All posts tagged: Thinking

Meta’s loss is Thinking Machines gain

Meta’s loss is Thinking Machines gain

Published by Miika Tikkanen

Weiyao Wang spent eight years at Meta — his first job out of college — helping build multimodal perception systems and contributing to open-world segmentation projects, including SAM3D. His final day at Meta was last week, and he has since joined Thinking Machines Lab. His move to Thinking Machines Lab (TML) comes as the AI startup expands on multiple fronts. TML just signed a multibillion-dollar cloud deal with Google, giving it access to Nvidia’s latest GB300 chips and making it one of the first startups to run on the hardware. The agreement, announced this past Tuesday at Google Cloud Next, follows an earlier partnership with Nvidia, and puts TML in the same infrastructure tier as Anthropic and Meta. (Meta reportedly held talks to acquire Thinking Machines around this time last year and has more recently been picking off TML’s founders one by one.) The talent picture remains fluid. Wang and Kenneth Li — a Harvard PhD who spent 10 months at Meta before joining TML this month — are the latest examples of a talent …

How to Break a Loop of Stuck Thinking

How to Break a Loop of Stuck Thinking

Published by Jenni Sidey

Let me tell you a funny story: A few days ago, my 3-year-old told me she had a sore armpit. I asked her some questions, concerned. I assumed she’d strained her lats hanging from the jungle gym, or something similar. Then, she showed me her “armpit.” She was showing the inside of her elbow, where she gets eczema that flares up periodically. Poor baby had a red patch that needed ointment. But what was amusing was when I said to her, “Oh, it’s your elbow,” she kept insisting it was not her elbow that was sore. It was her armpit. She adamantly told me the pointy part was an elbow, and the part she was referring to was most definitely her armpit. Her explanation was smart; it just didn’t match my terminology. Why am I telling this story? Because it illustrates one of the fundamental root causes of stuck thinking: We try to solve a problem based on an assumption of a reliable narrator. Medical doctors, mechanics, and tech troubleshooters all face these types of …

All Thinking Is Biased Thinking

All Thinking Is Biased Thinking

Published by Jenni Sidey

Have you ever been told you should change your attitude or that your thinking is biased in some way? Did you ever think something would turn out one way, but the result was the opposite? Perhaps your first meeting with a colleague was great, but they turned out not to be the person you thought. Many times a day, we make judgments and decisions. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky were trailblazers in this area of research. They gave people tasks and asked them to make decisions and judgments (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974). For example, they gave people descriptions of someone. Then the people had to choose that someone’s most likely job from a list such as pilot, farmer, or doctor. Or, based on a person’s attractiveness, they were asked how skilled the person might be. Kahneman’s book Thinking Fast and Slow (2011) is a delightful roam about this area. Biases and Heuristics From this work, patterns in our thinking called biases and heuristics were identified. For example, you can read about the confirmation bias and …

Will AI End Deep Thinking?

Will AI End Deep Thinking?

Published by Jenni Sidey

Many analysts have been saying for years that generative AI usage can prevent young people from developing critical thinking skills. Recently, however, attention has turned to older workers. One study surveyed 200 various owners, founders, CEOs, and other titans of industry and found that 62% of the respondents are using AI to make “most decisions.” Furthermore, “140 of the titans reported second-guessing their own ideas when they conflicted with AI’s recommendations, while 46% said they now rely on advice from AI more than that of their own business colleagues.” Those are big numbers and reports of AI’s success are still few. More importantly, “a joint study conducted by Carnegie Mellon and Microsoft found that knowledge workers who trusted the accuracy of generative AI systems had a lower propensity for critical thought.” That is scary. But not surprising because “when humans are confident that a task has been competently automated, we tend to take a backseat and let the system do its thing — sometimes literally, as in the case of self-driving cars.” A second study …

Actively open-minded thinking protects against political extremism better than liberal ideology

Actively open-minded thinking protects against political extremism better than liberal ideology

Published by José Betancourt

A recent study published in the journal Thinking & Reasoning has found that a specific type of open-mindedness is a better predictor of healthy reasoning than simply identifying as a political liberal. The research suggests that while open-minded thinking and liberal ideology often overlap, they are fundamentally different psychological traits. The findings help clarify how people process information and resist political extremism, regardless of their political party. Actively open-minded thinking is a cognitive style where a person intentionally seeks out information that contradicts their own beliefs. People who score high in this trait tend to tolerate ambiguity, avoid jumping to conclusions, and willingly revise their opinions when presented with new evidence. It involves temporarily stepping back from your own assumptions to objectively evaluate a complex situation. “This study was conceived after finishing my book on myside bias, The Bias that Divides Us. Writing that book was a reminder about how politicized many areas of psychology had become,” said study author Keith E. Stanovich, emeritus professor of applied psychology and human development at the University of …

What Is the ‘Critical’ in Critical Thinking?

