[HN Gopher] The Cognitive Design of Tools of Thought (2014) [pdf]
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The Cognitive Design of Tools of Thought (2014) [pdf]
Author : andsoitis
Score : 178 points
Date : 2024-05-25 12:58 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (gjgreenberg.bol.ucla.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (gjgreenberg.bol.ucla.edu)
| passwordle wrote:
| This topic has been researched and discussed extensively in the
| embodied cognition branch of cognitive science. It's mentioned as
| a central aspect of cognition in Margaret Wilson's landmark paper
| " Six views of embodied cognition"
| (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12613670/) which came out 12
| years before this one. I'm surprised to not see much of the
| extensive research that has been on this idea before cited here.
| tithe wrote:
| Direct PDF link:
| https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.3758/BF03196322.pdf
| velcrovan wrote:
| "The Extended Mind" by Andrew Clark and David Chalmers, is a much
| more interesting (to me) examination of the categorical blurring
| between the mind and externalized tools of thought.
|
| https://consc.net/papers/extended.html
|
| This idea is also one of the many interesting facets of my
| favorite novel, "Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrel".
|
| https://joeldueck.com/mind-palaces.html
| asolove wrote:
| If you're interested in this topic but want more, I recommend
| "Cognition in the wild": https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262082310/
| eggy wrote:
| Will Eisner's, Comics and Sequential Art, book is great for
| graphic storytelling and the history of the artform.
| dctoedt wrote:
| Coincidentally, the author, Dr. Barbara Tversky [0], was married
| to Amos Tversky, of Kahneman and Tversky fame -- their decades-
| long collaboration was the subject of one of Michael Lewis's
| books [1]. After Amos Tversky's early death, Barbara Tversky and
| the also-widowed Daniel Kahneman became partners until Kahneman's
| own death just a few weeks ago.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Tversky
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Undoing_Project
| mizzao wrote:
| Wow, that's fascinating. I didn't know Kahneman and Tversky
| were related through Barbara as well.
| ninjitsu3 wrote:
| Here's an analysis of similar ideas, but in the context of
| business strategy:
| https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/smj.3613
| alphazard wrote:
| A common theme is that tools for thinking allow you to
| restimulate your brain with its own output. Essentially creating
| a full outer loop from your sensory inputs to your motor outputs.
|
| I'm speculating now: There are probably smaller loops within the
| brain that allow you to ruminate on a topic to think through it,
| but those loops don't give you access to as many neurons or have
| the same fidelity between iterations. The alternative to this
| sort of self-stimulating recursion, is that everything we reason
| about can be done in one pass from sensor to motor, which I find
| unlikely.
|
| The idea of applying multiple passes of the same networks using
| memory to hand off between iterations also explains why memory
| and other aspects of intelligence are correlated in humans, when
| they needn't be. A machine has FLOPS independent of it's memory
| capacity for example.
| keskival wrote:
| Isn't that close to what instruct-tuned LLMs do when they are
| adviced to first think out aloud before jumping to answering?
| They are generating their own output to their scratchpad, the
| attended context, to support their thinking.
| andsoitis wrote:
| Is _culture_ also a tool for thought?
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| Defo. (to the point that people who are only aware of their
| mother culture don't even think of it as _a_ tool; it 's just
| what they always use, whether they're hammering nails with it
| -- or screws)
| swayvil wrote:
| There's a few cartoons going around where they describe the
| effect of various drugs using graphical patterns, facial
| expressions, etc.
|
| That's a rich vein for development. It could be generalized and
| optimized.
|
| Because states of consciousness are so central to our ...
| everything.
|
| And it's a subject that's difficult to discuss. I imagine well-
| designed models rendered with nice animations.
|
| We could discuss drugs, dreams, focus, meditation, fiction...
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| In a published book I've seen a nice set of facial expressions,
| with a small (half dozen?) set of "eigenemotions", then the
| matrix of combinations of the eigenemotions to express more
| nuanced emotions.
|
| Anyone know of a publicly-accessible image in this genre?
|
| (Laumer's _Corps Diplomatique Terrestrienne_ [sic] has gone so
| far as to give each facial expression an official alphanumeric
| code, but I doubt he bothered to substructure, or even hold
| consistent, the coding scheme)
| smarm52 wrote:
| > When thought overwhelms the mind, the mind puts it into the
| world, notably in diagrams and gestures
|
| And in song and words.
|
| > Some ancient outpourings of thought ...
|
| And oral histories.
|
| So, using media to help with cognition. Odd that they don't
| mention oral media.
| kqr wrote:
| For some reason, oral media _are not as good at this_ as the
| written word and abstract drawing. James Gleick ( _The
| Information_ ) speculates that it has to do with being able to
| zoom back and forth between parts of sentences and paragraphs.
| It offers an explicit way of structuring thought.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| I think of rhetorical devices as a way of formalising oral
| discourse, providing signposts that aid the listener "parse
| out" a more-complex-than-1D structure, aiding "zooming back
| and forth between parts of sentences and [whatever the oral
| equivalent of a paragraph may be]" via explicit additions.
|
| (I wonder if the different temporal aspects of delivery also
| play into other aspects of style? For instance, I translated
| an italian art critic once whose prose style was heavily
| pyramidal: every so often, at the beginning of a paragraph,
| he'd introduce a crisp new thought, and his language would
| steadily get more elaborate and flowery after that, until I
| often was struggling, but just before he seemed about to
| leave the plane of actual semantic meaning behind, he cycled
| back to the next crisp thought. My hazy understanding of
| latin oratory is the opposite: it was supposed to be all
| flowery at the outset, and steadily tighten to conclude
| crisply.
|
| If this be a true distinction, it'd make sense in the light
| of media consumption: more people read a hed than lede, more
| the lede than anything after, but presumably orators attract
| listeners, so more people hear the conclusion than prepatory
| statements, and more the prepatory than the prefatory?)
| the-mitr wrote:
| Of possible interest
|
| https://www.rheingold.com/texts/tft/
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| Looking at Figure 5, I'm reminded of a distinction I like to make
| between "cookbook" instruction and "textbook" instruction. The
| former is like the top of the figure: everything is fully in
| context, but also everything remains implicit, and it's up to the
| reader to suss out* the principles given a bunch of examples. The
| latter is like the bottom of the figure: major things are pulled
| out of context, explicitly so that their principles can be
| communicated, noninductively and clearly.
|
| * _That which thy fathers have bequeathed to thee, earn it anew
| if thou wouldst possess it._ -- JWvG (as quoted by ISR)
| monadINtop wrote:
| What a waste of time. Who provides funding for this? Also mildly
| annoying to use "isomorphism" outside of mathematics to describe
| a relation or analogy between things. You can just say relation
| or analogy.
|
| Relying on the technical mystique of precicely defined jargon in
| a context where it doesn't apply should indicate that there is a
| lack of substance in the ideas being presented, which is why the
| author feels compelled to obfuscate it.
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