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Noetik — On thinking well in a noisy world

• [article] Stupid Questions — 1 Jan 2026
  Nature is just nurture over time, and nurture is far more obviously in charge; nothing changes if free will <em>isn’t</em> real; and the same is true of consciousness. They’re just complicated debates with no real outcomes.
• [article] AI Hallucination is just Man-Guessing — 1 Nov 2025
  Human reasoning isn’t flawed, it’s a social tool we use in the wrong places. It’s about sharing and evaluating intuitive claims, not generating rational ones. AI is fundamentally this but crippled: without the grounded intuitions and social friction that makes it work.
• [article] Moral Blindspots — 27 Jun 2025
  Most people think better ethical decision-making is just a matter of stopping to think before acting. But many moral judgements are intuitive, and then we rationalise them to ourselves. We have to train both intuition and reasoning, not rely on one to correct the other.
• [article] Beyond System 1 and System 2 — 13 Jun 2025
  System 1 vs System 2 is a useful shorthand, but our minds aren’t two-speed engines—they’re multi-process coalitions of specialised agents working in parallel and in series.
• [article] The Neuroscience Con — 6 Jun 2025
  The neuroscience confidence game trades content for cosmetic filler, making vacuous advice look smart.
• [article] Uncertainty vs Risk — 9 May 2025
  Our brains track two kinds of uncertainty. Expected uncertainty makes us trust our model of the world more and exploit familiar patterns (be biased). Unexpected uncertainty makes us explore and update our model (prefer noise). Correctly diagnosing the uncertainty is the key.
• [article] Preferring Coherence — 2 May 2025
  Cogntive dissonance often describes a bias towards seeing ourselves as coherent. Sure, it’s sneaky and prevalent, but entirely necessary. And, other times we tolerate how noisy we are, keeping us open to new insights and better equipped for a complex world.
• [article] Cognitive dissonance isn't discomfort — 25 Apr 2025
  Cognitive dissonance is often thought of as the <em>discomfort</em> we have with conflicting cognitions. But it’s really about how the brain will smooth over <em>dissonant</em> cognitions, whether they’re uncomfortable or not. It happens a lot.
• [article] Evolution is overrated — 18 Apr 2025
  Without time-travel, evolutionary narratives can only identify theories that <em>don’t</em> make sense (like death drives). It can’t tell you what theories <em>do</em> make sense, because you can make many to explain the same thing. All they do is let you see what people wish the world was like.
• [article] Bias vs Noise pt. I: Bias vs Bias — 21 Mar 2025
  The behavioural economists treat bias as an error. But the brain isn’t an economist. It’s more like a statistician, using bias as a trade-off. Bias ignores noise to see something more clearly, though of course, sometimes the noise shouldn’t be ignored.
• [article] Language is a barrier to communication — 28 Feb 2025
  Our brain clusters things that are similar to each other together. This includes ideas and the words we attach to them. If your words are attached to the wrong ideas, you’re going to struggle to make the connection for them.
• [article] Everyone's Suggestible — 10 Jan 2025
  Everyone is suggestible, not just children or the easily hypnotised; our memories and behaviours are heavily influenced by external suggestions, more than we like to acknowledge.
• [article] Bias is good — 15 Nov 2024
  Bias reduces noise—if you know <em>roughly</em> what to expect, then being biased by those expectations means you won’t get distracted by less relevant data points.
• [article] Confirmation bias is all there is — 18 Oct 2024
  Many cognitive biases seem like they can be boiled down to a handful of fundamental beliefs, and then belief-consistent information processing (i.e. confirmation bias).
• [article] Great Spirits of History — 6 Sep 2024
  The ‘Great Man’ theory of history has the history of ideas moved forward by individuals. But by thinking of these as ‘Great Ideas’, or better ‘spirits’ of ideas, we’re encouraged to examine their motivations, which is surprisingly effective.