Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking | Daniel Dennett | Talks at Google
Why Hacker News recommends it
Pointed to as an accessible introduction to intuition pumps as thinking tools, and shared in remembrance after Dennett's death.
What it is
Philosopher Daniel Dennett visits Google to discuss his book Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, describing thought experiments and thinking tools across psychology, biology, computer science and physics.
Recommended by 1 HN commenters across 1 different months, 2013 to 2024.
What Hacker News said
Recommends aggerdy · 2015-12 · on “Concepts for Your Cognitive Toolkit”
Found the article to be a good summary of a lot of concepts I had encountered on their own, but hadn't seen together in list form before. If you enjoyed this, you might find Daniel Dennett's "Intuition Pumps and Tools for Thinking" interesting [1]. I would highly recommend "The Philosopher's Toolkit: A Compendium of Philosophical Concepts Methods" by Julian Baggini and Peter Fosl as well [2]. - [1] Link to Talk at Google By Dennett: [this video] - [2] Link to pdf: [LINK]
Cites cbennett · 2013-05 · on “The Unexotic Underclass”
I like this idea quite a bit, although I'm not exactly sure it would be a startup in the end because the willingness (ability?) to pay amongst the target market here must be quite low, I imagine. Just free styling here, but the way to go about it would be to bundle a sort of 'package' of tools into a couple of various tiers, from easy (low input of time/funds) to challenging (more pricey/difficult). One wrinkle is that I think there is a spectrum from pretty clearly verified IQ boosters.. such as psychologically verified games like n-back, and proper nutritions (EPA+DHA, etc etc), to ones that are much more speculative or carry some baggage that 'underclass' folks (that sounds sort of bad ha
Cites kkwteh · 2019-10 · on “How can we develop transformative tools for thought?”
Daniel Dennett introduced the introducing notion of Intuition Pump, which I would say definitely qualify as transformative tools for thought. They are thought experiments designed to focus attention on important features of a question and to deflect them from getting bogged down in hard-to-follow details. Google talk by Daniel Dennett on Intuition Pumps [this video]
Cites passion__desire · 2021-12 · on “How to Think: The Skill You’ve Never Been Taught”
[LINK] You can`t do much carpentry with your bare hands and you can`t do much thinking with your bare brain. - Bo Dahlbom, quoted by Daniel Dennett in his book "Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking" [this video] (talk by Daniel on Google Campus)
Cites AlbertCory · 2024-04 · on “Daniel Dennett has died”
So sad. I was on the team that brought him to Google, and my task was to get his signature on the video release form. Here's the talk: [this video] I told him that his book Darwin's Dangerous Idea was one of the few where, when I got to the end, I immediately wanted to go back to the beginning and read it again. He said, "I'm not sure that's a good thing."