Thinking 101: Subtle Art of Shaping Thoughts
Much have been thought about thinking. Are you thinking about how you think?
Thoughts are foundational. All our efforts will end up amounting to nothing, if we aren’t thinking right. Even then, more often than not we end up putting very little thought about how we think.
What do we do, when we think? All our thoughts can be, more or less, categorized as imagination, deliberation, concept formation, reasoning, problem solving and judging. And, there are no waking moment when we are not indulging in one of those.
More we think, more we train our brain on how to think and as that happens, more rigid our thought process becomes. Thinking is a conscious cognitive process. Ideally our thoughts should be considered, yet we often find ourselves overwhelmingly relying on intuitions and presumptions. That happens because our brain prioritise efficiency over rationality, and it creates shortcuts based on past processes (think machine learning). Thus it becomes increasingly important that we train our brain with the right kind of models so that we think right, and when we need shortcut our intuitions don’t fail us.
First Principles Thinking
The most powerful and the simplest model that we have to set ourselves on path of thinking right is First Principles Thinking.
A first principle is the most foundational information - knowledge or assumption which stands alone, and can not be deduced from any other assumption. First Principles Thinking or Reasoning from First Principles is essentially breaking down the complex concern to its elemental form.
Aristotle defines first principles as “the first basis from which a thing is known.”
Reasoning by first principles removes any kind of corruption from the thought - assumptions, biases and conventional wisdom. Read more here.
Second Order Thinking
Second-Order Thinking or more general, Subsequent Thinking simply put, is a process in which we ask ‘then what?’.
Any solution that addresses the immediate, superficial situation is called First Order Solution. Almost everyone is good at proposing first order solutions. All that is required to do so, is to have a superficial understanding of current state and an opinion of future state. They more often than not end up proving disastrous in the long run because they do not consider further impact of action. Most successful people are great second-order thinkers. They are good at identifying the subsequent consequences at higher orders. Read More here
Thought Experiment
Thought experiment has remained by far the most favourite tool of the thinkers for millennia. Oldest of our scriptures depict gods, sages, and thinkers indulging in thought experiments to unearth the truth of being or envisage how their actions will playout. Some go to the extent of suggesting that our whole universe is a thought experiment in itself.
The basic element of a thought experiment is an imaginative premise. As humans, we are inherently curious. We like to observer, interact and understand everything we come in contact with.
Thought experiments bring together imaginative premise and logical deduction together, potentially creating possibility of a breakthrough outcome. Read more here
Inversion
Inversion, as the word indicates, is simply turning your thought process around. When faced with a situation, instead of trying to achieve a favourable outcome we consider and process unwanted outcomes.
Thought inversion is often explained using two articulation - avoidance and thinking backwards. While in various cases they might seem entirely different, one can postulate thinking backwards is a special case of avoidance for a premeditated outcome. The root of the idea can be traced back to the stoic philosophy of ‘premeditation of evil’.
It is much easier to avoid being an idiot, than becoming a genius. Read more here
Most of the time structured thinking will employee more than one of these tools simultaneously and often in conjunction with secondary tools such as probabilistic thinking, analogues thinking etc.
Irrespective of the tool that we use or don’t, it is important that we understand the process the we follow as we develop our thoughts. This is the building block of our metacognition.