In my last post, I mentioned that I wanted to think about how to connect the ideas in this post, where I describe how we have different groups of people in different contexts and often find them difficult to identify them outside of the context in which we know them, and this post, where I […]
Category: cognition
Mental models as tools
After the disjointedness of my last post, it’s probably worth going to check out the comments, because I think I clarified some of what I was thinking with the help of my commenters. What I want to talk about today is how we use classification systems, and more broadly, mental models. Let’s start with the […]
Stereotypes and Classification Systems
I was having an email discussion earlier today with a friend where the topic of stereotypes came up. As is common, my friend said that stereotypes are bad, and we should judge people based on their own individual characteristics. This gave me an excuse to launch into a longstanding rant of mine, wherein I defend […]
Filtered world views
This is the next post in the Latour series so feel free to skip it if you found the other posts boring. I’d actually started writing this post several weeks ago, when I noticed that while I was reading Latour, certain points resonated very strongly with me, and others I was just kind of skimming […]
Context sensitivity
I’ve talked about the importance of context to cognitive subroutines before, but I wanted to pick up on it again this morning. I’ve just spent most of the last three weeks in New York City, living a very different kind of life in a different place. I walked almost everywhere I went, I was going […]
Cognitive subroutines extensions
In my last post about cognitive subroutines, I extended the idea to allow for us to use other people as part of our internal routines. I was using this in the idea of team building, but this idea of leveraging elements outside of ourselves can be extended even further. While I was at the Whitney […]
Cognitive trust
[Bonus post that I wrote at the airport last night] I liked this quote from Emotional Design: “Cooperation relies on trust. For a team to work effectively each individual needs to be able to count on team members to behave as expected. Establishing trust is complex, but it involves, among other things, implicit and explicit […]
Cognitive subroutines and learning
I was reading Emotional Design by Don Norman the other day, and he was contemplating ways in which we could leverage emotional machines to improve the learning process. This got me kick-started again on thinking about applications of the cognitive subroutines theory that I’ve been playing with. As a side note, I think I’m finally […]
Clay Shirky on cognitive maps
Clay Shirky had an interesting idea in an article over at Many-to-Many, where he divides the world between radial and Cartesian thinkers. Here’s how he makes the distinction: Radial people assume that any technological change starts from where we are now – reality is at the center of the map, and every possible change is […]
Identity as context
Picking up on the cognitive subroutine thread, I had another thought yesterday. What is our self, our identity? To some extent, it is the holistic sum of all of our cognitive subroutines. After all, we judge somebody by how they react to different situations. At work, we like to see how people handle pressure. In […]
