The Psychology of Thinking - with Richard Nisbett 

I regret using headphones, the intro just melted my brain

The shoe on the left is casting a spell.

Excellent Lecture. Thank you!

Great video, thank you!

“If you don’t understand these things then you can’t function effectively in your daily life” Me: Oh.

And in the year 2020, it would appear that vast swaths of the general populace may be headed back towards pre-industrial mindsets and modes...

Never mind understanding probability & sharp statistical skills; despite gains in IQ points, many folks still tend to lack abstract thinking skills & are concrete thinkers unable to leverage categories &/or metaphors, lack a theory of mind, & have trouble with logic both committing fallacies &/or erroneously being convinced by fallacious arguments!

he is hard work. not nodding off while he rambles on but thanks for sharing never STOP loving xxx

Did we get wiser? Yes we did. Dr. Flynn shows us that over the decades we got so wise that the least of men could be relied on to wisely vote for a government. Then the least of women were accepted. Forty years back 18yo youths were. Now people are seriously proposing 16yo. They are truly as informed and wise as their grandparents were at 21.

This is what a mainstream newspaper sounds like when it becomes sentient.

@13:46 What IS the distance to Plato?

29:00 Also, isn't the "best rookie" just the best of the rookies? The next year, he's compared to *everyone*. The increased diverse sample will reflect the truth of his relative prowess.

Lots of critics commenting. I’m certain none of them have the knowledge or intelligence of the speaker though!

Interesting talk, wide variety of topics mentioned. I was waiting for him to say a sentence or two about survivor bias as well. Anyway a nice job educating the public.

I have a feeling aristotle would be in disacord with your opinion about ancient intelligence

Knowledge and Understanding: In the domain of Knowledge there are different types: True, false, questions, distinctions, predictions, contradictions, procedures, nonsense, and the list goes on. In the domain of Understanding where the knowledge type 'procedural' is the how-to instructions included in the body of knowledge that makes up the understanding. You can view your list of understandings by listing all the words you use that end with the suffex ing. Like: Reading, writing, thinking, talking, seeing, believing, typing, tweeting, etc. Understandings are the program code that runs all the things that you do. Understandings consume energy (calories) when operating whereas knowledge does not require extra energy just to remain in state. Its good to know the difference between Knowledge and Understanding. Knowledge Directs, Understanding Affects. The brain organizes knowledge into ten knowledge contexts for every issue in its knowledge library. These contexts are: Name, Authors, Purpose, Environment, Language, Configuration, Operation, Owners, Market, and Value. These are the Ten Directors that control the function of any issue. All procedural knowledge that drives understandings are stored in the Operation Director. You can change your life my meditating on each one of the ten directors individually and doing a house cleaning on the knowledge stored there. Delete the false knowledge and install true knowledge in each of the ten directors. Edit modify and test changes to procedural knowledge in all your understandings. Thinking is an Understanding that can be edited and changed as needed.

My summary: something something industrial revolution how it changed our lives(i think) examples of the new tools after the industrial revolution 6 tools will be talked about examples for each tool psychologists have discovered the best way to teach people something is to emphasize their good performance(tell why it's good) and de-emphasize the bad performance(not as useful to tell why it's bad) everything has alternatives, and there is a best alternative. law of large numbers: sample values resemble population values as a direct function of their size and an inverse function of the expected error associated with each observation observation = true score + error the correlation between interview performance and performance in college or business is 0.1 a study about something something abilities and traits, "perceived and actual correlations across two occasions and across 20", ppls ability to correlate accurately given a 1 streak or multiple streak regression to the mean: extreme observations of events are likely to be followed by less extreme observations of the same type of event - to the extent that there is variation for the observations of the type in question predictions of events of one kind based on the observations of another kind have to take into account the correlation between the two kinds of events self selection: the subject chooses not only the subject's level on a given variable but the level on a host of other variables that are correlated with that variable (idk kinda what this all means)multiple regression analysis: examines the association of each of a number of independent variables with a dependent variable - net of the association between every other variable and the dependent variable in other words, the correlation of x and y "controlling for" all variables that are correlated with both x and y in theory it works, but often all the variables can't be identified of the ones identified, they often can't be measured, or it is difficult to be measured meaningless to say you control for variables with missing values(idk what this means) a b testing: "use a blue border, use a red border, see which gets more clicks, something like that" opportunity cost: the net benefit of the best course of action not taken everything has alternatives, and there is a best alternative. the best alternative is the opportunity cost of doing the thing a tip is to reduce opportunity cost is to frame actions as potential costs: is this the optimal thing to be doing now? sunk cost: resources spent to attain a goal that can't be retrieved a tip to reduce sunk cost is to pretend if the resource had not been expended, would you still do the thing there are examples for each tool fyi

