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whateverboat

It was duuring my PhD I realised that thinking is essentially

1. remembering all the different information to remember all the tricks

2. trying all the different tricks in the problem

3. optimizing deciding which to try based on different information

4. trying random things to discover patterns (and hence new tricks)

5. explaining your tricks to others so that they can do the first 4 steps independently and come up with even better tricsk

6. refactoring tricks into common and special parts to create a well organized theory

7. documenting for future generation in a language they can understand

that's all thinking is.

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LLMs are enormously good 1. and 2. But humans are much better at the rest.

I don't want to read another LLM documentation ever again. The information to text ratio is way too small.

> That's all thinking is

That's more because a PhD (especially in this socioeconomic era where academia is also a microcosm of capitalism) does not automatically teach or focus on deep inquiry, rather narrow research programmes. Case in point, fallaciously reducing it all to a superficial theory of tricks means that by the same light, general relativity or any other major scientific result is merely just a trick. That framing ought to be absurd on the face of it but the fact is many PhD students do still graduate with very unexamined understanding of science, cognition, philosophy, etc. (Another way to see this is to note how such an argument is letting the notion of "trick"/"heuristic" do all the heavy lifting--something an advanced education should have nurtured the critical thinking skills to avoid that very metacognitive pitfall in the first place, which is ironic.) (Yet another way is to see how increasingly experts of one field or another insist that one must stay on their lane when speaking about a complex topic.) There are professors and thinkers who have written/spoken about this but they are a minority. Even Einstein himself when he complained that more and more scientists were trained/structured to miss the forest for the trees, and that was almost 100 years ago.

> „[…] but the fact is many PhD students do still graduate with very unexamined understanding of science, cognition, philosophy, etc.”

Is there some generally accepted definition what it should take to graduate with a PhD?

I did kind of go overboard with the "trick" thing, but I think the point still stands. Could you come up with an instance of thinking that is not falling in the steps I've written down?

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