Which things influence or determine the "quality" of a thought?

[Carl-Richard]

We know people with high IQs (Mike Israetel *erm*) tend to be very quantitatively impressive, in that they can produce many thoughts very fast and hold many of them in their head at one time, and of course they become better problem-solvers as a result.

However, as Mike also has demonstrated (sorry if you're not keeping up), having a quantitatively impressive mind does not necessarily make you immune from having not so smart thoughts. Because you can have many thoughts and handle them well, but what if your thoughts are shit? Which things influence or determine the quality of a single thought? What if you can have a relatively low IQ but consistently have very great thoughts pop into your mind at the right place and the right time, with immense precision, like bullets?

So yeah, which things influence or determine the quality of a thought? Which things cause you to have high or low quality thoughts? Which things predict or lead to an increase or decrease in the quality of thoughts? I'll add my own thoughts later (let's see how precise they are ;P) but I'm curious what you think.

Edited Saturday at 09:29 AM by Carl-Richard

[Xonas Pitfall]

It's either the practical value of it or genuine care for truth, depending on the situation at hand. Knowing when to balance these two is wisdom.

To give an example:

You might know, truthfully, that you're not the most charming person in the room. But you can have an "untruthful" thought that's pragmatically useful, like telling yourself, "I AM THE MOST CHARMING PERSON HERE!" Even if it's not true, it's useful to think this way because, in this moment, you want to be magnetic. So, this is the most practical thought to have.

However, sometimes it’s important to recognize delusions, and that's when you need to confront them with the truth. For instance: "Oh, but... I researched the impressive quantitative metrics for my triptonized new GLP-96 medication. I'm so smart, PhD!" In this case, you need more truth, more care for the truth, and more value for the truth to break through your biases and genuinely see the situation clearly.

Another way to put it: the quality of your thoughts is directly proportional to the clarity of the observed situation, or your consciousness, or wisdom, or awareness of the present moment and its context.

A scientist who only considers one variable has a lower quality of thought than one who considers two, three, or more. But these are still less effective than a scientist who considers all variables, INCLUDING themselves as a variable (the observer/self), etc.

That’s one way to look at consciousness: your ability to hold as many variables and pieces of information as possible, to synthesize, unify, and see the patterns and harmony in all of it, and then know how to act properly based on them in any given situation.

I suppose the shortest answer to your question is consciousness. Consciousness determines the quality of your thoughts.

In the first example, the person was conscious enough to realize they wanted to be magnetic, conscious enough to recognize they weren’t as magnetic as they wanted to be, and conscious enough to know that having more positive thoughts, even if deluded, would give them a better chance. They’d become even more conscious as they gained more information and understanding, observing each reaction and finding the right trigger points to immerse their friends and audience. So, their consciousness and understanding of what it means to be "magnetic" expand.

[zurew]

I would use Vervaeke's framework - where you can seperate finding the right frame (formulating the problem and knowing where to search for the solution) and the ability to search through all possible solutions within a frame (this would be what you said Mike is good at).

If your framing of a problem is wrong and you dont search for the solution within the right frame,then it doesnt matter whether you can iterate through and think through all possible solutions within that wrong frame 100x faster than the person who has the right frame.

It would be like the 9 dot problem and Mike doing math calculations and or brute forcing the problem without even considering going outside the 9 dot border (because his brain would frame the problem and would assume that you cant do such a thing ,even though the problem doesnt prevent you from doing so and in fact thats what allows you to "solve" the issue)

[Carl-Richard]

@zurew

I guess that gives a particular case of quality vs quantity. But what determines finding the right frame? Maybe my wording was not precise enough: what things cause you to find the right frame or cause you to have high quality thoughts?

Edited Saturday at 09:30 AM by Carl-Richard

[Ramanujan]

@Carl-Richard oooo carl

Thats a good one

 

INFP power

Edited Saturday at 10:24 AM by Ramanujan

[zurew]

3 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

I guess that gives a particular case of quality vs quantity. But what determines finding the right frame?

