For practise, I made comments on each sentence in the first paragraph. I’m practising making comments which is something I don’t do a lot of when I read. This task was quick, easy and enjoyable and I didn’t get stuck.
Intuition is an important part of rational thinking and learning.
This seems different than what most people think rational thinking is about. Intuition is generally considered not rational. Being rational is considered to be about being cold, calculating, logical and definitely not emotional. People think of the image of being a very rational person as being some sort of emotionless ‘rational robot’.
Intuition includes subconscious ideas: ideas which aren’t in words and emotions.
So this view is quite different to the ‘robot’ view of rationality. This view considers emotions to be an important part of rational thinking, not the antithesis of irrationality like the robot view.
You can’t do all your thinking in conscious or explicit ways.
Why can’t you? Because thinking about things requires using relatively less complex prerequisites: speaking a sentence well requires that you basically know what the words in the sentence mean and what its grammar means, and how to physically make the individual sounds that correspond to a sentence. You can’t hold all that stuff in your conscious mind at once, but the thinking still has to be done. So at least some of your thinking is done subconsciously or inexplicitly.
To be an effective thinker, you need to understand your intuition and know when and why to use it.
I think this means intuition as a faculty, not any particular concrete intuition. I think if it meant that you needed to understand particular concrete intuitions, it’d use the word ‘intuitions’ or some different wording.
So I think it’s saying: you need to understand some things about your subconscious, intuitive, emotional faculty, and when and why to use it in order to be an effective thinker
You must also learn how to train or improve your intuition.
So it’s not just a matter of like, knowing that you will inevitably have intuitions and emotions so be on the lookout for them like the rational robot view says. Your intuitions can be valuable and so your faculty to intuit should be taken advantage of and trained and improved.
More comment practise on paragraph 3 of this article. Most of my comments appear to be me trying to restate things, and check if I understand what is being said.
If anyone has any comments on my comments on sentence 5 here that’d be helpful. I was trying to think about the analogy and the the role that subconscious creativity plays in subconscious learning, and how that’s different from just programming a computer.
The basic way you make progress in life is to, first, learn things consciously then, second, teach your subconscious to do them.
Progress means improving things over time. Making progress in your life means becoming a better, improved, more effective person. In order to improve things you need to be able to fix the things wrong with what you’re currently doing, and then make those fixed things you do easy so you can build on them. Teaching things to your subconscious is how you automate the improvements that you first must consciously figure out.
Think of your conscious mind as the boss and then your subconscious mind as twenty workers.
This analogy represents the ratios (1/20) that Elliot mentioned in the second paragraph, it also captures the different roles of the conscious and subconscious mind.
The workers don’t do much planning or take much initiative.
The workers are subordinate to the boss. So what the workers achieve depends heavily on how they are managed. Their job isn’t management or planning of the factory or business as a whole. Their scope is limited to their delegated task. A mismanaged factory can be inefficient and potentially counterproductive despite the workers best efforts to do what they are directed to do.
The boss is crucial to creativity but the workers are sometimes creative in their own ways.
Main point: The boss is the main, crucial, creative force in the business, even though the workers are sometimes creative in their own ways.
In what ways are the workers creative, and what are the limits on that? Can the subconscious mind reimagine how to perform its own tasks? I don’t think so.
The boss has to teach the workers to do jobs and sometimes has to simplify jobs (and break them down into smaller parts) so the workers can handle them.
This sentence illustrates the difference in roles that a boss and a worker has. The boss teaches the worker to do the job. That means the boss already knows the job. That also means that the worker can learn. The worker is not programmed by the boss. The boss helps the worker learn the job that the boss knows how to do.
A human worker has an intelligent mind the same as the boss does. A human worker in the real world could develop a new method for doing a job. But the point of the analogy is to illustrate the difference in roles between a worker qua worker and a boss qua boss. Workers use their creativity to learn the things that the boss already figured out for them to do with the boss providing corrective oversight. They don’t use their creativity to figure out what they should do.
In the same way that the worker isn’t programmed by the boss, the subconscious isn’t just a computer that the conscious mind programmes. It is a programme itself that can learn things the conscious mind tries to teach it with the help of the conscious mind’s oversight. Like a worker, the subconscious needs creativity to be able to learn its jobs that their boss (the conscious mind) has figured out and simplified for them.
But the workers are very diligent and they’re good at remembering their jobs once they learn what to do.
Also, each worker only does one job at a time but they’re fast workers who can do many jobs in one day.
These seem like clarifications on the limits of the analogy so that some of the undesirable behaviour of real workers is not brought into the analogy. Real workers in general aren’t so efficient and diligent etc. But ET is saying your subconscious mind is like a number of workers if we think of them being like described in 6 and 7. He’s mentioning it because these aren’t normal traits of workers but are normal traits of your subconscious. So your subconscious is like a factory of excellent workers.
Sometimes it’s useful to think of your mind as having many thousands or millions of workers, rather than twenty, but twenty workers is often an adequate mental model.
It seems that the subconscious would have a whole hierarchy of workers, where some do very basic one step things, and pass on their work to some others that take multiple inputs and so on. In this way you could imagine many many more workers. You could abstract that all in to fewer workers too though.