This post opens with the claim that most human thinking amounts to babble-and-prune. My reaction was (1) that’s basically right, (2) babble-and-prune is a pretty lame algorithm, (3) it is possible for humans to do better, even though we usually don’t. More than anything else, “Babble” convinced me to pay attention to my own reasoning algorithms and strive to do better. I wrote a couple posts which are basically “how to think better than babble”—Mazes and Crayon and Slackness and Constraints Exercises—and will probably write more on the topic in the future.
“Babble” is the baseline for all that. It’s a key background concept; the reason the techniques in “Mazes and Crayon” or “Slackness and Constraints” are important is because without them, we have to fall back on babble-and-prune. That’s the mark to beat.
This post opens with the claim that most human thinking amounts to babble-and-prune. My reaction was (1) that’s basically right, (2) babble-and-prune is a pretty lame algorithm, (3) it is possible for humans to do better, even though we usually don’t. More than anything else, “Babble” convinced me to pay attention to my own reasoning algorithms and strive to do better. I wrote a couple posts which are basically “how to think better than babble”—Mazes and Crayon and Slackness and Constraints Exercises—and will probably write more on the topic in the future.
“Babble” is the baseline for all that. It’s a key background concept; the reason the techniques in “Mazes and Crayon” or “Slackness and Constraints” are important is because without them, we have to fall back on babble-and-prune. That’s the mark to beat.