Our surroundings can have a profound effect on our thinking.

Want to read: Joan Meyers-Levy and Rui Zhu, “The Influence of Ceiling Height: The Effect of Priming on the Type of Processing That People Use,” Journal of Consumer Research 34, no. 2 (2007): 174–86, https://doi.org/10.1086/519146.

This is a whole different area than "thought spaces" but somehow relevant all the same.

cross reference this with Annie Murphy Paul's thinking with built spaces

Did Forte find this source on his own or borrow from Annie Murphy Paul? Likely the later given his reliance on other small bits which overlap.

In The Creative Habit, dancer and choreographer Twyla Tharp has creative inspiration and note taking practice which she calls "the box" in which she organizes “notebooks, news clippings, CDs, videotapes of me working alone in my studio, videos of the dancers rehearsing, books and photographs and pieces of art that may have inspired me”. She also calls her linking of ideas within her box method "the art of scratching" (chapter 6).

related: combinatorial creativity triangle thinking

[[Twyla Tharp]] [[The Creative Habit]] #books/wanttoread

Not sure I agree wholly with

The moment you first encounter an idea is the worst time to decide what it means

Sometimes your fleeting reactions are incredibly useful upon first encounter as they won't return as easily. However this is also a space where setting things aside for diffuse thinking apparatus to work can be highly useful.

Either way, one should always return to ideas in their notebook for future processing.

Dacher Keltner and Paul Ekman, “The Science of ‘Inside Out,’” New York Times, July 3, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/05/opinion/sunday/the-science-of-inside-out.html.

Can it be?! Twyla Tharp has an entire chapter in her book on creativity that covers a variation of the zettelkasten note taking concept!!!

Does the phrase "thinking outside of the box" make a tacit nod to the idea of using a card index (or the German zettelkasten) for note taking, sense making, and thinking?

Marshall Kirkpatrick describes a method of taking three ostensibly random ideas and attempting to view each from the others' perspectives as a way to create new ideas by linking them together.

This method is quite similar to that of Raymond Llull as described in Frances Yate's The Art of Memory (UChicago Press, 1966), though there Llull was memorizing and combinatorially permuting 20 or more ideas at a time. It's also quite similar to the sort of meditative practice found in the lectio divina, though there ideas are generally limited to religious ones for contemplation.

https://content.blubrry.com/thrivingonoverload/THRIVING_013_Marshall_Kirkpatrick.mp3#t=1559,1745

Other examples: - https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich?q=%22combinatorial+creativity%22 - https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich?q=%22Llullan%20combinatorial%20arts%22

There's some magical thinking involved here. While the system has some arbitrary internal branching, the surprises come from the system's perfect memory that the human user doesn't have. This makes it appear that the system creates its own creativity, but it is really the combinatorics of the perfect memory system with use over time.

Link to: serendipity of systems based on auto-complete

This is the key problem that makes current social media dangerous, it can be easily gamed due to this evolutionary shortcut of the brain, the fast system of biases aka Daniel Kahneman's research.

You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a

Gian-Carlo Rota, Indiscrete Thoughts (Boston: Birkhäuser Boston, 1997), 202.

Richard Feynman indicated in an interview that he kept a dozen of his favorite problems at the top of his mind. As he encountered new results and tricks, he tried applying them to those problems in hopes of either solving them or in coming up with new ideas. Over time by random but combinatorial chance, solutions or ideas would present themselves as ideas were juxtaposed.

One would suspect that Feynman hadn't actually read Raymond Llull, but this technique sounds very similar to the Llullan combinatorial arts from centuries earlier, albeit in a much more simplified form.

Can we find evidence of Feynman having read or interacted with Llull? Was it independently created or was he influenced?

