[SEQ RERUN] Cached Thoughts
Today’s post, Cached Thoughts was originally published on 11 October 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
Brains are slow. They need to cache as much as they can. They store answers to questions, so that no new thought is required to answer. Answers copied from others can end up in your head without you ever examining them closely. This makes you say things that you’d never believe if you thought them through. So examine your cached thoughts! Are they true?
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we’ll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky’s old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Do We Believe Everything We’re Told?, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day’s sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.
I’ve been meaning to ask this for a while now: Is there evidence that human cognition consists mostly of cached lookups, or is this just theorizing? Google reveals that the term “cached thoughts” originated here; I’ve been perusing some of the literature on pattern recognition, but most of those studies examine how we pattern-match faces, objects and letters rather than thoughts. I’ve yet to see any study or paper that directly supports Eliezer’s claims in this post, which makes me a bit suspicious.
I’m incredibly amused that “That’s a cached thought!” is now one of my most used cached thoughts. Thankfully, it’s a lens that reflects upon itself and I’ve checked the math on my own.
Now I try my best not to take a position unless I’ve at least followed the derivation myself. This often leads me to being unable to endorse any position in domains I’m unfamiliar with, but maybe that’s for the best.
Copied here (and expanded) from where I originally posted it responding to Godot’s complaint (on RationalWiki) about “cached thoughts”
It is now apparent that they should more accurately be called “habitual thoughts”, thoughts that automatically re-occur in response to a particular stimulus. Except that “habit” is usually applied to behaviors rather than thoughts, it fits almost exactly the definition of habit, “Habits are response dispositions that are activated automatically by the context cues that co-occurred with responses during past performance.”
Quote from abstract of David T. Neal, Wendy Wood, and Jeffrey M. Quinn. [2006] Habits—A Repeat Performance. CURRENT DIRECTIONS IN PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE Volume 15, Number 4