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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.
by OnlyMortal 2y ago
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.
- nine_k 2y agoOur 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.
- jvanderbot 2y agooh 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".
- Bluestein 2y agoJust to be sure, "TFA" is Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking, Fast and Slow", I assume ...
- jvanderbot 2y agoAh no, it was the article we were all discussing here. The one the HN thread is about.
- Bluestein 2y agoUnderstood. :)
- gwd 2y agoMan, 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
- bbor 2y agoIDK 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
- jvanderbot 2y agoEveryone learned it somewhere!
- Bluestein 2y agoAh. Slashdot. Those were the days.- Had not made the connection between "TFA" here and that. Much less "RTFM" ... ... which is a classic by now.-
- neuronexmachina 2y agoThe OP article cites Kahneman & Frederick quite a bit in the intro.