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"I already got the prize, the prize is the pleasure of finding the thing out" source   "try to figure out what it really means, what is really saying" source  "we can reach true happiness by learning to understand" source  

The working memory does not have room for much. So let's make it short. There is mostly one thing that you should not forget: NEVER.GIVE.UP! What exactly? Hope! I can't tell you that things outside your control will get better but when you feel that you can take it anymore you need to remember that this is temporary. Once you put your mind to rest that feeling will start to diminish and vanish like any other. If you would just make the effort of diverting your thoughts away from it. The bad news is that your mind is kind of stubborn and it thinks that it already knows what to do and it doesn't need a help like this. The good news is that the more you remember the rule and you notice that it helps you recover from bad times the more this way of thinking will become natural instead of like having to make of shopping list because you don't remember what you need to buy. 

 People like for things to be simple. They try to convince themselves that things can be made simple and they will advice you not to over-complicate them. It's not their fault. Human beings evolved to be efficient, to consume as little energy possible to achieve their goals. If your image of the world is simple it will be cheap to compute what you should do next. But the world is not simple just because we want it to be. So don't be fooled that some people behave like they know enough. Most likely they are wrong. You never know enough. Learn as much as you can. But the resources are limited. Mostly try to understand what is important.  Choose which do you think that are the important areas and have a deep understanding of the mechanisms that make those subsystems turn. Don't be fooled, this is an over-simplification, mostly we know only in retrospect what was important, but can't do much about that. Luckily, each one of us doing particular choices will cover a lot of gr...

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton's_fence

" I think human consciousness was a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self-aware. Nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself. We are creatures that should not exist by natural law. We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self, this accretion of sensory experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody when, in fact, everybody's nobody." Seems to me that Bertrand Russell suggests that we should fix this accident and become nobody again: “Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river — small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged...

In this interview, along other things, Noam Chomsky explains that a teacher should not try to convince the students that he/she is right but to motivate them to think about the subject in order to find the truth themselves which sometimes is that he/she is wrong. And if a teacher or speaker has this talent of being persuasive by appealing to people's emotions they should avoid using it because it undermines their capacity for independent thinking. --- Later edit: Also, here's a quote from Dead Poets Society movie: "I always thought the idea of education was to learn to think for yourself." Here are others from the same movie.

Psychology researcher Judith Rich Harris formulated the theory that children's personalities are mostly influenced by their genes and their social group. The theory contradicts the myth that the way the parents raise their children has the most important role in the shaping of their character. According to her research the teenagers personality is formed when they are trying to fit in with the group or to compete with their peers. There is an article on edge.org about the work of Judith Rich Harris: link

In an article of Northeastern University News, Lisa Feldman Barrett, University Distinguished Professor of Psychology, is quoted saying that we are at a moment in history when it is very important to have a working knowledge of science. Luckily there a lot of scientists how are trying to communicate in simple terms that are adapted to the general public.

According to journalist David Wallace-Wells, the most important thing that we can do at this point to try to stop climate change is political action. Other measures may not be able to counteract the failure to change state policies so that they will effectively result in reducing the global warming effect. His interview in The Guardian.

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... or why we hold on to our beliefs even if we are presented with strong proofs that they are wrong. Here is the New Yorker article about this. As you may have already noticed we have a tendency to take into account the proofs that are in favor of our current beliefs but to dismiss the ones that disproves them. Another way of putting it is that we like to be right and we hate to be wrong. So we do our best to make ourselves feel good. Even if it is counter intuitive we should try to overcome this fear of being wrong and not hesitate of changing opinion if evidences point in that direction. In an interview Jeff Bezos points that doing this is a valuable trait. Or from a Richard Feynman quote : "We have found it of paramount importance that in order to progress we must recognize our ignorance and leave room for doubt."

... if you put them in practice. In the end, you cannot say that an idea is good only by reasoning about it. You may always miss something when you're simulating the future in your head. You need to actually do it to test if it works or not, usually multiple times so that you know that if you got the expected results this was not by chance. Another way of thinking about it is that let's say you are reading about some rule. You shouldn't think it is true or that it applies in any conditions because you trust who wrote it. You have to think yourself about it maybe more than you usually do by instinct when you are encounter anything new. Which basically means to think critically. So ideas are good if you put them to practice. But if you apply this pattern to the process of reasoning about the patterns themselves it just means to think critically since the patterns are about thinking about how to think.  

As in why do I write? Just because I believe that most of the time the reason we are not happy is that we get caught up in unhealthy thinking. And this unhealthy thinking happens because we focus so much on the immediate inconveniences that we forget some good thinking rules that we found in more happier times. And I feel that if I just write them down this thinking patterns may just become habits so that I remember to use them when I need them the most. So basically I write so that I don't forget what I think them to be general patterns of good thinking. Because they usually don't teach you in school (enough about) this kind of things, more precisely how to think. I guess it is implied that since you are thinking all day long then obviously you know how to do it. But actually it doesn't mean that you are doing it right! And it may not be obvious how to correct your way of thinking until you somehow find out from someone wiser. As an example when confronting with a ma...

While deep learning (or other types of machine learning) seems to be the answer to most of the hard problems in computer science like computer vision, prominent figures of the field admit that advancing in the area of general intelligence will require entirely different methods. Geoffrey Hinton says that he is "deeply suspicious" about back-propagation, the technique used to train neural networks, and that "My view is throw it all away and start again" . Yoshua Bengio, in a conference presentation called " Creating Human Level AI ", says that we are "still far away". "All industrial successes are based on pure supervised learning" "Still learning supeficial clues that do not generalize well outside of training contexts and make it easy to fool trained networks: Current models cheat by picking on surface regularities, e.g. , background greenery implies that probably an animal is present " "Still unable to do a good...

"The idea of educating people to challenge, to think for themselves, to create, to challenge ( what you are saying for example ) that's what an educational objective really should be." Here is the source .

An useful tool for thinking, if you want to find the best solution from all the points of view that matter (you're trying to fix a problem but the solution should not have negative side effects) is to consider the problem together with its context. Here is a great article about this way of seeing things: How to be a Systems Thinker

Why this question (why?)? Because I need to start somewhere and this is because there is no absolute but everything is relative or at least this is my understanding so far. So that's why I should start with "why?". So let's start. Why? (as in why I'm writing this? or why I'm writing in general? or many other why-s like why we are here?)     Because there's a lot of interesting concepts that could be useful to answer all kind of questions and so it becomes obvious why there is a need that they are easily available. So how do you make concepts easily available? Well, you need to find them, store them, organize them etc. so let's start with the beginning. Let's create articles illustrating great concepts. Hopefully at some point some kind of categories will emerge so that we could more easily find them when we need them. (An interesting category could be thinking about thinking itself.)     And because I'm interested to understand why th...

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