GOAL: React to article and free write.
I’m about half-way through the article and it reminded me of the thought I have written below.
I guess that most of the variation and selection in thinking happens in the subconscious. So, most of the evolution of our minds is not all that highly directed. You can only do directed evolution on a small part of your mind at any given time. A lot of our mental evolution is happening in an automatized way. That would seem to help explain why just spending lots of time thinking about something has an effect. Like, if you watch lots of news, the ideas you get from the news which beget more ideas and that spawns chains of thought which can take on even more evolution. The more time you spend on a subject the more your mental activities, both conscious and subconscious, are creating conditions for idea evolution in the subject of focus.
More article reaction:
1
When I think about knowledge creation as evolution it also helps me understand more about the value of re-reading material, and studying stuff. You have a different mind when you’re reading something for the second time than you had on the first pass. You might have a bit more of a scaffolding to put ideas onto or you might have picked up one or two small pieces of understanding in the first reading and on the second reading you can put some pieces together.
2
I think one of the big ideas from the article is that criticism is the major key to creating more good knowledge. You need good criticisms that help weed out the good ideas from the noise, garbage, and randomness of brainstorming. Good criticisms are hard to come by but they’re super helpful because they rule out lots and lots bad ideas that can trip you up and waste a lot of your time and resources.
I have found that criticisms that appear really powerful are also really hard to get right and implement correctly. If an idea criticizes lots of other ideas then there can be lots of nuances and it easy to misapply criticism that I don’t understand well. Like, I have some ideas about induction being wrong but I don’t know enough to apply Popperian criticism to induction. It’s just too big and nuanced of a criticism with too many sub-variants for me to understand at this point.
3
The evolutionary environment for our thinking is determined by our goals. The goals are what determines which ideas will or won’t work, that is the selection criteria. The most important thing about your overall goal is that its really big. Having a really big goals means you will have to power up a lot to achieve it. The powering up process leads to convergence on which prerequisites you will have to achieve.
4
Criticism is connected to goals because an idea can’t be criticized in a vacuum. An idea is criticized for not meeting some standard or criteria. Criticism is connected to error correction via goals because a criticism says why an idea fails to accomplish a goal. Failure to accomplish a goal is an error. A well specified goal is binary (with margins of error), which means that it either totally succeeds or totally fails. The appearance of partial success means that you’re combining goals where the idea succeeds with goals where the idea fails. There’s a logical asymmetry, where a single error causes failure no matter how many positive attributes an idea may have. In an Idea-Goal-Context a single error means that something has to change but it could be the idea, the goal, or the context.