Talks at Google
1 HN recommender · recommended in 5 months, 2013–2024
1:01:45 · 129K views · May 22, 2013
Philosopher Daniel Dennett visits Google to discuss his book Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, describing thought experiments and thinking tools across psychology, biology, computer science and physics.
Pointed to as an accessible introduction to intuition pumps as thinking tools, and shared in remembrance after Dennett's death.
5 comments from Hacker News
Found the article to be a good summary of a lot of concepts I had encountered on their own, but hadn't seen together in list form before. If you enjoyed this, you might find Daniel Dennett's "Intuition Pumps and Tools for Thinking" interesting [1]. I would highly recommend "The Philosopher's Toolkit: A Compendium of Philosophical Concepts Methods" by Julian Baggini and Peter Fosl as well [2]. - [1] Link to Talk at Google By Dennett: this video - [2] Link to pdf: [LINK]
I like this idea quite a bit, although I'm not exactly sure it would be a startup in the end because the willingness (ability?) to pay amongst the target market here must be quite low, I imagine. Just free styling here, but the way to go about it would be to bundle a sort of 'package' of tools into a couple of various tiers, from easy (low input of time/funds) to challenging (more pricey/difficult). One wrinkle is that I think there is a spectrum from pretty clearly verified IQ boosters.. such as psychologically verified games like n-back, and proper nutritions (EPA+DHA, etc etc), to ones that are much more speculative or carry some baggage that 'underclass' folks (that sounds sort of bad ha) might be extremely reluctant to participate in.. eg meditative practice, nootropics, etc. (Brain) food for thought.. :P With regards to the Victorian study, I read through that last week and it is not immediately clear to me from the literature that reaction time is really a reliable indicator of g. Conversely, the Flynn affect suggests that IQ has really been going up. And if you've read any of Flynn's stuff you'll find that he has quite a nice explanation here, which is that the more brilliant heuristics/words/thinking tools pioneered amongst scientists, inventors, so on are slowly filtering down into the masses generation by generation. Perhaps what this suggests is that education in a new way- introducing folks to a library of new 'thinking tools' rather than just memorization etc- m
Daniel Dennett introduced the introducing notion of Intuition Pump, which I would say definitely qualify as transformative tools for thought. They are thought experiments designed to focus attention on important features of a question and to deflect them from getting bogged down in hard-to-follow details. Google talk by Daniel Dennett on Intuition Pumps this video
So sad. I was on the team that brought him to Google, and my task was to get his signature on the video release form. Here's the talk: this video I told him that his book Darwin's Dangerous Idea was one of the few where, when I got to the end, I immediately wanted to go back to the beginning and read it again. He said, "I'm not sure that's a good thing."
[LINK] You can`t do much carpentry with your bare hands and you can`t do much thinking with your bare brain. - Bo Dahlbom, quoted by Daniel Dennett in his book "Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking" this video (talk by Daniel on Google Campus)