I had an example of this on 2022-05-28 in Dan Allosso's book club on Equality in the closing minutes where a bit of inspiration hit me to combine the ideas of memes, evolution, and Indigenous knowledge and storytelling to our current political situation. Several of them are problems and ideas I've been working with over years or months, and they came together all at once to present a surprising and useful new combination. #examples

Link this also to the idea of diffuse thinking as a means of solving problems. One can combine the idea of diffuse thinking with combinatorial creativity to super-charge one's problem solving and idea generation capacity this way. What would one call this combination? It definitely needs a name. Llullan combinatorial diffusion, perhaps? To some extent Llull was doing this already as part of his practice, it's just that he didn't know or write explicitly about the diffuse thinking portion (to my knowledge), though this doesn't mean that he wasn't the beneficiary of it in actual practice, particularly when it's known that many of his time practiced lectio divina and meditated on their ideas. Alternately meditating on ideas and then "walking away" from them will by force cause diffuse thinking to be triggered.

Are there people for whom diffuse thinking doesn't work from a physiological perspective? What type of neurodiversity does this cause?

Perhaps better: Provide fodder for thinking and creating?

1. Luhmann, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft , 82f.

Related to talking rocks (for me), but also completely opposite to talking and thinking rocks altogether.

excellent quote

This reminds me of Feynman's observation:"It's a brown-throated thrush, but in Germany it's called a halzenfugel, and in Chinese they call it a chung ling and even if you know all those names for it, you still know nothing about the bird."

Sometimes knowing a name stops our curiosity to push our understanding further because we cheat ourselves into thinking that we know more than the mere name. This is a fallacy.

No product is an island. A product is more than the product. It is a cohesive, integrated set of experiences. Think through all of the stages of a product or service - from initial intentions through final reflections, from first usage to help, service, and maintenance. Make them all work together seamlessly. That's systems thinking.

https://www.connectedpapers.com/

See also: - Research Rabbit - Open Knowledge Maps

https://openknowledgemaps.org/

Open Knowledge maps is a visual literature search tool that is based on keywords rather than on a paper's title, author, or DOI. The service was founded in 2015 by Peter Kraker, a former scholarly communication researcher at Graz University of Technology.

In part because of modalities of studying the brain using methods like fMRI where the images are of an individual's head, we focus too much and too exclusively on single brains bound to individuals rather than on brains working in concert.

Greater flexibilities in tools and methods should help do studies of humans working in concert.

Link this to the anecdote:

I recall a radiology test within a medical school setting in which students were asked to diagnose an x-ray of a human patient's skull. Most either guessed small hairline fractures in the skull or that there was nothing wrong with the patient.

Can you diagnose the patient?

Almost all the students failed the question, and worse felt like idiots when the answer was revealed: the patient must be dead because the spinal column and the rest of the body are not attached. Compare:

"Social encoding advantage" is what psychologists refer to as the phenomenon of people remembering social information more accurately than other types.

Reference to read: “social encoding advantage”: Matthew D. Lieberman, Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect (New York: Crown, 2013), 284.

It's likely that the social acts of learning and information exchange in oral societies had an additional stickiness over and beyond the additional mnemonic methods they would have used as a base.

The Western cultural tradition doesn't value the social coding advantage because it "excludes social interaction from the realm of the intellect" (Paul, 2021). Instead it provides advantage and status to the individual thinking on their own. We greatly prefer the idea of the "lone genius" toiling on their own, when this is hardly ever the case. Our availability bias often leads us to believe it is the case because we can pull out so many famous examples, though in almost all cases these geniuses were riding on the shoulders of giants.

Reference to read: remember social information more accurately: Jason P. Mitchell, C. Neil Macrae, and Mahzarin R. Banaji, “Encoding-Specific Effects of Social Cognition on the Neural Correlates of Subsequent Memory,” Journal of Neuroscience 24 (May 2004): 4912–17

Reference to read: the brain stores social information: Jason P. Mitchell et al., “Thinking About Others: The Neural Substrates of Social Cognition,” in Social Neuroscience: People Thinking About Thinking People, ed. Karen T. Litfin (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), 63–82.

People have evolved as social animals and this extends to thinking and interacting. We think better when we think socially (in groups) as opposed to thinking alone.

This in part may be why solo reading and annotating improves one's thinking because it is a form of social annotation between the lone annotator and the author. Actual social annotation amongst groups may add additonal power to this method.

