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Cognitive load

Cognitive load

Our brains can only hold so much information at once. When there's too much "information overload," we tend to get distracted easily and not retain what we're learning.

"Working memory is what brain scientists call the short-term store of information where we hold the contents of our consciousness at any given moment — all the impressions and thoughts that flow into our mind as we go through the day."

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171 reads

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Cognitive humility

Cognitive humility

Decades of cognitive research shows that "our minds are finite and far from noble. Knowing their limits can help us become better reasoners..."

Perhaps the most dire consequence is that human beings tend to be better at remembering evidence consistent with their beliefs."

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217 reads

Constraint satisfaction

Constraint satisfaction

When presented with too many choices — no matter how beautiful or beneficial — it can be overwhelming, and we are paralyzed by indecision.

That's why having constraints, or any sort of limits, is beneficial and leads to solutions.

In fact, "much creativity emerges fr...

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154 reads

Cumulative error

Cumulative error

When information travels through multiple channels, it's easy for some elements of the message to get distorted — by biases, or simple human error.

The effect of the spread of misinformation is "cumulative error." Living in an age where information can travel across the wor...

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99 reads

Double-blind control experiment

Double-blind control experiment

It's a tool that researchers use to prevent against subconscious bias when performing experiments.

Understanding the need for double-blind experiments would help the rest of the population understand their inherent subjective, everyday biases, and guard against generalizati...

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79 reads

Failure liberates success

Failure liberates success

"Failure is not something to be avoided but something to be cultivated... It is a sign of weakness and often a stigma that prohibits second chances.

Yet the rise in the West is in many respects due to the rise in tolerating failure. Indeed, many immigrants trained in a fail...

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56 reads

Holism

Holism

"Holism is colloquially described as 'The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.'

Perhaps the most impressive is that carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur, phosphorus, iron, and a few other elements, mixed in just the right way, yield life...

There is a ki...

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32 reads

Inference to the best explanation

Inference to the best explanation

When any single event occurs, there are many possibilities as to the cause of the event.

But the truth often lies in what is the single most reasonable, best explanation for the event.

"Many of our most rancorous scientific debates — say over string theory ...

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40 reads

Name game

Name game

We give names to everything in order to understand the world. But in doing this, we sometimes undermine, or simplify, the true nature of an organism or process. "Naming" keeps us from asking further, deeper questions about the nature of something.

It's also important not t...

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38 reads

Pessimism meta-induction

Pessimism meta-induction

"Because so many scientific theories from bygone eras have turned out to be wrong, we must assume that most of today's theories will eventually prove incorrect as well ."

Accepting the belief that many of our theories are "fundamentally provisional and quite possibly wrong,...

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34 reads

Positive-sum games

Positive-sum games

In zero-sum games, there's a clear winner and a clear loser. In positive-sum games, "everyone wins."

"In a positive-sum game, a rational, self-interested actor may benefit the other actor with the same choice that benefits himself or herself."

Some competition will a...

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30 reads

Powers of 10

Powers of 10

Much of the world operates in powers of 10. Understanding scaling laws, like Richter scales that measure earthquakes or of "that between the volume of the brain's cortical white matter" — where computing takes place — would give us more perspective on the depth of events, matter, and ourselves.

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22 reads

Self-serving bias

Self-serving bias

The idea that we perceive ourselves to be better than we are; to claim responsibility for success and blame others for failure .

"In everyday life, more than nine in ten drivers are above-average drivers, or so they presume. In surveys of college faculty, 90 percent or more...

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24 reads

Randomness

Randomness

"Randomness is a fundamental limit to our intuition ; it says that there are processes we can't predict fully. It's a concept that we have a hard time accepting, even though it's an essential part of the way the cosmos works."

But some random events — like random collection...

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23 reads

Shifting baseline syndrome

Shifting baseline syndrome

The belief that what we perceive is what's normal, not taking into account the full extend of the past nor potential for future events.

The syndrome is named after scientist Daniel Pauly, who said that each generation accepts "as a baseline the stock size and species composition that occurr...

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22 reads

Skeptical empiricism

Skeptical empiricism

"Skeptical empiricism, the kind exemplified by the carefully thought-out and tested research in science at its best. It differs from plain empiricism" — which is simply the observation of results of the world around us.

Put more simply, it is important for us to be skeptica...

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24 reads

Umwelt

Umwelt

Umwelt is the idea that we blindly accept the reality of the world around us .

"It would be useful if the concept of the umwelt were embedded in the public lexicon. It neatly captures that idea of limited knowledge, of unobtainable information, of unimagined possibilities."...

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31 reads

Uncalculated risk

Uncalculated risk

"We humans are terrible at dealing with probability. ... Our irrational fears and inclinations are costly ."

We place too great a weight on the possibility of rare, major events occurring to us — for example, the lottery, or a plane crash — but not enough weight into the ef...

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27 reads

Fixed-action patterns

Fixed-action patterns

Some behaviours we exhibit we blame on instinct. But what we believe to be instinct may, in fact, be learned behaviour over time — or a "fixed-action pattern."

