Oli's Share: How to think like a strategic genius (5d thinking)

Thanks Oli for sharing this.
It provides an interesting way of characterizing the challenges of aligning one's mental model of the world with the external constraints imposed by reality. I liked that it includes the oft-neglected effect of technology on social systems and patterns of thought.

But to my mind the 5-D structure is much more complex than it needs to be (obscuring valuable insight) and it wrongly deniggerates the value of level 1 and 2 (tier 1) thinking.

Abstract cognitive "rational" thinking is costly - both in metabolic terms and in lost opportunity due to delayed action. Intuitions aligned with reality are "cheaper", faster, and generate comparable outcomes the "tier 2" thinking.

Successfully acting in the world depends on knowing when your intuition is likely to be accurate (and thus can be relied upon) and when it is likely to be fatally flawed (and thus needs to be ignored, your premises questioned, and additional thought needed).

I think that Daniel Kahneman's simpler "System 1 / System 2" structure (comparable to Tier 1 and 2 here) provides better more useful insight. His book, "Thinking, Fast and Slow" (readable, long, and full of challenging ideas), focuses less on the nature of these two modes of acting in the world than on how to determine when System 1 / Tier 1 / Fast / Intuitive thinking is not to be trusted.

His list of flawed cognitive shortcuts (biases/heuristics) is extensive, familiar, and frankly quite disheartening. And extraordinarily on-point and valuable.

To function we must be in Tier 1 amost all of the time. Kahneman provides insight, and some guidance, about under which circumstances one needs to slow down, incur the cost of increased energy and time imposed by interrogating your intuitions, and gather more information.

His structure is simpler than the 5-D structure here, but his details based on decades of research and observation provide a level of guidance that I found extremely useful.

Though the writing is clear, it is a long book, and I found yhat every few pages I had to shut it, close my eyes, and consider how often I had inappropriately relied on the cognitive short-cut I had just read about.

It is one of a handful of books that has changed how I approach the world and one book that I think everyone should read.

I think this was a fascinating read, and I always appreciate insight into new ways of thinking and of breaking down thinking.

I especially liked the insights into what "stupid thinking" is as those are pretty decent rules for trying to gain new perspectives through methods such as asking questions and avoiding the tribal mentality when possible.

However, it was hard to avoid that fact that the author of this piece was falling into the mindsets that he initially notes to avoid and that made me question a lot of the advice in the article. For example, "stupid thinking point 2" notes that stupid thinking is reductionistic, and this whole article is an attempt to put something as complex as the human thought process on to a graph. Alongside that it is angled from a business perspective, constantly framing it through the lense of an entrepreneur.

The author also writes with a tone that seems to look down on people with "lower tiers of thinking", or at least viewing "higher tiers of thinking" as above these tiers. There is danger in close-mindedness, but there is also danger in mentally placing yourself as above the general population. Statements such as "Most people, in today's world, have never thought for themselves a single day in their life." are strange to me because I've never had a long conversation with someone and thought to myself that they weren't thinking complex thoughts, even if I didn't agree.

All in all I really enjoyed reading this article and the thought that it provoked, and despite my concerns about these few details I am going to spend a decent amount more time processes the idea of open thinking on different planes. As the article states "good thinking is the ability to continue thinking" and this has inspired me to do just that and roll it around in my brain a bit more.