daijin's Shortform

The sequences can be distilled down even further into a few sentences per article.

Starting with "The lens that sees its flaws": this distils down to: "The ability to apply science to our own thinking grants us the ability to counteract our own biases, which can be powerful." Statement by statement:

• A lot of complex physics and neural processing is required for you to notice something simple, like that your shoelace is untied.
• However, on top of noticing that your shoelace is untied, you can also comprehend the process of (noticing your shoelace is untied) - i.e. by listing the steps through which light reflects off your shoelace and your visual cortex engaging, etc.
• The ability to consider the steps of our own thinking appears to be uniquely human.
• If we recognise that our process of comprehension and understanding is potentially flawed, you can choose to consciously counteract it.
• Science is repeatedly and deliberately making measurements of our own observations over time, attributing theories to those measurements, and constructing experiments to produce further measurements to potentially disprove those theories.
• The ability to apply science to our own thinking grants us the ability to counteract our own biases, which can be powerful.
  • One example of reflective correction is correcting for optimism by noticing that optimism is not correlated to good outcomes.

The tool I am using to distill the sequences is an outliner: a nested bulleted list that allows rearranging of bullet points. This tool is typically used for writing things, but can similarly be used for un-writing things: taking a written article in and deduplicating its points, one bullet at a time, into a simpler format. An outliner can also collapse and reveal bullet points.