To me, the first thing to notice about human thinking — via scrutinizing the rare examples of “first class thinking” we can identify — is that we humans are pretty much not genetically equipped for thinking at all!

We are most well set up for learning how to fit into our cultures, and make our way in them, mostly socially. We are a little bit clever, and like other primates are able to cheat in numerous ways, but we very often aren’t smart enough to also take into our minds the consequences of cheating.

We have “lots of ‘coping genes’ but essentially no ‘progress genes’ ” — in fact, it appears that even the idea of progress had to be invented (mostly in the 18th century). The philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead remarked that “The great invention of the 19th century was Invention itself” (suddenly everyone was inventing!)

Most of the processes we associate with “good thinking” seem to be inventions, the good ones very rare and initially far apart. Despite the power of these, our thinking was so dim that it took quite a while to realize that one of the things we should be doing is to purposely invent better ways to think, and then figure out how to teach them to children to create much more able adults than we are. (We still do not see much call for this in most public media.)

Einstein came up with a great comment: “We cannot solve our problems with the same levels of thinking that we used to create them”.

This links up starkly with the Dunning-Kruger Effect: that many people are not able to think well enough to see that they are not thinking well enough. There is a very real sense in which all of us have this problem.

A parallel allied concept is sanity, which is usually assessed in a relative normalized manner i.e. “what the majority of people in a culture do, and especially if in accord with the culture’s norms, is considered sane, and that outside these norms is considered not-sane.” But if we look at sanity as “the goodness of the mapping between what’s in a mind and what is actually in the environment in which the mind exists”, then we can see that all human beings have “delusional disorders”, and many of the most dangerous ones are held by much more than a majority of humans! This includes the Dunning-Kruger delusion that they are “generally thinking well”.

Another part of considering what good thinking might be about is to notice that ignorance very often resembles stupidity. Imagine being born with twice Leonardo’s IQ but in 10,000 BCE!

And Leonardo, supersmart as he was, was not smart enough to invent any useful engines for any of his fantasy vehicles. He was in the wrong century — there was not enough knowledge for him to use and reshape with his intellect.

Similarly, it took geniuses to invent calculus but many much less smart people can learn it and become more powerful thinkers about many kinds of change than the geniuses of antiquity.

We can then reflect what someone nowhere near Leonardo or Newton — Henry Ford — was able to do. Why? Because of the vast change in context — how to look at and think about the world around us — for which Newton was the main catalyst and cause.

I think of this as “Knowledge is Silver, Context is Gold, IQ is often a Lead Weight!”

Or: “Context is worth 80 IQ Points!”

This is especially true if the Knowledge is (a) drawn from the strongest Contexts, (b) some of the Knowledge is the knowledge of Contexts (or Points of View, or Perspectives, etc.), and (c) some of the knowledge is what has been learned about how to think much better than our genetic minds can by themselves.

Almost 400 years ago Francis Bacon wrote about the “four Idols” that humans worship which confuse our attempts to think. In modern vernacular, we have “bad brains/minds” from our genetics, our cultures, our languages, and our academics. He called for a “new science” to be invented that would mitigate these as much as possible (much of what he called “new science” is what we call “Science”). One part of this is the idea that we can find and invent “methods and tools” which when carefully learned and used can help us think much better than our traditional processes did.

A classic study of human thinking problems — both in general and associated with language use — is “Science and Sanity” by Alfred Korzybski.

The field of Cognitive Psychology — of George Miller, Jerome Bruner, etc. — started to measure many limits to human thinking, for example that we can only deal with a very small number of things at once, and for something new we are almost blind, deaf, and dumb because we don’t yet have mental organizers for what we have to deal with. (This is called “Cognitive Load”.)

A more modern identification of human mental “noises, glitches, and barriers” is part of the work of Kahneman and Tversky — see Kahneman’s book “Thinking: Fast and Slow” — which includes how humans form valuations — the field of “Behavioral Economics” — and also unearthing the many “Cognitive Biases” we routinely exhibit. The Wikipedia article lists more than 100 that have been found so far — but readers will find it easy to identify and add more. For example, not included in the K&T list are (a) we confuse both our perceptions with “reality” and “normal” with “reality”, and (b) we often will generalize a good enough idea and then make dogma (and even religions) from it.

So we can certainly make a start on learning how to think better by (a) identifying existing barriers of all kinds, and then to find and invent heuristic workarounds that will help eliminate noise and increase clarity, and (b) from the other direction, to identify the strongest known ways to think clearly — for example, the methods and tools of science — and learn them so fluently that they will be at least as automatic as our less able genetic reactions.

Just a note here on this kind of learning. If you remember the stages you went through to learn to drive a car, the most striking were (a) the beginning stages that involved over-controlling, tunnel vision, not being able to hear the person trying to help, not being able to see stop signs and children, not knowing what gear one is in, etc. and (b) a few months later being able to steer the car, listen and talk to the other person, automatically be aware of stop signs and road conditions, etc. (This is a general learning progression for most things.)

What is happening during the learning is that a lot of the initial effort had to be done with your cognitively smart, but slow part of your brain, and this is easily overloaded. The learning starts to build little specialists — I call them “brainlets” — that offload much of the work to faster, less smart, but more routinized parts of the brain. This leads to both skills, and a certain resistance to learning different ways to do things.

Quite a bit of learning to think better is accomplished by doing the various processes that will build “brainlets” for helping to think. Some of them will damp down many of our genetic responses, and some of them will provide a variety of points of view, analogies, etc., and a whole host of heuristics to help.

Seymour Papert used to say “You can’t think about thinking without thinking about thinking about something”. In other words, it will really help to have important issues and ideas, and things to learn about that require much better thinking. Then, the many things that are known about thinking, how poorly we are generally at it, and what we’ve learned about doing it better, can be brought to bear.