The Importance of Thinking

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I really like your focus on the feedback loops. We have very, very few people in society who think about thinking as the way an elite athlete thinks about training the body or with anywhere close to the same intensity. The tools are out there, they're just art programs for basically training thinking. So college says they'll teach you how to think. And if you ask anyone to define what it means to think, well, they'll say something like, oh, you know, being critical. And it's really vague. It should be obvious, of course you need to engage in incredibly deep and intense mental action in order to perform at a high level. But I feel like we don't

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What is "The Index"? What are some benefits of externally compiling and organizing one's knowledge? When is spaced repetition useful? How can we co-opt our visual systems to boost memory? Would we all be more interested in producing an external personal knowledgebase if we could feel on a visceral level how much information is constantly being forgotten? How and when should we move up and down the ladder of abstraction? What sorts of problems can be solved by simulation? What is a generative model (as opposed to a predictive model)? How can constraints improve creativity? How useful are credentials as a guide to how much a person knows and whether or not a person is "allowed" to have an opinion on a topic? What do credentials actually signal about a person? What are "fox" and "hedgehog" thinking? What is deugenesis?

Jeremy is the founder of Consilience, an immersive information retrieval company. Previously he did machine learning research at Google Brain and studied Applied Mathematics at Harvard University. Jeremy works relentlessly towards aggregating knowledge, acquiring knowledge, and creating new knowledge. Find him on Twitter at @jvnixon or email him at jnixon2@gmail.com.

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