Posts Tagged ‘optical illusions’
A short course in thinking about thinking
Yesterday I came across A Short Course in Thinking About Thinking by Daniel Kahneman. What a fascinating resource! I was searching for “metacognition” but what I found there is relevant to so much of what we’re doing in Kusasa. For instance, in session one Kahneman talks about “inside” and “outside” views of planning or problem solving…
The inside view is looking at your problem and trying to estimate what will happen in your problem. The outside view involves making that an instance of something else—of a class. When you then look at the statistics of the class, it is a very different way of thinking about problems. And what’s interesting is that it is a very unnatural way to think about problems, because you have to forget things that you know—and you know everything about what you’re trying to do, your plan and so on— andto look at yourself as a point in the distribution is a very un-natural exercise; people actually hate doing this and resist it.
As a problem solving strategy “taking the outside view” is itself an instance of a broader strategy: “solving a similar problem.” As it happens this broad strategy is one of George Polya’s problem solving heuristics. “Inside and outside views” will be the subject of one of our Kusasa modules.
In session five Kahneman talks about attribute substitution as it happens in optical illusions and many other contexts. Alan Kay discusses illusions as examples of “the world is not as it seems” in his paper on Children Learning by Doing (PDF). Why is this important? Because, as Alan explains, we “want to help [children] escape from the very simple perception of the world that their senses (including their ‘commonsense’) provides them.” Optical illusions, attribute substitution and other cognitive biases such as anchoring will be the subjects of several Kusasa modules.
If you want to further explore “inside and outside views” consider Kahneman’s article in the Harvard Business Review. It’s $6.50 but well worth it. And you’ll find more on “attribute substitution” in his Nobel Prize lecture.
