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Comment by RandomWorker | Hacker News Reader

> Cognitive Reflection (CR) refers to the individual ability or disposition to stop the first impulsive response that our mind offers and to activate the reflective mechanisms that allow us to find an answer, make a decision, or carry out a specific behavior in a more thoughtful way.

Basically the idea that you think before you act. Makes sense that this would enhance all other skills. Is this junk science? I’d rather see actual test plus data with control variables. Meta analysis seems to have the conclusion already in the introduction. We think this matters here’s a bunch of evidence we found, therefore it matters.

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> Basically the idea that you think before you act

They talk about thinking before you judge, not thinking before you act. ADHD people often have a hard time thinking before they act but many of them are still really smart and think a lot before judging.

Judging without thinking is a much bigger problem than doing without thinking, but most people still do it.

That’s a really interesting and important distinction. Thanks for clarifying. Suddenly I understand ignorance and stupidity in a whole new light.

Doing a meta-analysis on something easily quantifiable is sketchy enough, doing a meta-analysis on something as vague and hard to measure as "cognitive intelligence" is.. well, it's sociology's territory. Not to say it isn't of value, many discoveries were made on a lot less methodologically strict grounds and this kind of "conversation" does create the stimulus for further, more specific research, but you ought to read this more like a an investigative journalistic piece with a lot of opinion rather than hard science.

It’s impulsive if it’s blindly obvious.

Someone of intelligence would find that so and have no need to reflect or even think about it.

oh the word games in this thread.

This is an old concept:

System 1 and System 2 (The linked article but also everyone?)

book: Thinking fast and slow (Daniel Kahneman)

analogy: Elephant and Rider (Haidt)

analogy: Charioteer and Horse (stoics)

An impulse is not blindly obvious (e.g., unconscious bias or unquestioned assumptions), and an intelligent person may or may not have correct biases / impulses in all situations. However, a person who can sit with their impulses, override them, and try to see through them through reflection may in fact have something that is synonymous with intelligence to a degree (thesis of TFA).

I believe the implication is that "much of intelligence is reflection" and that "continuous reflection yields better intuition on the reflected domain". Not "a person born with high IQ has better instincts".

Just to be sure, "TFA" is Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking, Fast and Slow", I assume ...

Man, I'm shocked at how often this has to be reiterated here...

"TFA" means The F[ine]* Article (or insert another 'F' word if you wish), which I first heard on Slashdot, which was perhaps the OG "news aggregator" site back in the 90's and early 2000s, to refer back to the original article which we were all discussing.

This was a back-formation from RTFA, which would have meant, "Read The F[ine] Article", an admonition / accusation not uncommon on Slashdot which is explicitly discouraged here.

RTFA, in turn, was a modification of RTFM, familiar to many of the IT crowd, as an admonition / recommendation often proffered in response to user questions: Read the F[ine] Manual.

Although RTFM was obviously fairly toxic, and RTFA was of the same spirit, TFA by itself simply filled a useful role: a way to refer back specifically to the article we were all (supposedly) discussing.

* There are other F-words sometimes used here, of course

IDK if you just wrote that all on the spot but well done, you need a blog! I knew most of those facts individually but never tied it all together into a narrative, or made the connection with Read the Freakin Manual.

To only slightly elongate this tangent: I’m giving the Reddit crowd cultural victory on this one with “OP” (for Original Post) rather than “TFA”/“TLA”. I’m curious what is typically used on platforms like Instagram and TikTok, but I’m guessing no one here knows lol

Everyone learned it somewhere!

Ah. Slashdot. Those were the days.-

Had not made the connection between "TFA" here and that. Much less "RTFM" ...

... which is a classic by now.-

Ah no, it was the article we were all discussing here. The one the HN thread is about.

Understood. :)

The OP article cites Kahneman & Frederick quite a bit in the intro.

Our knowledge of a situation is almost always imperfect, and can most of the time benefit from longer, deeper, less blond analysis.

Where impulses and reflexes rule is time-sensitive activities, like most sports, playing musical instruments, or driving. Whoever can deploy a better repertoire of thoughtless, instant reactions wins. It's basically precomputed and cached thought.

It is junk science--when a skill is truly mastered, it is done entirely without thinking bout it. Flow. Conscious, reflective thought is very slow and is typically only invoked when all else fails.

When you are programming--really sucked into it, the state of flow---you are not thinking about how you are programming. You are not aware that you have feet, inside of socks, or even that you are sitting down. You are not even aware you are thinking about it at all--you actually disappear altogether, all that really exists is this mind-meld of you, the problem you are trying to solve, and the program you are solving it with.

If, in the middle of this state, you stop and start questioning "am I programing this the right way? Am I sure this is the best way to do it? Should I be making this more general, or generic? All you get is analysis paralysis.

Its a trap even, because bike shedding feels like you are getting things done, or being smart, foresighted, etc etc. You are not; if you know how to solve the problem within spec and budget, doing anything else is just procrastinating.

I disagree with this. Outstanding programming (outstanding performance at almost anything) involves a flow state where you are doing-the-thing almost unconsciously, but that frees your mind up for meta-cognition reflecting on the bigger picture and concurrently refining the performance of the task. To be an outstanding athlete, you also need to be your own best coach.

I don't think this is right at all, a lot of intellectual forms of 'flow' necessarily involve incessant reflection, often through writing and re-writing, but also through conversation with self and others. Keep in mind that Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, who pioneered the concept of flow, thought of the manipulation of symbols - including in science, philosophy, conversation - as one of its principal domains.

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