The focus of skills over knowledge

What working a decent job means is slowing losing ground, as we are not deriving meaning from our work.

Having a job means getting paid for our talents, but it may not be the case for many. Work ethic is supposed to provide us a good life, but in reality, the opposite is happening.

Most workers rely on the whims and fancies of the so-called 'Job Creators', a class of people who own a business and can employ staff. Job creators hold power on the worker's time, behavior and conditions of employment.

These employers also monitor and sanction what workers post on social media, what they eat or drink, how frequently and for how long are they going to the bathroom, and what are their political leanings.

These are people who don't reflect on thinking nor consider the consequences of not thinking. Their prejudices and misconceptions lead them.

They do not consistently apply standards like accuracy, relevance, precision, and logic.

People at this intellectual stage are aware of the importance of thinking and know that the lack of thinking can result in major issues.

• They acknowledge that their own mental processes might have many flaws but are unable to identify all the weaknesses.
• They may spot some instances of their own self-deception.
• They may have a sense that proper thinking involves navigating assumptions, inferences, and points of view, but only on a basic level.

Many well-known problems of human reasoning disappear once you get a group of people together and let them talk about it.

It's a good way to see your ideas refuted or let stronger ideas win the day. Although there’s a risk of group think and conformity pressures, if you take a large and diverse enough group, you’re more likely to be exposed to the best reasoning, which will tend to win out over the majority opinion.

"Nothing tends to materialise man, and to deprive his work of the faintest trace of mind, more than extreme division of labour."

To come up with new ideas, you need to know things outside your field.

The further afield your knowledge extends, the greater potential you have for innovation.

• They read between the lines: they cross-examine evidence and logical argument;
• They dig deeper;
• They're skeptical: they don't jump on the first good idea they find;
• They come prepared: they know that real problems occur and are agile enough to find ways to solve them creatively.

Human beings tend to have two kinds of conflicting mindsets:

• The Higher Mind, the conscious truth-seeking mind, has made human beings an advanced civilization.
• The Primitive Mind is our hardwired, thousands-of-years-old survivalist part, the one that's still stuck in the dark ages.

Our Higher Mind and the Primitive Mind always have a tug-of-war like conflict. The degree of the conflict can be placed in a spectrum, which is called a Psych Spectrum.

If the Higher mind is in control, we are placed higher in the Psych Spectrum and have the Primitive Mind under check. If we are placed at a lower degree in the Psych Spectrum, then the Primitive Mind is under control.

Blaming, oversimplifying, and seeing oneself as a victim are all common traits of unhappy couples and failed marriages.

Conflicts should be approached by looking together at the problem.

Most of us don’t have adequate communication skills going into marriage. It is important to build this skill.

Tacit Knowledge is defined as the "know how" (process)  rather than "know what" (content). A part of it could be codified into explicit knowledge. However, it is often difficult to explain just by writing it down. It is something you learn by doing.

Explicit Knowledge, on the other hand, refers to information we see on the books or the internet.

Although there's a difference, one is not dependable without the other. 

“Any education environment that only emphasizes one form of knowledge or the other [tacit or explicit] is failing the human brain."

Confusing models with reality is a cardinal sin of clear thinking. 

If you believe too strongly in your models of the world, you can start to ignore evidence that your model is wrong.

The basic idea is that when you reward people for a particular measure — clicks, dollars, likes, etc. — people will find a way to “game” the system.

For example: If journalism is fueled by clicks, journalists are going to write sensationalist clickbait.

Learning how to learn is critical for everyone. Most of us have to deal with a changing world and to learn how to manage tons of new information.

However, most of our learning methods are outdated and far from optimal. It may even be giving us an illusion of learning, like re-reading and highlighting that don't provide proper feedback to show what you haven't learned.

Focused and diffuse modes provide two models for how we develop, elaborate, deepen and broaden connections. Both methods are important.

• The focused mode of learning is about bringing related concepts together into a unit, called a chunk. 
• The diffuse mode operates through a wider net of connecting general ideas across different fields. We use this diffuse mode while we sleep, exercise or daydream.