I personally annotate alone, though I typically do so in a publicly discoverable fashion within Hypothes.is. While the audience of my annotations may be exceedingly low, there is at least a perceived public for my output. Thus my thinking, though done alone, is accelerated and improved by the potential social context in which it's done. (Hello, dear reader! 🥰) I can artificially take advantage of the social learning effects even if the social circle may mathematically approach the limit of an audience of one (me).

great quote

How can social annotation practices take advantage of these sorts of active learning processes? What might be done in a flipped classroom setting to get students to use social annotation on a text prior to a lecture and have the questions and ideas from these sessions brought into the lecture space for discussion, argument, and expansion?

Most writing systems and forms force a beginning and an end, they force a particular structure that is both finite and limiting. The card index (zettelkasten) may have a beginning—there's always a first note or card, but it never has to have an end unless one's ownership is so absolute it ends with the life of its author. There are an ever-increasing number of ways to order a card index, though some try to get around this to create some artificial stability by numbering or specifically ordering their cards. New ideas can be accepted into the index at a multitude of places and are always internally mobile and re-orderable.

link to Luhmann's works on describing this sort of rhizomatic behavior of his zettelkasten

Within a network model framing for a zettelkasten, one might define thinking as traversing a graph of idea nodes in a particular order. Alternately it might also include randomly juxtaposing cards and creating links between ones which have similarities. Which of these modes of thinking has a higher order? Which creates more value? Which requires more work?

marktani asks (not unreasonably):

what is an hour of reward?

Kartik's response[1] is adequate, I feel.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30041447

To a great extent, Hypothes.is has such a small footprint of users (in comparison to massive platforms like Twitter, Facebook, etc.) that it's never been a performative platform for me. As a design choice they have specifically kept their social media functionalities very sparse, so one also doesn't generally encounter the toxic elements that are rampant in other locations. This helps immensely. I might likely change my tune if it were ever to hit larger scales or experienced the Eternal September effect.

Beyond this, I mostly endeavor to write things for later re-use. As a result I'm trying to write as clearly as possible in full sentences and explain things as best I can so that my future self doesn't need to do heavy work or lifting to recreate the context or do heavy editing. Writing notes in public and knowing that others might read these ideas does hold my feet to the fire in this respect. Half-formed thoughts are often shaky and unclear both to me and to others and really do no one any good. In personal experience they also tend not to be revisited and revised or revised as well as I would have done the first time around (in public or otherwise).

Occasionally I'll be in a rush reading something and not have time for more detailed notes in which case I'll do my best to get the broad gist knowing that later in the day or at least within the week, I'll revisit the notes in my own spaces and heavily elaborate on them. I've been endeavoring to stay away from this bad habit though as it's just kicking the can down the road and not getting the work done that I ultimately want to have. Usually when I'm being fast/lazy, my notes will revert to highlighting and tagging sections of material that are straightforward facts that I'll only be reframing into my own words at a later date for reuse. If it's an original though or comment or link to something important, I'll go all in and put in the actual work right now. Doing it later has generally been a recipe for disaster in my experience.

There have been a few instances where a half-formed thought does get seen and called out. Or it's a thought which I have significantly more personal context for and that is only reflected in the body of my other notes, but isn't apparent in the public version. Usually these provide some additional insight which I hadn't had that makes the overall enterprise more interesting. Here's a recent example, albeit on a private document, but which I think still has enough context to be reasonably clear: https://hypothes.is/a/vmmw4KPmEeyvf7NWphRiMw

There may also be infrequent articles online which are heavily annotated and which I'm excerpting ideas to be reused later. In these cases I may highlight and rewrite them in my own words for later use in a piece, but I'll make them private or put them in a private group as they don't add any value to the original article or potential conversation though they do add significant value to my collection as "literature notes" for immediate reuse somewhere in the future. On broadly unannotated documents, I'll leave these literature notes public as a means of modeling the practice for others, though without the suggestion of how they would be (re-)used for.

All this being said, I will very rarely annotate things privately or in a private group if they're of a very sensitive cultural nature or personal in manner. My current set up with Hypothesidian still allows me to import these notes into Obsidian with my API key. In practice these tend to be incredibly rare for me and may only occur a handful of times in a year.

Generally my intention is that ultimately all of my notes get published in something in a final form somewhere, so I'm really only frontloading the work into the notes now to make the writing/editing process easier later.