It is or it is not, error factor what ever you make it is.

A lot of good info here, if you don't fall asleep.

Why the name is not - The Statistics of Thinking ???

there are fish that can eat birds... Goliath Grouper can swallow pelicans whole :) !!!

Intelligence has nothing to do with the school. Schools does not make people more intelliegent, it just make them to know more things. Intelligence is not equal to knowledge, actully they are completely different things.

Around the middle of this I took out my ukulele for some strumming (not a euphemism) while continuing to listen. This eased the boredom. Overall, though, I found the talk interesting.

How are revenge and forgiveness alike? They are both words? I would say they depend on another person, but you can forgive yourself. They are both predicated upon punishment, one is to punish whilst the other is to refrain from punishment.

seems like this talk should have the word "statistics/probability" or "statistical thinking" etc... in the title.

I was saying "exactly" almost the whole time. Before I was even 10 I recognized that many people couldn't do this stuff he describes here. EDIT: I think it's because most people don't want to expend the energy necessary to think for themselves or run experiments for themselves. I think it's because people expect to receive answers from someone they think knows better. I feel like people don't realize that doing this allows others to control their thoughts.

Umm...err...uh...you know...um...

Increase the speed to 1.25 to cut down the registration of the "ahh...ahhhh...uhhh ahhh.. ahhhh..." . Its a little better but still really dull to listen to.

bird & fish alike? my answer is they both have eyes

loads of fish eat birds sharks toss seagull's about playing with them and such.

Informative talk, but explanations of concepts often unclear. Instead of "true score plus error", more intuitive to say "averages vs. random variation."

Meditation is good for you but first you need something to meditate about. In hypnosis it's known that to make yourself do something that you normally don't do is easier than trying to quit smoking because your still thinking about smoking.

And what proof for school being source of IQ growth? Otherwise can be - better nutrition, better healthcare, more complicated world day-to-day.

6:22 "The more words you have the more concepts you have." No. The more concepts you have the more words you need and therefore acquire.

A...a...a...a..rgh! Fluency!

The talk was rather parochial in terms of similies and analogies applied. But good overall - Thanks.

It doesn't make sense to me that he was saying IQ in children went up due to increased education in adults. What mechanism is he proposing? Parents with greater education produce children with higher IQs?

It's difficult to believe that people have got more intelligent whilst listening to this lecture unless you correlate intelligence with being being bored out of your mind.

This talk is hard to listen to. I like how Ted talk are easy to understand and much more informative.

I've never heard "uhh" so uhh much uhhh in a uhhhh lecture.

Educational psychology has better optimized the use of the biochemical brain.

Intro was way too loud.

