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How Mind Works
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Disciplines
- Cognitive Science
- Neural Science
- Psychology
- Evolutionary Psychology
- Machine Learning
- Artificial Intelligence
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Theories
- Bounded Rationality; Simple Heuristics that Makes us Smart
- Social Animal
- Language as a window into Human Mind
- Decision Theory
- Reasoning, deductive and inductive
- Argument Theory
- Bayesian Inference
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Cognitive Fallacies
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Fallacies in Human Reasoning
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Informal Fallacies
- e.g. False Dilemma
- e.g. Correlation doesn't imply Causation
- e.g. Post Hoc
- e.g. Begging the Question
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Formal Fallacies
- e.g. Denying the Antecedent
- e.g. Affirming the Consequent
- e.g. Affirming a Disjunct
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Cognitive Biases
- e.g. Bandwagon Effect
- e.g. Authority Bias
- e.g. Confirmation Bias
- e.g. Framing Effect
- e.g. Wishful Thinking
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Fallacies in daily Judgment and Decision Making
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Judgment and Decision Making
- e.g. Cognitive Dissonance and Self-Justification
- e.g. Representativeness, Availability and Anchoring
- e.g. Paradox of Choice
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Behavioral Economics
- Why Smart People Make Big Money Mistakes
- Predictably Irrational
- Black Swan
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Critical Thinking
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What's the problem?
- Set a yardstick first, and then measure everything against it.
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What're the assumptions?
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Unconscious Assumptions are Dangerous
- It ain't so much the things we don't know that get us into trouble. It's the things we know that just ain't so.
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How to smoke out the assumptions?
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By asking questions
- "It doesn't have to ..."; "Do we have to ... ?"
- "This doesn't necessarily mean ..."
- "What would happen if we don't do this?"
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By formalizing the reasoning process
- Specify the Premises.
- Look at the Conclusion(s).
- Does the conclusion necessarily follow the Premise.
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By learning critical-thinking
- e.g. False analogy
- e.g. Problem of Induction
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What're the facts?
- If you don't have knowledge, you have assumptions.
- Do your homework, get the facts right.
- Routine Question: "Really?"
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Where's the logic?
- Routine Question: "... doesn't necessarily mean ...!"
- Routine Question: "it doesn't have to be ... to ...!"
- Routine Question: "... and why is that?"
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What's the conclusion?
- Avoid jumping to conclusions; see Cognitive Shortcut.
- Routine Question: "So?", "Then?", "So what?"
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Problem Solving
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Problems
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Problem often known and well defined
- e.g. Math
- e.g. Algorithms
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You figure out what the problem is
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Problems we face everyday
- e.g. financial decisions
- e.g. time management
- e.g. career
- e.g. relationship
- Judgment and Decision Making in general
- Practical Problems
- Complex Decisions
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Techniques
- Routine Question: "What's the Problem?"
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Heuristics
- e.g. Trial and Error
- e.g. Analogy
- e.g. Specialization
- e.g. Simplification
- e.g. Working Backwards
- e.g. Brainstorming
- e.g. Root Cause Analysis
- e.g. Lateral Thinking
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Decision Making
- Pros and Cons Analysis
- Key Factor Analysis
- Choice under Uncertainty