That’s nicely done! Clear, concise, and immediately applicable. I think Frank himself is an intelligent person with good and interesting ideas, but the “meat” of these posts seems spread out among a lot of filler/elaboration—possibly why they’re hard to skim. I wasn’t even sure, for quite a while, what the whole series was really about, beyond “general self-improvement.”
This latest article is much more “functional” than the previous two, though, so I think we’re moving in the right direction.
One thing your comment brings to mind—Frank notes something about unconscious mental processes being trainable, and the suggestion is that one can train them to be rational, or at least more accurate. (If I remember correctly.) Is this idea included your comment? Perhaps under “folk psychology”?
It seems like an interesting concept, though I was unable to find any instruction on how to actually accomplish it. (But I haven’t looked too hard yet.)
One thing your comment brings to mind—Frank notes something about unconscious mental processes being trainable, and the suggestion is that one can train them to be rational, or at least more accurate. (If I remember correctly.) Is this idea included your comment? Perhaps under “folk psychology”?
I tuned out all that stuff about “the unconscious”. How does Frank know that “our unconscious thinking is actually very powerful, very intelligent, and fairly sensible”? That it is “extremely powerful, doing massive amounts of computation very quickly”? And yet, “When they make a mistake they have no way of telling that they made a mistake”? Where does this come from? What does he mean by “the unconscious”?
When he says “When I realize this disconnect and see how the information about underlying frequency was shifted as it passed through my sources, I unconsciously come to a better estimate of how often something happens”, what is the word “unconscious” doing there? Looks like a description of something conscious.
By “the unconscious” I mean the mental operations we perform without getting internal mental feedback about the process of the operation.
That’s not very concrete. The most widely recognized extension of this part of reality is emotions we don’t understand the reasons for, along with other mysterious-by-default things like why we spend a long time mentally reviewing our stated positions. We can simply ask “Why do I feel that way, and why do I spend my time that way?” This question doesn’t require any mention of unconscious thinking, or thinking at all. At this state of knowledge, the answer could conceivably involve any number of mechanisms, and those mechanisms may not be mental.
But in my own attempts to answer these questions, the most efficient way to model the source of those things is actually to model them as a mind. (I say “efficient” to emphasize a goal of using the concept, but the model appears to be accurate as well.) By a “mind”, I mean something that has a model of the world, that takes in evidence it receives about that world, that performs a very great amount of inference on that model and evidence, and even undertakes strategic thinking in the attempt to reach goals. In other words, the answer to why we feel and do those things is that there’s a genuine optimization process there, and the feelings and actions are its output.
We receive the conclusions of this part of our thinking, but we don’t have feedback about the thoughts taking place there. The system-of-us does not receive as input the process of these thoughts, and this is what distinguishes conscious and UNconscious thinking.
That’s nicely done! Clear, concise, and immediately applicable. I think Frank himself is an intelligent person with good and interesting ideas, but the “meat” of these posts seems spread out among a lot of filler/elaboration—possibly why they’re hard to skim. I wasn’t even sure, for quite a while, what the whole series was really about, beyond “general self-improvement.”
This latest article is much more “functional” than the previous two, though, so I think we’re moving in the right direction.
One thing your comment brings to mind—Frank notes something about unconscious mental processes being trainable, and the suggestion is that one can train them to be rational, or at least more accurate. (If I remember correctly.) Is this idea included your comment? Perhaps under “folk psychology”?
It seems like an interesting concept, though I was unable to find any instruction on how to actually accomplish it. (But I haven’t looked too hard yet.)
I tuned out all that stuff about “the unconscious”. How does Frank know that “our unconscious thinking is actually very powerful, very intelligent, and fairly sensible”? That it is “extremely powerful, doing massive amounts of computation very quickly”? And yet, “When they make a mistake they have no way of telling that they made a mistake”? Where does this come from? What does he mean by “the unconscious”?
When he says “When I realize this disconnect and see how the information about underlying frequency was shifted as it passed through my sources, I unconsciously come to a better estimate of how often something happens”, what is the word “unconscious” doing there? Looks like a description of something conscious.
By “the unconscious” I mean the mental operations we perform without getting internal mental feedback about the process of the operation.
That’s not very concrete. The most widely recognized extension of this part of reality is emotions we don’t understand the reasons for, along with other mysterious-by-default things like why we spend a long time mentally reviewing our stated positions. We can simply ask “Why do I feel that way, and why do I spend my time that way?” This question doesn’t require any mention of unconscious thinking, or thinking at all. At this state of knowledge, the answer could conceivably involve any number of mechanisms, and those mechanisms may not be mental.
But in my own attempts to answer these questions, the most efficient way to model the source of those things is actually to model them as a mind. (I say “efficient” to emphasize a goal of using the concept, but the model appears to be accurate as well.) By a “mind”, I mean something that has a model of the world, that takes in evidence it receives about that world, that performs a very great amount of inference on that model and evidence, and even undertakes strategic thinking in the attempt to reach goals. In other words, the answer to why we feel and do those things is that there’s a genuine optimization process there, and the feelings and actions are its output.
We receive the conclusions of this part of our thinking, but we don’t have feedback about the thoughts taking place there. The system-of-us does not receive as input the process of these thoughts, and this is what distinguishes conscious and UNconscious thinking.