For the Demokrazed: When does the model (of an atom, a star, a galaxy) become the atom, the star, or the galaxy itself? When do the consensus view of the laws underlying the model become the model or the thing itself? When does the projection or regression of a model become the real thing? At best, each is a system of explaining, and at most predicting the behavior that we can explain with our current system? Contrary to what most people believe, the Ptolemaic system of astronomy can still be used. All you need to do is to add more epicenters when a discrepancy appears. What changes is the efficacy, the scope, the latent potential as it were, of the system. Just as an old system can work given the scope of our daily needs, apparently cutting edge systems can be perceived as primitive compared to reasonable thought experiments. If we wanted to travel to near solar systems, as human beings, it would take tens of thousands of years & we would have to convert our solar system to fuel, leaving us without the ship to hold the fuel. These legs are meant for walking anyone. Or, marriage goes like a horse and carriage. Or, horseless wagon. We can see so much with essentially a particle/ wave. For all practical purposes, it's a first brick. Hydrogen, so universal. Is it not reasonable to see it as subject to the simplest laws. And, perhaps, these simplest laws, vis a vis light/wave & "the universe", are what we can understand and register at this time. As it is we are approaching limits beyond which either there's no beyond which to be concerned about, or we can't even form the mathematics to create the model to test or attempt to register it's viability as a model. Scientific inquiry should be seen as a journey to uncover our scientific errors and limits & seek to expand our ability to register, to predict, to explain with most accuracy and economy.

Should have been labeled cognitive bias

Me when I’m talking to a girl:

2:12 they both have eyes? i guess XD

here we go with IQ... I'm aware of the increase in IQ but this isn't necessarily smarter...just more educated and education prone.

Aristotle is presented as the "top of reasoning"???? The man was dead wrong about almost everything.

Great Insights and information but, poor delivery.

in my opinion we shouldn't be thinking at all, thinking deteroiorates brain cells over time and eventually we'll get dementia but we only think when we are faced with a problem brought about my a loss or lack of love!!

Eh eh ah ah....

Uh

ahh...ahhhh...uhhh ahhh.. ahhhh...

The kindly makeup tinctorially peep because washer anecdotally trace since a descriptive hole. gifted, savory ping

Uhh...

After listening for an hour I didn't understand a thing : (

FFS stop with the "Uhmm"

Some people are not suited to speak in public. Uhh.

What do you mean by smart. Are you talking of our ability to cultivate memory. The innate intelligence of the human body has not changed only very negligibly. The innate intelligence is sensory, and the dialectic artificial structure you have created an identity out of, is no match for that. We have accumulated knowledge but this is a mere labeling process. It is an extension of our survival mechanism that we are using to create this tremendous structure of thought. It is only so we can exploit the Earth's natural resources. But that is not intelligence, ultimately it will destroy everything. what we call progress is progressively moving in the direction of destroying everything. Mere linguistics is no match for millions of years of evolution. We are born with a tremendous intelligence, there is nothing we can do through volition to improve that. That is what brought you here in the first place that is what keeps your body functioning. It's because we think we are more intelligent than that, we are making such a mess of things. we have exploited the Earth's natural resources, we have destroyed life and Property, created new forms of cancer and disease. And with all our intelligence why have half of the people on this planets not even got their basic needs met, when this earth can feed 3 times the population with no scientific or technological advancement. Not so smart to me, and I'm an illiterate.

Aristotle is the smartest man who ever lived? Really? We're talking about the guy who thought eels spontaneously generated from mud and who believed some people were born to be slaves. Even by Ancient Greek standards those are some pretty dumb ideas.

Poor skills as a lecturer make this one a tough to wade thru. The gentleman is getting older, so the uhhhhs, uhmmm, and lips smacking might be overlooked, but not the lack of communication skills. He talks over the head of a general audience, for example, giving a puzzle about birth rates - and then saying "everyone gets this wrong". But then NOT telling what the right or wrong answer is, but immediately jumping to a statistical theory..... as if OF COURSE we all know the correct answer. "OK, I won't talk correlation theory", and then immediately does. A very credentialed scientist, this kind of lecture just isn't in his skill set, at least not on this occasion.

This guy is a terrible speaker. Makes the content way less interesting

Uh uh umm uhh uhh uhh ...i wish he didnt use filler so much i cant concintrate

Too much time for the content.

Great info, mediocre delivery.

School does not make you smarter.

What a load of garbage. Don't get me wrong, information might be gold, but you are talking to people, right? But it seems like you are making a lecture for robots. You don't explain things, you do not prepare it for human awareness, or a story that could make this all information all the more understandable and digestive, enjoyable? How you can lecture about psychology, when you ignore peoples psychology?