimes doesn't have much luck separating good plans from silly ones ("Ogon" means "Fire" in Russian)
• Grunt — who goes slowly and steadily, likes to check all the details along the way, and tries to make sure there are no errors or exceptions ("Grunt" means "Earth" in Russian)

What's the Plan?

This book begins with some of the easiest tricks for thinking less, better. (Or maybe they're the hardest tricks? — since knowing the difference between easy and hard is a super-hard trick!) The story builds toward more complicated tricks. (Again, maybe!)

But you can read the chapters of this book in any order you like. In fact, it's best to read them in the order that makes most sense to you. That's probably not the order they're arranged in, by the way.

Take a moment now and think about how you think. Start with a choice you have to make: whether to eat cereal or yogurt for breakfast, say. Or whether or not to carry an umbrella today. How do you decide? "It's obvious!" you may say. "I hate yogurt!" or "We're out of cereal!" Or for the umbrella decision, you look out the window and it really looks like it's about to rain. Or you live in the desert, or under a giant dome, where it never rains.

But whatever you choose, you're taking information and applying rules to it. You have memories ("Yogurt tasted bad last time I tried it." or "It rained yesterday afternoon and I got wet on the way home.") and you have rules to process those memories. For instance, one rule might be, "My feelings about flavors don't usually change overnight." So you can expect that a food that tastes horrible one day probably won't taste great the next. Likewise, you may have a mental rule that if there's no cereal in the house one day, then unless somebody brings some home from the store then there won't be any the next day either.

Hmmmmm ... an even better rule might be, "Things change at their natural rate, unless something happens to change that rate." So the amount that you like yogurt might change slowly over the years, unless you discover a new flavor or type of yogurt that's really great. And the amount of cereal in the house might go down gradually as people eat it up, but then suddenly increase after a shopping trip.

Anyway, call those rules "mental building blocks" — tricks and methods to take information and reach decisions from it. Some methods are broadly general; others are narrowly specific. Everybody is born with a different set of mental building blocks, and as people grow up they pick up more mental building blocks. It's not likely that your collection of blocks is the same as anybody else's. So it's not likely that the best order for you to read the chapters of this book is the same as anybody else's.

By the way, just to let you know: the Big Secret of this book is that you can apply rules to other rules. You can use building blocks to make new building blocks. If you get the hang of doing that, there's no limit to what you can do. Wow!

The Game of Truth

"What's the simplest thing to think about?" Sneg asked one day.

"Nothing!" said Grunt, and went back to digging a hole.

"Everything!" said Ogon. "There's stars, and where do they go to when the sun comes up? And there are jokes — why are some of them funny and others not? And then there's the wind, and where babies come from, and which fork to use for ..."

"No," interrupted Sneg. "I mean really simple. Like, so simple you couldn't think about anything less and still have anything to think about."

"Nothing!" said Grunt again, and kept digging.

"Thank you, Grunt, but 'nothing' is just too simple. If all you have is 'nothing', here's no place to go from there," said Sneg.

"So how about just two things: 'something' as opposed to 'nothing?" asked Ogon.

"Hmmmmm ... you mean two really simple things, like 'yes' or 'no'?" said Sneg.

"Yeah!" said Ogon. "Or like 'true' or 'false' — 'good' or 'bad' — 'on' or 'off' — 'day' or 'night' — 'girls' or 'boys' — ..."

"Hold on a moment with that last one!" laughed Sneg. "Or maybe I should have said, 'Hold off!' And watch out for some of your other examples too. 'Good' and 'bad' aren't always clear, and 'day' fades slowly into 'night'. Same way with lots of other things. But 'true' and 'false' — now, that might work ..."

<to be continued>

(later chapters?)

Sets of Stuff

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Lists of Stuff

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Continuously Changing Stuff

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Relationships Among Stuff

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Tools to Make Tools (to Make Tools ...)

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Game of Thinking

Candyland-like: issue/challenge to solve ("What's for breakfast?" or "What is the nature of Good?" or "How should I treat myself?") ... move around a board or draw cards or roll dice, and get positive metacognitive moves to apply (inversions of cognitive fallacies or biases) ... e.g., "Suggest a new hypothesis!", "Question the question!", "Lift anchor!", "Merge two hypotheses!", "Invert!", "Pop up a level!", "Take another viewpoint!", ...

and what are rules for Playing? Scoring? Winning? ...

Tarot-like cards for "moves" – with literary/apt quotes – computer program to implement "moves" in art/graphics, in sound/music, in poetry, ...