'Memory crutch' implies a physical human failing that needs assistance rather than a phrase like aide-mémoire that doesn't draw that same attention.

The gender-based disparity of spatial thinking skills between boys and girls may result from the fact that at an early age boys are more likely to play with spatially oriented toys and video games. Encouraging girls to do more spatial gesturing at an earlier age can dramatically close this spatial thinking gap.

Evidence indicates that those who are have experience or fluency in sign language (both hearing and non-hearing) have increased visual-spatial intelligence and reasoning. Practice using gesturing directly improves spatial thinking.

Penetrative thinking is the ability to abstractly consider and internally visualize or theorize about the inside of a three dimensional object based on what can be seen on its surface.

Penetrative thinking can be useful in areas like geology and anatomy.

Improvements in penetrative thinking can be exercised, encouraged, and improved by using gestures.

Research shows that gesture can impact our memories by helping to associate speech with visual cues.

References for this?

Link this to the idea that our visual memories are much stronger than our verbal ones.

Embodied cognition is a theory in psychology that a the mind is shaped by entire body of an organism. The mind is not only attached to the body, but the body influences the mind. Movement of the body doesn't just amplify one's spoke language, for humans, but it helps to create cognitive and communicative functions that language cannot, and these extend not only to viewers, but the communicator themself.

Interesting question: should non-experts debate a topic they care about?

Pros: Thinking more and consuming less, valuing the topic by talking about it, maybe morals are personal and can be debated by everyone? Cons: Easy to overstate confidence and be misinformed, supporting existing views may be more useful overall.

spectacular intellectual feats exhibited in science and other areas of systematic enquiry, as well as in the arts, they need to understand the extent to which the mind is reliant upon external scaffolding.” (Ibid.)

Does Neil Levy go into anything on orality with respect to this topic? Check: Levy, Neil. 2011. “Neuroethics and the Extended Mind.” In Judy Illes and B. J. Sahakian (Ed.), Oxford Handbook of Neuroethics, 285–94, Oxford University Press

Link this to P.M. Forni's question about how I think about mathematics and my answer relating to scaffolding or the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza.

Link this to the 9/8 zettel quote from Luhmann about writing being thinking.

Compare the ideas of visual thinking (visualizations) and a visualization of one's thinking being instantiated in writing along with the Feynman quote about the writing being the thinking. What ways are they similar or different? Is there a gradation in which one subsumes the other?

What does Annie Murphy Paul have to say on this topic in The Extended Mind?

Genius: The Life And Science of Richard Feynman,” James Gleick, Pantheon Books, 1992 (see pg. 409).

In comparison to less successful students unusually successful doctoral students have the ability to think beyond the frames of a given text.

Kirsti Lonka 2003, 155f

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/d9aeT3RsbZ95cHgHw/meaning-of-words-an-exercise-for-active-thinking

Active thinking for building mental models can be a good thing.

Sadly this article seems to do a lot of faffing about. Not sure what I'm really supposed to take from it....

Learnings: - It's easy to assume people in the past didn't care or were stupid. But people do things for a reason. Not understanding the reason for how things are is a missed learning opportunity, and very likely leads to unintended consequences. - Similar to having a valid strong opinion, one must understand why things are as they are before changing them (except if the goal is only signaling).

Scrivener and its community are an example of a tool for thought being thought of as a magical tool potentially without people thinking about what the tool is doing that makes things so dramatically different.

This article is written in 2017 just before the expansion of the zettelkasten craze in various social media spaces.

https://www.denizcemonduygu.com/philo/browse/

One can use the Zeigarnik effect to their advantage by keeping specific unanswered questions in their mind so that it can use the diffuse thinking effect to solve them while doing other activities like walking, doing the dishes, etc.

(Gadamer 2004).

All intellectual endeavors start from a preexisting set of ideas. These can then be built upon to create new concepts which then influence the original starting point and may continue ever expanding with further thought.

Ahrens argues that most writing advice goes against the idea of the hermeneutic circle and pretends as if the writer is starting with a blank page. This can prefigure some of the stress and difficulty Ernest Hemingway spoke of when he compared writing to "facing the white bull which is paper with no words on it."

