The new Wait but Why post, purporting to understand Elon Musk’s “secret sauce” in being so innovative is a very long, but great, read. And what Tim Urban suggests is that Musk is proactive in updating his mental software to reflect reality, and the real question he gets into is: why aren’t the rest of […]
Category: cognition
The Rise of Superman, by Steven Kotler
Amazon link Book website This book examines the extreme limits of human performance, delving into the world of action-adventure athletes who are redefining what is possible. It tells of big wave surfing, extreme free skiing, skateboarding, free solo rock climbing, base jumping, kayaking impossible rivers, etc. Kotler also examines the neuroscience behind the state of […]
Thinking Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman
Amazon link I finally read this book, which has been on the to-read list since it came out because of its discussion of cognitive biases. I hadn’t been in a particular hurry to read it, especially since I’d listened to Kahneman’s Long Now talk which covered the main themes of the book. But I finally […]
How is your memory indexed?
My Facebook friends have heard me complain a few times that I have apparently exceeded my brain’s capacity to keep track of people. At Google, I have worked with hundreds of people, and it’s entirely embarrassing when one of them sees me at lunch or elsewhere on the Google campus and says “Hi Eric!” and […]
Expertise as exception handling
A few months ago, I wrote a post claiming that expertise was doing difficult tasks consistently and Rif challenged me on that. And I’ve been thinking about it over the past few months and have another model I’m going to throw out there: expertise as exception handling. One example of this is my experience as […]
How We Decide, by Jonah Lehrer
Amazon link I picked this up from the library, as yet another in the recent series of books I’ve been reading that reinforce my own biases. Overall, I liked it – I knew most of the patterns in cognition that the book describes, but it summarized them nicely with good anecdotes. One standard model of […]
The Paradox of Self-Discipline
I was listening to the Fresh Air interview with Jonah Lehrer, author of How We Decide, and he mentioned an experiment that seems relevant to me right now. Lehrer describes the experiment in a Wall Street Journal article about New Year’s Resolutions: In one experiment, led by Baba Shiv at Stanford University, several dozen undergraduates […]
The Talent Code, by Daniel Coyle
Book website, with excerpts Amazon link A coworker recommended this to me, and was even kind enough to lend it to me for the weekend. Coyle asks the question: where does talent come from? Is it nature (genetics) or nurture (environment/opportunity)? He started by visiting several talent hotbeds – the Russian tennis academy that spawned […]
Cognitive Theories of Corporations
One of the topics I want to think more about is organizational cognition aka how organizations think, and how to design an intelligent organization. For some reason, I was thinking about this today, and made a connection to standard theories of cognition that I hadn’t made before. Let’s start with Descartes’s view of the world: […]
Thinking about easy
I’ve noticed a fundamental distortion in how I view the world: If I know the answer or how to do something, it’s easy. If I don’t, it’s hard. This is a distortion because this worldview devalues my accumulated experience and knowledge. It’s funny because I know how long it took me to learn what I’ve […]
