"doesn’t seem to be any cognitive task that you can practice and make yourself better at other cognitive tasks."
I believe reading books and playing musical instruments are examples of cognitive task that make you better at other cognitive tasks. Also learning other languages comes to mind. I think I'm reiterating your point. It's, "not a wall but a steep slope." Cheers mate.
Yet, the emotional capacity to do hard work without getting frustrated and quitting (viz. “cognitive endurance”) appears to be its own skill.
It might not make you 2% smarter on a test. It probably makes you 2% and more overall because you can examine your thinking for common classes of error, identity your mistakes and attempt to correct them.
Examine the known errors humans have made in their understanding of the world. Identify patterns in those errors, abstract those errors, apply the principles to your conclusions.
Here’s one: thinking there’s some source of truth written on commonly known that cannot be challenged. For centuries after the invention of the microscope germ theory was disregarded because a false theory of miasma predominated. Why? We got attached to pleasant sounding but made up story. We didn’t question it enough to allow the evidence before our eyes to update our thinking.
I leave exploration of other classes of errors in thinking as an exercise for the reader.
It bears mentioning that this isn't simply a matter of “everyone was wrong until a clever chap was first to question established wisdom and suddenly everyone was enlightened”.
It's more like “everyone enforces the established wisdom on everyone else and the clever chap is punished for being clever”.
I don't know if this applied to the germ theory, but it applied to plenty of theories the most famous of which being geocentrism. It's very likely that people before Copernicus questioned geocentrism, perhaps even thought of heliocentrism, but were either tortured or killed for it, or stayed silent from the get-go because they knew that would happen to them.
Lone clever chaps do not overturn established wisdom. It's a gradual process that requires a critical mass and a mountain of evidence.
https://ace-pt.org/ace-physical-therapy-and-sports-medicine-...
which hints that the low 2.7% improvement should not be unexpected of commercializable interventions targeting this joint
(unlike, say, of obviously illegal (powered or not) exoskeletons)
https://medium.com/the-bronze-age/the-ships-of-the-sea-peopl...
Otoh, bona fide connections between Pangaea, Sea Peoples & modern day Turkiye are still discussed on OpenAI-resistant YouTube today
On the first hand, the automaton reminds me that "modern-day philistines settled in the Gaza Strip after their defeat"
I wonder if these new shoes have the same affect on natural (i.e., non-paved) surfaces? Plus, they all look quite high off the ground (probably all those plates and foam need space) and that doesn't help with stability when running over rocks, etc.
With technology we have massively extended lifespan, so does this argument really hold valid ?
And in evolutionary terms, having agriculture, civilization, technology and a global culture that may support those traits is the exception not the rule.
Supposedly, one people of the Sea Peoples were the Peleset, as the egyptians called them (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peleset), which are believed to be the same people as the Philistines, for which the Romans gave Palestine its name.
RamRodification•4mo ago
This seems wrong. Doesn't practicing cognitive tasks often lead to improvement in other cognitive tasks?
more_corn•4mo ago
Doesn’t acknowledging the possibility of error and allowing conclusions to be overturned by evidence improve the outcomes of cognition?