While it can be convenient to think of the idea of tabula rasa, in practice it really doesn't exist. As a result the zettelkasten more readily shows its value in the writing process.

Critical thinking can provoke people into "divisive" considerations. Such a tip line makes it pretty easy to disrupt any attempt to 'teach kids to think [critically]'

Just one or two such efforts aren't too worrisome, but this might portend a broad change in the mission of education, from humanistic flourishing to the production of a compliant populace.

Jetelina, K. (2022, January 13). State of Affairs: Pediatrics and Omicron [Substack newsletter]. Your Local Epidemiologist. https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/state-of-affairs-pediatrics-and-omicron

This is related to the idea of diffuse thinking caused by taking breaks or doing things that don't require extreme concentration. Flaneuring... walking, etc.

You want an activity that requires a little bit of attention but not too much attention. Doing dishes, walking, errands, etc. are good examples.

Relate this to the

It should be recognized that these basic note types are very different than the digital garden framing of 📤 (seedbox), 🌱 (seedling), 🪴 (sapling), 🌲 (evergreen), etc. which are another measure of the growth and expansion of not just one particular idea but potentially multiple ideas over time. These are a project management sort of tool for focusing on the growth of ideas. Within some tools, one might also use graph views and interconnectedness as means of charting this same sort of growth.

Sönke Ahrens' framing of fleeting note, literature note, and permanent note are a value assignation to the types of each of these notes with respect to generating new ideas and writing.

https://github.com/SkepticMystic/graph-analysis

Analyse the structure of your Obsidian graph using various analysis techniques

At what point could digital tools be said to be thinking? Do they need to be generative? It certainly needs to be on the other side of serendipitously juxtaposing two interesting ideas. One can juxtapose millions of ideas, it's the selection of a tiny subset of these as "better" or more interesting than the others and then building off of that that constitutes this sort of generative thought.

Remembering and being able to more quickly recall prior contexts allows our thinking to build momentum.

Various quotes along the lines of "writing is thinking".

What is the equivalent in oral societies? Memory is thinking?

Found Reflections

• Like #Lit/poetry/found, this is #my/thinking/reflection/found

1. Luhmann, Zettelkasten II, index card no. 9/8g (my translation).

The act of taking notes helps to focus the mind and one's concentration. This facilitates better and deeper thinking. While he erases oral cultures and those who used mnemonic techniques, Niklas Luhmann said, "without writing, there is no thinking."

Fulton-Lyne, L. (n.d.). Research Guides: Misinformation: Misinformation Course. Retrieved January 17, 2022, from https://libguides.norquest.ca/fakenews/course

From a computer science perspective, isn't the index card functioning like an external memory, albeit one with somewhat pre-arranged linked paths? It's the movement through the machine's various paths that is doing the "thinking". Or the user's (active) choices that create the paths creates the impression of thinking.

Perhaps it's the pre-arranged links where the thinking has already happened (based on "work" put into the system) and then traversing the paths gives the appearance of "new" thinking?

How does this relate to other systems which can be thought of as thinking from a complexity perspective? Bacteria perhaps? Groups of cells acting in concert? Groups of people acting in concert? Cells seeing out food using random walks? etc?

From this perspective, how can we break out the constituent parts of thought and thinking? Consciousness? With enough nodes and edges and choices of paths between them (or a "correct" subset of paths) could anything look like thinking or computing?

An incredibly short, but dense essay on annotating books, but one which doesn't go into the same sort of detail as he gets in his book length treatment in How to Read a Book.

Missing here is the social aspect of annotating a book. In fact, he actively recommends against loaning one's annotated books for fear of losing the details and value in them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3Tvjf0buc8

graph thinking

• intuitive
• speed, agility
• adaptability

; graph thinking : focuses on relationships to turn data into information and uses patterns to find meaning

property graph data model

• relationships (connectors with verbs which can have properties)
• nodes (have names and can have properties)

Examples:

• Purchase recommendations for products in real time
• Fraud detection

Use for dependency analysis

Study: Digital literacy doesn’t stop the spread of misinformation. (n.d.). MIT Sloan. Retrieved January 12, 2022, from https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/study-digital-literacy-doesnt-stop-spread-misinformation

What a great title for an online publication.