What Is the ‘Critical’ in Critical Thinking?

Published by Jenni Sidey

I’ve been researching critical thinking (CT) for almost 20 years now, and, because of that, much about it I take for granted. I’ve defined it, exemplified it, shortened its description, and analogised it for so many people so many times, of course, it would be easy for me to assume that most people would know what I’m on about. Luckily, I don’t fall prey to this kind of “curse of knowledge,” as I’m also quite familiar with the great trouble researchers and educators alike have had for many years in defining CT. Only relatively recently is research acknowledging a fairly consistent conceptualisation among CT researchers, but that’s not necessarily the case for educators (which happens to remain a large barrier to efforts to enhance CT in younger populations). Misinterpretation of Critical Thinking With that, I was surprised recently by the occurrence of the same misinterpretation twice in the space of as many weeks, not only because it represents such a basic feature of CT but also because such an issue had not occurred to me …

What Was Grammarly Thinking?

What Was Grammarly Thinking?

Published by Daniella Wilson

To me, the best first sentence of any piece of journalism is the one in Joan Didion’s 1987 book, Miami, which begins like this: “Havana vanities come to dust in Miami.” I love that sentence and that propulsive first chapter so much that I once sat down to try to figure out how she did it. I looked at the sentences one at a time to assess what purpose each one was serving, and I counted how many of them Didion had needed to accomplish each thing she wanted to accomplish. Then I thought about how she figured out what order to put them in to have maximum page-turning impact. And then I compared all of it unfavorably with the flailing and feeble way in which I would have pursued the same goals. I marked up my copy of the book in a somewhat desperate fashion and then became depressed. That type of copying is pretty normal, and they teach it in school. It’s how you learn (and how you become depressed). But in the …

The psychological drive for structure predicts conspiracy thinking

The psychological drive for structure predicts conspiracy thinking

Published by José Betancourt

People who have a strong psychological need to find patterns and strict rules in their everyday lives are more likely to believe in conspiracy theories. A recent study published in the journal Cognitive Processing revealed that this preference for rigid structure can lead people to accept conspiratorial ideas, even when they possess strong scientific reasoning skills. These results suggest that fact-checking alone might not be enough to change minds, as conspiracy theories offer a comforting sense of order to those who seek it. Conspiracy theories often present straightforward explanations for chaotic global events. They tend to blame corruption or malicious intent for complex world problems. This offers a single narrative that can make the world feel easier to comprehend. Past research has usually suggested that people fall for these theories because they lack analytical thinking skills. Psychologists have often assumed that individuals with lower levels of education or poorer critical reasoning abilities simply fail to evaluate the information they read. But recent investigations revealed a paradox regarding people with elevated autistic traits. These individuals generally …

Is Optimism Overrated? Rethinking Positive Thinking

Is Optimism Overrated? Rethinking Positive Thinking

Published by Jenni Sidey

“I’m grateful. I’m happy. I’m proud of myself. I practice mindfulness. I’m optimistic.” Do these mean the same thing? People often use them interchangeably, but definitions have consequences. When we blur them, we miss what’s unique about gratitude—and we miss its power. Optimism may be slightly overrated, while gratitude deserves more airtime. In a recent paper, Nayoung Cho and I review various definitions of gratitude and argue that the 5As best capture it: Appreciation Attribution to External Sources Agentic Benefactors Affectionate Reaction Action Generalized Gratitude Gratitude involves appreciating the benefits in your life. Appreciation isn’t just noticing that something good happened (“yes, this steak is delicious”). It includes a positive emotional connection to the benefit. Too often, we let goodness slip by like a shadow in the background. If you practice appreciation, you savor the good—delight in it, dwell on it, celebrate it. Gratitude also involves attributing your benefits to external sources—people, nature, luck, circumstances, God, or a higher power. I call this the principle of gifts: you’re not the sole author of goodness in …

AI boosts worker creativity only if they use specific thinking strategies

AI boosts worker creativity only if they use specific thinking strategies

Published by José Betancourt

A new study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology suggests that generative artificial intelligence can boost creativity among employees in professional settings. But the research indicates that these tools increase innovative output only when workers use specific mental strategies to manage their own thought processes. Generative artificial intelligence is a type of technology that can produce new content such as text, images, or computer code. Large language models like ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini use massive datasets to predict and generate human-like responses to various prompts. Organizations often implement these tools with the expectation that they will help employees come up with novel and useful ideas. Many leaders believe that providing access to advanced technology will automatically lead to a more innovative workforce. However, recent surveys indicate that only a small portion of workers feel that these tools actually improve their creative work. The researchers conducted the new study to see if the technology truly helps and to identify which specific factors make it effective. They also wanted to see how these tools function in …