"doesn’t seem to be any cognitive task that you can practice and make yourself better at other cognitive tasks."
I believe reading books and playing musical instruments are examples of cognitive task that make you better at other cognitive tasks. Also learning other languages comes to mind. I think I'm reiterating your point. It's, "not a wall but a steep slope." Cheers mate.
It’s unclear. On one hand, there is little evidence of being able to strengthen mental faculties (reasoning, working memory, etc) through practice — only the development of specific skills that can transfer.
Yet, the emotional capacity to do hard work without getting frustrated and quitting (viz. “cognitive endurance”) appears to be its own skill.
There are known errors in thinking. Avoiding them can make you less likely to fall into the many reasoning errors that humans have been trapped in throughout history.
It might not make you 2% smarter on a test.
It probably makes you 2% and more overall because you can examine your thinking for common classes of error, identity your mistakes and attempt to correct them.
Examine the known errors humans have made in their understanding of the world. Identify patterns in those errors, abstract those errors, apply the principles to your conclusions.
Here’s one: thinking there’s some source of truth written on commonly known that cannot be challenged. For centuries after the invention of the microscope germ theory was disregarded because a false theory of miasma predominated. Why? We got attached to pleasant sounding but made up story. We didn’t question it enough to allow the evidence before our eyes to update our thinking.
I leave exploration of other classes of errors in thinking as an exercise for the reader.
> Why? We got attached to pleasant sounding but made up story. We didn’t question it enough to allow the evidence before our eyes to update our thinking.
It bears mentioning that this isn't simply a matter of “everyone was wrong until a clever chap was first to question established wisdom and suddenly everyone was enlightened”.
It's more like “everyone enforces the established wisdom on everyone else and the clever chap is punished for being clever”.
I don't know if this applied to the germ theory, but it applied to plenty of theories the most famous of which being geocentrism. It's very likely that people before Copernicus questioned geocentrism, perhaps even thought of heliocentrism, but were either tortured or killed for it, or stayed silent from the get-go because they knew that would happen to them.
Lone clever chaps do not overturn established wisdom. It's a gradual process that requires a critical mass and a mountain of evidence.
Supposedly, one people of the Sea Peoples were the Peleset, as the egyptians called them (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peleset), which are believed to be the same people as the Philistines, for which the Romans gave Palestine its name.
Another tantalizing possible connection for two other Sea Peoples groups, the "Sherden" and the "Shekelesh" sure sound pretty close to "Sardinia" and "Sicily", but I'm not sure if there's any actual evidence besides similarity.
> We have been optimized very hard by evolution to be good at running, so there shouldn’t be any “easy” technologies that would make us dramatically faster or more efficient.
I wonder if these new shoes have the same affect on natural (i.e., non-paved) surfaces? Plus, they all look quite high off the ground (probably all those plates and foam need space) and that doesn't help with stability when running over rocks, etc.
Yes. The top marathon racing shoes are optimized for road-running & hard surfaces like asphalt. Definitely not good for trails. They are indeed very tall (though there's limits for official competitions.) Excellent lateral stability is essentially a non-goal so they are not a good choice for volleyball or tennis either. So yeah, we run in a very different world than the one where our ancestors evolved...
> In general, that argument is that there shouldn’t be any simple technology that would make humans dramatically smarter, since if there was, then evolution would have already found it.
With technology we have massively extended lifespan, so does this argument really hold valid ?
On average. But it wasn't that uncommon to have people reach 100 years of age even 500 years ago. The biggest impact on lifespans was hygiene not medicine (except for maybe anti-biotics).
Evolution is multidimensional, if for improving one trait you diminish another that may for our survival some compromise will be reached. Not by design, but natural selection, at the end matters that the genes manage to survive. If living more implies that against food scarcity you get no surviving children that is the end of the line for the genes that enabled that extra lifespan.
And in evolutionary terms, having agriculture, civilization, technology and a global culture that may support those traits is the exception not the rule.
I dig your style. I had a thought:
"doesn’t seem to be any cognitive task that you can practice and make yourself better at other cognitive tasks."
I believe reading books and playing musical instruments are examples of cognitive task that make you better at other cognitive tasks. Also learning other languages comes to mind. I think I'm reiterating your point. It's, "not a wall but a steep slope." Cheers mate.
It’s unclear. On one hand, there is little evidence of being able to strengthen mental faculties (reasoning, working memory, etc) through practice — only the development of specific skills that can transfer.
Yet, the emotional capacity to do hard work without getting frustrated and quitting (viz. “cognitive endurance”) appears to be its own skill.