Santos, H. C., Meyer, M., & Chabris, C. (2021). Reports of the Death of Expertise May Be Exaggerated: Limits on Knowledge Resistance in Health and Medicine. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/6wy53

Schmid, P., & Lewandowsky, S. (n.d.). Tackling COVID disinformation with empathy and conversation. The Conversation. Retrieved December 15, 2021, from http://theconversation.com/tackling-covid-disinformation-with-empathy-and-conversation-173013

Sloman, S. A. (2021). How Do We Believe? Topics in Cognitive Science, 0(2021), 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.12580

A Theory of Change and Systems Thinking

Karnofsky suggests that the cost/benefit ratio of how we typically think of reading may not be as simple as we intuitively expect i.e. we think that 'more time' = 'more understanding'.

If you're simply reading to inform yourself about a topic, it may be worth reading a couple of book reviews, and listening to an interview or two, rather than invest the significant amount of time necessary to really engage with the book.

A few hours of skimming and reviews/interviews may get you to 25% understanding and retention, which in many cases may be more than enough for your needs of being basically informed on the topic. Compared to the 50 - 100 hours necessary for a deep, analytical engagement with the text, that would only get you to 50% understanding and retention.

That being said, if your goal is to develop expertise, both Karnofsky and Adler ('How to read a book') suggest that you need a deep engagement with multiple texts.

The inability to think holistically is the problem.

Lagnado, D. A. (2022). Explaining the evidence: How the mind investigates the world. Cambridge University Press.

.systems thinking

It builds on many of these traditions, but there is a rather sizeable movement in the physical world as well as lots online of sketchnotes which might fit the bill for you Roy.

The canonical book/textbook for the space seems to be Sketchnote Handbook, The: the illustrated guide to visual note taking by Mike Rohde.

For a solid overview of the idea in about 30 minutes, I found this to be a useful video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evLCAYlx4Kw

“Students are graduating into a brutal job market.”

The entreprecariat is designed for learned helplessness (social: individualism), trained incapacities (economic: specialization), and bureaucratic intransigence (political: authoritarianism).

The Design Problem

Three diagrams will explain the lack of social engagement in design. If (in Figure 1) we equate the triangle with a design problem, we readily see that industry and its designers are concerned only with the tiny top portion, without addressing themselves to real needs.

(Design for the Real World, 2019. Page 57.)

The other two figures merely change the caption for the figure.

• Figure 1: The Design Problem
• Figure 2: A Country
• Figure 3: The World

Systemic Problems

The problem is systemic. How do you deal with the problem when the system is off the table when it comes to the design problem?

Adaptive Content

COPE: Create Once, Publish Everywhere

With the growing need and ability to be portable comes tremendous opportunity for content providers. But it also requires substantial changes to their thinking and their systems.

O’Brien, T. C., Palmer, R., & Albarracin, D. (2021). Misplaced trust: When trust in science fosters belief in pseudoscience and the benefits of critical evaluation. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 96, 104184. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2021.104184

The Conspiracy Theory Handbook | Center For Climate Change Communication. (n.d.). Retrieved March 3, 2021, from https://www.climatechangecommunication.org/conspiracy-theory-handbook/

Motz, B., Fyfe, E., & Guba, T. P. (2021). Learning to Call Bullsh*t via Induction: Categorization Training Improves Critical Thinking Performance. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/65qfj

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewsGmhAjjjI

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/11/opinion/brain-mind-cognition.html

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Joel Chan</span> in on Twitter: "@RoamBookClub next book? Extended Mind draws on distributed cognition, which is a powerful theoretical perspective for understanding #toolsforthought and #BASB" / Twitter (<time class='dt-published'>09/14/2021 10:01:01</time>)</cite></small>

In many areas of human life including education and business, we limit ourselves too heavily by too exclusively promoting and preferring brain-bound thinking. If we could begin to re-center our external thinking as many oral and indigenous cultures have, we might be able to go further and farther.

Thinking in solitary can increase one's susceptibility to confirmation bias. Thinking in groups can mitigate this.

