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Providing Mental Scaffolding and Tools Drastically Increases Human Cognitive Performance
Summary:
Scaffolding people's experiences with tools like mind mapping can raise their performance above their innate capacities.
Studies have shown up to a 40% increase in cognitive capacity when individuals are taught and encouraged to use tools for problem-solving and understanding. This highlights the significant role of tools in enhancing human cognitive performance, akin to how a computer is described as a 'bicycle for the mind' by Steve Jobs.
Transcript:
Speaker 1
So but Kotzky was this Russian educational theorist, right? And he and his whole notion was, if you scaffold people's experiences, so just training wheels, right, basically, you can raise the level of their capacity and their performance above And beyond their innate capacities. So mutual friend of Danglish Marktemberg, who's in Jordan Hall's, and I was Zack Stein, as a Harvard psychologist, very thoughtful guy. And he was working with an organization, his whole dissertation was on standardized testing and how whacked it is, right? And how the inequities it bakes into the system and that kind of thing. And they did studies where they would have somebody, you know, fundamentally on an intelligence or cognitive capacity assessment, right, makes sense of your life, makes sense of The world, makes sense of this word problem, whatever it would be. And then, you know, and then someone would score, you know, a 60% or a three out of five on a Leica scale, right? But then they would teach them how to mind map, right, a tool scaffolding, right? And they'd say, okay, so now everything you just said there, now hit the like draw connections, draw bubbles, draw dotted lines, like, sort and establish the relationship here about What you were thinking, and then retested them. And they would score a five out of five. So there's sort of up to this 40% swing in someone's intelligence or cognitive capacity, just based on did you give them a tool, right? It's like Steve Jobs saying, you know, that a computer is like a bicycle for the mind, right? And you're like, oh, okay. So how many bicycles for our minds, right? Can we share and create such that we can all pedal faster?
#11 - Jamie Wheal — Tackling the Meaning Crisis
Win-Win with Liv Boeree
Risk tolerance in org change: When 1 bad thing happens, don't pave over it with rules
Transcript:
Speaker 1
Two is, and Sam, like you and I have talked about this a million times, like there is such a bias around risk where it's like this thing happened once. Now we make a rule for it. Now we have to uphold that rule in perpetuity. And that is what we call work debt. We don't even know if that one thing would ever happen again. But now we have hours and time and money and cycles and cycles and cycles probably forever because let's be honest, we're never going to unwrite that rule for what might have been a one Off. And so on the one hand, I think like that person's perspective is really valid. On the other hand, I'm like, if you want to be strategic, you have to learn to look at risk a little bit differently, which is that you can never eliminate it. You are always doing stuff with the issue in the rear view.
The Future of HR — Building Your Capabilities, Pt. 1 - Getting to Level 3
At Work with The Ready
Feeling like a speck in the wind amongst massive Societal systems
Transcript:
Speaker 1
I mean we have thousands of years of human history where you know since the agricultural revolution and the dawn of city-states it's just been constant change and one could argue that On a longish you know say century timescale we haven't been at equilibrium in 10,000 years what's next right how are all these nested feedback loops churning around between you know Societal structure and environmental structure to change the shape of society in the next couple hundred years Peter Turchin probably knows this better than I do but this is where I think thinking about these things at population scales rather than individual scales is it really helps me because when I think about things at the individual level like what can I do how do I live in the society right I find myself slightly distraught about like well I don't know I'm just a speck in the wind getting blown around by this maelstrom of society by trying To sort of think about the way the whole system is of all thing I can see it's not that I'm hurtling through space it's that we're all hurtling through space together in similar ways and That creates patterns that can then be identified what do you do with those patterns well then you know you get a professorship and you get to talk about it that helps sometimes
Paul Smaldino & C. Thi Nguyen on Problems With Value Metrics & Governance at Scale
COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life
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