You can tell people just like I have you to focus their attention, choose a target. Imagine there's a spotlight shining just on it. Don't pay much attention to what's in your periphery almost as if you have like blinders on, right? So don't pay attention to those distractors. People can do that. We have them talk to us about like, well, what is it that you're focused on? What's catching your attention right now? Those are easy instructions to understand and it's easy to make your eyes do it. What's important though is that that's not what their eyes do naturally. When they're walking or when they're running, people do take a sort of wider perspective. They broaden their scope of attention relative to what these instructions are having them do. And when we taught people that narrowed style of attention, what we found is that they moved 23% faster in this course that we had set up. From the start line to the finish line, it was always exactly the same distance. And we were using our stop watches to see how fast did they move. They moved 23% faster and they said it hurt 17% less. Right? So exactly the same actual experience, but subjectively it was easier and they performed better. They increase the efficiency of this particular exercise.

The distinction between a priori and a posteriori knowledge thus broadly corresponds to the distinction between empirical and nonempirical knowledge.

The terms “a priori” and “a posteriori” are used primarily to denote the foundations upon which a proposition is known. A given proposition is knowable a priori if it can be known independent of any experience other than the experience of learning the language in which the proposition is expressed, whereas a proposition that is knowable a posteriori is known on the basis of experience.

The more pieces of information we can “access” and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers.

There’s a lot of value in slow thinking. You use the non-lizard side of your brain. You make more deliberate decisions. You prioritize design over instant gratification. You can “check” your gut instincts and validate your hypothesis before incurring mountains of technical debt.