Wednesday 17 February 2016

A way to represent thinking

There are many ways to think of knowledge and it pays to jump between them on the fly depending on which is most useful at any time.

Here is one way


You have a question or problem. You want to know the answer, to know the truth. For example, a problem is "Who will win the Martian Civil War?" You start from the left, answers are on the right. You need to find a path to the correct answer. How? You jump along nodes. Nodes represent  knowledge. The longer the distance between two nodes, the more difficult the connection is to make and the higher the chance that the connection is a false one leading you in the wrong direction.

The more knowledge you have, the more nodes you have. The more creative you are, the more connections you see. The more critical you are, the lower the maximum length of a connection you are willing to risk traveling along. The smarter you are, the faster you search through the tree.

i.e:

H is the wrong answer. D is the right answer. Note how the jup from B to F is right and the jump from B to I is wrong despite the first being shorter than the second. This is because length represents probability of error. Note that the link from C or I to H is correct. Faulty reasoning can contaminate your entire line of thinking, even if subsequent links are correct.



This graph is a simplification. In  reality, there are hundreds of nodes and edges with varying degrees of support for a number of conclusions. Likewise, just as edges have a % chance of being wrong so nodes have a % chance of being true (and truth itself is a %, not a binary). Thinking well requires managing this complexity and uncertainty along with all the biases which further obfuscate the truth.

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