Very hard question that no one has a good comprehensive answer for , because it relates to the deepest issues with categorization especially given that its underspecified what kind of problem we would want to find the right frame for and its also unclear whether there is only one or multiple right frames or whether there is a possible solution at all.

The short uninformative answer to your question is that its based on how many psychotechnolgies you know and what ecology of practices you engage in and what kind of meta heruisitics you use and basically and obviously how much domain specific knowledge and skills you have (where the domain is specified by the kind of problem you need to find a solution for). So for instance, if you are a math guy, you generally have a better eye to recognize what kind of problems are math problems and what kind of problems can be solved with math, because your math specific knowledge and skills are developed and you have seen a bunch of math problems already (thats not to say that you cant be mistaken and biased, where you frame certain problems as math problems, just becuase you are good at it).

 

Btw your question can be rephrased this way - How do I know what kind of problem I am dealing with or "how do I form well formed problems from ill-defined ones"? If we have an answer to this, we have an answer to the frame problem. Hint: I dont have an answer 

 

 

Now, buckle up for the ramble. This gets more deep into relevance realization [RR] (because that is what has to do with even the most basic categorization - even the fact what constitutes a frame, how many frames you can choose from and how many of them you are aware of any given moment happens long after RR)  which unfortunately I still dont understand well in depth. Like even the categorization of a problem is depended on RR and without categorizing the problem in the right buckets, you cant construct any frame for it and therefore you won't know where you should search for the solution.

 

Here comes the classic Vervaeke talk - one meta problem that you need to solve each time you try to solve any given problem is that you are faced with combinatorially explosive info (this is one reason why it cant be algorithmized, because basically infinite info is avalaible at any given moment  and there are even more possible combinations between them and you cant check all of them).

RR "solves" this problem by slicing up reality and only checking for the info and for the solution in certain places (these would be the unconsciously used meta heruistics, that are connected to survival and to your deepest beliefs and goals) meanwhile ignoring all other places and info. From this follows the  connection to bias and self deception ( which under RR  just means that the heruistic or set of heruistics that you tried to use to solve the given issue made you stuck in one frame and you dont realize that there are alternative explanations and frames, because you are literally unaware of them). This is why Vervaeke likes to emphasize that "the things that makes you more adapative , they are the same things that make you prone to self deception". Ignoring info and constructing and destroying frames is what makes you an adaptive problem solver (which unsurprisingly relates very tightly to spiritual practices and psychedelics btw)

and yes, this just pushes the question down one more step and we can ask "but what determines what meta heruistics one has?" - and we could also ask what kind of normativity could we tie to RR and what it means to be good in RR? One Vervaekeian answer to this is to learn more psychotechnologies and  to engage/participate in an ecology of practices (which are responsible for the frame breaking and frame construction). 

 

Edited Saturday at 12:12 PM by zurew

[zurew]

I might have missed your point and I might have not talked about the same thing you wanted to talk about, but to me the answer lies in this: When there is a problem, like you need to not lose against the best AI in chess, then Mike is the kind of dude who would try to train for thousands of hours and try to invite all the best chest players to help him win against the AI and there is Gandalf the wise one who would just destroy the fucking chess table and satisfy the 'AI not being able to win' condition.

Whatever set of heruistics and approaches explains gandalf's solution is the general approach that probably should be applied to other problems as well.

Edited Saturday at 12:58 PM by zurew

[UnbornTao]

I suspect one of the first questions to ask is: What is the thought directed at? What's the relationship that calls for the existence of the thought? Because, in isolation, it's hard to tell its quality.

Edited 17 hours ago by UnbornTao

[Salvijus]

Maybe the thoughts that give you joy, peace, love are good quality thoughts. Thoughts that come as an expression of Spirit untouched by the fingers of ego.