There are known errors in thinking. Avoiding them can make you less likely to fall into the many reasoning errors that humans have been trapped in throughout history.
It might not make you 2% smarter on a test. It probably makes you 2% and more overall because you can examine your thinking for common classes of error, identity your mistakes and attempt to correct them.
Examine the known errors humans have made in their understanding of the world. Identify patterns in those errors, abstract those errors, apply the principles to your conclusions.
Here’s one: thinking there’s some source of truth written on commonly known that cannot be challenged. For centuries after the invention of the microscope germ theory was disregarded because a false theory of miasma predominated. Why? We got attached to pleasant sounding but made up story. We didn’t question it enough to allow the evidence before our eyes to update our thinking.
I leave exploration of other classes of errors in thinking as an exercise for the reader.
> Why? We got attached to pleasant sounding but made up story. We didn’t question it enough to allow the evidence before our eyes to update our thinking.
It bears mentioning that this isn't simply a matter of “everyone was wrong until a clever chap was first to question established wisdom and suddenly everyone was enlightened”.
It's more like “everyone enforces the established wisdom on everyone else and the clever chap is punished for being clever”.
I don't know if this applied to the germ theory, but it applied to plenty of theories the most famous of which being geocentrism. It's very likely that people before Copernicus questioned geocentrism, perhaps even thought of heliocentrism, but were either tortured or killed for it, or stayed silent from the get-go because they knew that would happen to them.
Lone clever chaps do not overturn established wisdom. It's a gradual process that requires a critical mass and a mountain of evidence.
Related interesting fact that I recently learned.
Supposedly, one people of the Sea Peoples were the Peleset, as the egyptians called them (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peleset), which are believed to be the same people as the Philistines, for which the Romans gave Palestine its name.
Another tantalizing possible connection for two other Sea Peoples groups, the "Sherden" and the "Shekelesh" sure sound pretty close to "Sardinia" and "Sicily", but I'm not sure if there's any actual evidence besides similarity.
> But there doesn’t seem to be any cognitive task that you can practice and make yourself better at other cognitive tasks.
This seems wrong. Doesn't practicing cognitive tasks often lead to improvement in other cognitive tasks?
Doesn’t identifying and challenging logical fallacies make you better at thinking?
Doesn’t acknowledging the possibility of error and allowing conclusions to be overturned by evidence improve the outcomes of cognition?
Pre-chatgpt blogposts on well-known topics used to be far better motivated or layman-oriented
https://ace-pt.org/ace-physical-therapy-and-sports-medicine-...
which hints that the low 2.7% improvement should not be unexpected of commercializable interventions targeting this joint
(unlike, say, of obviously illegal (powered or not) exoskeletons)
https://medium.com/the-bronze-age/the-ships-of-the-sea-peopl...
Otoh, bona fide connections between Pangaea, Sea Peoples & modern day Turkiye are still discussed on OpenAI-resistant YouTube today
https://youtu.be/a0LWFt78n7k
On the first hand, the automaton reminds me that "modern-day philistines settled in the Gaza Strip after their defeat"
> We have been optimized very hard by evolution to be good at running, so there shouldn’t be any “easy” technologies that would make us dramatically faster or more efficient.
I wonder if these new shoes have the same affect on natural (i.e., non-paved) surfaces? Plus, they all look quite high off the ground (probably all those plates and foam need space) and that doesn't help with stability when running over rocks, etc.
Yes. The top marathon racing shoes are optimized for road-running & hard surfaces like asphalt. Definitely not good for trails. They are indeed very tall (though there's limits for official competitions.) Excellent lateral stability is essentially a non-goal so they are not a good choice for volleyball or tennis either. So yeah, we run in a very different world than the one where our ancestors evolved...
> In general, that argument is that there shouldn’t be any simple technology that would make humans dramatically smarter, since if there was, then evolution would have already found it.
With technology we have massively extended lifespan, so does this argument really hold valid ?
On average. But it wasn't that uncommon to have people reach 100 years of age even 500 years ago. The biggest impact on lifespans was hygiene not medicine (except for maybe anti-biotics).
Vaccines dramatically reduce childhood mortality significantly skewing mortality figures.
For this reason, "life expectancy" doesn't tell you much. "Life expectancy at age 5" tells much, much more about how adults fare.
Evolution is multidimensional, if for improving one trait you diminish another that may for our survival some compromise will be reached. Not by design, but natural selection, at the end matters that the genes manage to survive. If living more implies that against food scarcity you get no surviving children that is the end of the line for the genes that enabled that extra lifespan.
And in evolutionary terms, having agriculture, civilization, technology and a global culture that may support those traits is the exception not the rule.
The word simple does a lot of work here.