This has many implications, including the fact that, as rational creatures, we can change what we believe to be i...

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41 reads

Deep time

Deep time

The belief that there is much more time before us than has already elapsed. This creates a more expansive view of the world and the potential of the universe.

"Our sun is less than halfway through its life. It formed 4.5 billion years ago, but it's got 6 billion more years ...

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88 reads

Cycles

Cycles

Cycles explain everything — especially, at the basic level: evolution and biology. Cycles can be disrupted. Also watch out to see which cycles are doing all the work.

"All the 'magic' of cognition depends, just as life itself does, on cycles within cycles of re-current, ref...

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78 reads

Background

Background

In order to sharpen our reasoning skills, we must have a good grasp of our own cognitive biases, as well as the basic laws of the universe.

But in a dynamic world, new laws are constantly emerging.

The editors over at Edge.org asked some of the most infl...

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221 reads

Contingent superorganisms

Contingent superorganisms

"Biologists have joined with social scientists to form an altruism debunkery society" — pushing the belief that every altruistic act is done in self-interest.

But a new concept, "contingent superorganisms," says that we live life on a few different hierarchies. The idea is that when you rea...

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121 reads

Expanding in-group

Expanding in-group

As technology makes us more interconnected, there are more cross-overs between groups and populations. For example, there are more intermarriages.

"These effects are potentially beneficial for the improvement of cognitive skills, from two perspectives. We call these the 'ex...

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66 reads

Hidden layers

Hidden layers

These are the layers of understanding that exist between the external reality and our own perception of the world.

These systems of layers become more interconnected as we develop habits. Learning to ride a bike was hard; but after a while it's like second nature.

"T...

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35 reads

Kaleidoscopic discovery engine

Kaleidoscopic discovery engine

The greatest insights and inventions are the product of multiple people. It's never just a single person; everyone's standing on someone's shoulders.

"In hindsight we often find that if one scientist did not make a particular discovery, some other individual would have done...

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34 reads

Predictive coding

Predictive coding

Our expectations — and if they are met or not — greatly influence how we perceive the world, and ultimately, our quality of life.

Predictive coding "concerns the way the brain exploits prediction and anticipation in making sense of incoming signals and using them to guide p...

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29 reads

Rational unconsciousness

Rational unconsciousness

Freud inspired the idea of the irrational subconscious, but many of today's scientists dispute that idea.

Instead they are bridging the conscious and unconscious — and insisting that we operate on both levels, and have an awareness of this connection, more than we think. "O...

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20 reads

Subselves and the modular mind

Subselves and the modular mind

The belief that we have a single self is false. In fact, we have multiple identities, or "subselves."

"Each of us has a set of functional subselves — one dedicated to getting along with our friends, one dedicated to self-protection, one dedicated to winning status, another...

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23 reads

Copernican principle

Copernican principle

The Copernican Principal is the idea that we are not special — that the universe is much larger, and we have a rather insignificant role.

"The paradox of the Copernican Principle is that by properly understanding our place, even if it be humbling, we can only then truly und...

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125 reads

Cultural attractor

Cultural attractor

We are attracted to ideas and concepts that are easy to accept or digest.

For example, round numbers are cultural attractors — they're "easier to remember and provide better symbols for magnitudes." Efficiency is another powerful cultural attractor.

But just because we are drawn to sp...

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124 reads

Externalities

Externalities

We all affect each other incidentally, especially in an interconnected world. Externalities are the unintended positive and negative side effects these interactions have.

"Externalities are increasingly important in the present era, when actions in one place potentially affect others half a...

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56 reads

Fear of the unknown

Fear of the unknown

Our attachment to the familiar keeps us from taking risks and making real strides and breakthroughs. We often don't accurately assess the risk/benefit ratio; our irrational fears get in the way of real progress.

"If the public could be brought to a greater understanding of...

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50 reads

Effective theory

Effective theory

"Effective theory is one of the more important notions within science — and outside it.

The idea is to determine what you can actually measure and decide, given the precision and accuracy of your measuring tools, and to find a theory appropriate to those measurable quantit...

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93 reads

Focusing illusion

Focusing illusion

We often believe that a certain, different set of circumstances would dramatically change our lives. But the truth is, factors like income and health are less indicative of overall happiness.

"The mismatch in the allocation of attention between thinking about a life condition and ac...

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50 reads

Structured serendipity

Structured serendipity

We overly-attribute breakthroughs to luck. But successful people regularly put themselves in positions — by studying, relentlessly working, pursuing the truth — where they encounter luck .

"We should each invest a few hours a week in reading research that ostensibly has not...

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24 reads

CURATED FROM

CURATED BY

.miu.

19 yo medical student😄 I share interesting and sciency articles! 🇬🇧🇧🇩 MBTI: INTJ-T

When I found this article, I didn't expect to not know most of these ideas from school already. These concepts are interesting in the way that they either perfectly describe the world we live in, or puts it in a whole new light- either way, it was enlightening!

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