How might keeping one's notes in public potentially help fight against these cognitive biases?

Is having a "conversation in the margins" with an author using annotation tools like Hypothes.is a way to help mitigate this sort of cognitive bias?

At the far end of the spectrum how do we prevent this social thinking from becoming groupthink, or the practice of thinking or making decisions as a group in a way that discourages creativity or individual responsibility?

The modality shift of putting ideas onto a page like this is similar to the idea behind the Feynman technique.

Moving ideas from our heads into the real world, whether written or potentially using other modalities, can provide a detachment gain, by which we're able to extend those ideas by drawing, sketching, or otherwise using them.

How might we use the idea of detachment gain to better effect in our pedagogy? I've heard anecdotal evidence of the benefit of modality shifts in many spaces including creating sketchnotes.

While some sketchnotes don't make sense to those who weren't present for the original talk, perhaps they're incredibly useful methods for those who are doing the modality shifts from hearing/seeing into writing/drawing.

The Flynn effect is the substantial and sustained increase in intelligence test scores over most of the twentieth century.

Research seems to indicate that the effect is environmentally caused: https://www.pnas.org/content/115/26/6674

We've been gaslighting ourselves about how our brains work. It's not a muscle, having "grit", and many of our attempts at productivity are completely wrong.

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Annie Murphy Paul</span> in Opinion | How to Think Outside Your Brain - The New York Times (<time class='dt-published'>09/13/2021 19:58:53</time>)</cite></small>

https://via.hypothes.is/https://finiteeyes.net/pedagogy/extending-the-mind/

A well written review of Annie Murphy Paul's The Extended Mind. Matthew Cheney has distilled a lot out of the book from his notes with particular application to improving pedagogy.

I definitely want to read this with relation to not only using it to improve teaching, but with respect to mnemotechniques and the methods oral and indigenous societies may have either had things right or wrong and what Western culture may have lost as a result. I'm also particularly interested in it for its applications to the use of commonplace books and zettelkasten as methods of extending the mind and tools for thought.

How might we use the fact that are brains are activated by conflict to potentially make the social media space better (healthier)?

How might we compare/contrast the ideas behind this with Alex Rosenberg's book How History Gets Things Wrong: The Neuroscience of Our Addiction to Stories?

I love that he's not only externalized his thoughts from the book as annotations/notes and then synthesized them into a longer essay, but he's further expanded and externalized them by thinking about how to put them to use!

This is certainly what is happening in the commonplace book tradition and even more explicitly in the zettelkasten tradition.

What other methods of offloading exist besides writing and speaking? Hand gestures? Dance? What hidden modalities of offloading might indigenous societies use that Western culture might not be cognizant of?

Often journaling or writing in a diary is a often a means of offloading the psychological cruft of one's day to be able to start afresh.

This is some of the philosophy behind creating so-called "morning pages".

I wonder how this may be leveraged with those who are using Hypothes.is for conversations in the margins in classrooms?

cc: @remikalir, @jeremydean, @nateangell

Could teachers specifically sow contention into their conversations? Cross reference the idea of a devil's advocate.

I love the aphorism:

“People should fight as if they are right, and listen as if they are wrong.” — Robert Sutton, Stanford Buisness School professor's formula for productive conflict

Looking at neurodivergence within this framing can be an important extension.

We're definitely not all the same and some of the differences and research on them can potentially help us all.

This likely underlies some of the thoughts I've had about dance and movement and which are touched on by indigenous cultures as documented in Lynne Kelly's work.

Another example of encouraging walking to think

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Cathie LeBlanc</span> in Cathie LeBlanc on Twitter: "@ChrisAldrich @AndySylvester99 @finiteeyes wrote a summary of a new book you might be interested in: https://t.co/Eor8pRBgkz" / Twitter (<time class='dt-published'>09/13/2021 08:53:46</time>)</cite></small>

I'd also heard about this book last week via Joel Chan's tweet: https://twitter.com/JoelChan86/status/1433798115807711237

@RoamBookClub next book? Extended Mind draws on distributed cognition, which is a powerful theoretical perspective for understanding #toolsforthought and #BASB https://t.co/CJixnXajw3

— Joel Chan is synthesizing knowledge (@JoelChan86) September 3, 2021

This vindicates the idea of [[Zettelkasten]], if I need to be an expert, I need to think outside the brain, I really cried when I read that line, I mean even I can feel like after externalizing my thinking, I can connect seemingly different concepts with one another.

