What I'm thinking about

This page serves as a snapshot of ideas, questions and curiosities currently orbiting my mental space. Some ideas will develop into essays and others will remain just that, snapshots. Check out the now movement, the inspiration for this page.

Currently reading

• Thinking, Fast and Slow — Daniel Kahneman
• Algorithms to Live By — Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths

Thinking, Fast and Slow

I am about fifty pages in, and I thought I knew about the susceptibility of the human mind to external suggestions but it turns out high school psychology gave me false confidence. The first few chapters have given me a grasp about the dealings of magicians and hypnotists, it all boils down to attention. Intuitively, I knew this to be the case but what I didn’t appreciate is the degree to which one can be at the mercy of an expert on human attention. A magic trick is cool at least because it fills your mind with wonder, what’s not cool is how big tech is holding our attention. Human attention is a finite resource and it seems wise to be aware of that fact.

Algorithms to Live By

I have just gone through the first chapter that covers the optimal stopping problem and I like how it concludes:

Intuitively, we think that rational decision-making means exhaustively enumerating our options, weighing each one carefully, then selecting the best. But in practice, when the clock—or the ticker— is ticking, few aspects of decision-making (or of thinking generally) are as important as this one: when to stop.

There is a mathematical answer for optimal stopping but I feel it's one of those problems that will rarely be satisfied in application. Knowing when to stop derives from our intuition, and that, as it turns out, is affected by many biases.