I feel like maybe I should start thinking in the nature and I also feel like I need to design my environment in such a way that it facilitates thinking

This is certainly true, a lot of things that we see and come across affect our thinking and is also highlights that some seemingly obvious answers are wrong when seen in a superficial manner, every question needs to be thought deeply.

https://lu.ma/community/com-mmvGpDTZoRDsxou

Boris Mann has created a lu.ma community for Tools for Thought!

Inasaridze, K. (2021). Cognitive restructuring. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/82pwz

I've noticed this phenomenon as well. When criticizing public policy, writers should be required to write down their alternate plans and then go at least one or two levels deep as to the knock on effects that their decisions are likely to have.

It's easy to criticize, but it's much harder to do the actual work and thinking to actually do something else.

GUEST POST: HOT or NOT – How to Develop Critical Thinking.

a) Bu sistemin önemli parçaları nelerdir?

b) Bu parçaları birbirine bağlayan ve birbirine uyumunu sağlayan başlıca süreçler nelerdir?

c) Sistemin gerçekleştirmek istediği amaçlar nelerdir?

Sistem düşüncesi neyin parçası olduğu ile sorgular

Analitik düşünce, sistemin yapısı ile ilgilenip nesnelerin veya olayların nasıl oluştuğunu tanımlamaya çalışırken, Sentez düşüncesi sistemin fonksiyonuna odaklanıp nesnelerin veya olayların niçin meydana geldiğini anlamaya çalışmaktadır.

Analitik düşünme yöntemi, bütünü parçalarıyla görerek nasıl çalıştığını anlama çabası.

apparently a quote from Reset: How to Restart Your Life and Get F.U. Money by David Sawyer FCIPR.

Notes about users of index card based commonplace books.

What form did Carl Linnaeus' erasable writing tablet take?

Effron, D. A., & Raj, M. (2020). Misinformation and Morality: Encountering Fake-News Headlines Makes Them Seem Less Unethical to Publish and Share. Psychological Science, 31(1), 75–87. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797619887896

I'm not sure what you mean by your use of the word "creative". I'm worried that you've seen too many photos of decorative and frilly commonplace books on Instagram and Pinterest. I tend to call most of those "productivity porn" as their users spend hours decorating and not enough collecting and expanding their thoughts, which is really their primary use and value. Usually whatever time they think they're "saving" in having a cpb, they're wasting in decorating it. (Though if decorating is your thing, then have at it...) My commonplace is a (boring to others) location of mostly walls of text. It is chock full of creative ideas, thoughts, and questions though. If you're having trouble with a place to start, try creating a (free) Hypothes.is account and highlighting/annotating everything you read online. (Here's what mine looks like: https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich, you'll notice that it could be considered a form of searchable digital commonplace book all by itself.) Then once a day/week/month, take the best of the quotes, ideas, highlights, and your notes, replies, questions and put them into your physical or digital commonplace. Build on them, cross link them, expand on them over time. Do some research to start answering any of the questions you came up with. By starting with annotating things you're personally interested in, you'll soon have a collection of things that become highly valuable and useful to you. After a few weeks you'll start seeing something and likely see a change in the way you're reading, writing, and even thinking.

reply to: https://www.reddit.com/r/commonplacebook/comments/ojhwrb/getting_started_with_a_commonplace_notebook_as/

I don't agree with this viewpoint. Just like Heraclitus' river, the information in an article or book may not change, but there is a contextual change in the reader, in their thinking, their circumstances, and their time that may give them a different reading or perspective of the same material at later dates.

Of course not all material is actually worth reading more than once either. But for some material a second or third reading may help them create new ideas and new links to prior ideas.

The goal of note taking and tools for it is to make capturing ideas and creating connections between them as easy and friction free as possible. This allows note taking come closer to actual thinking with better long term retention.

While this may be Nicholas Carr's statement, it's actually pre-dated significantly by Marshall McLuhann