Most of what feels like thinking is retrieval of a conclusion reached earlier or by somebody else, and it arrives with the same sensation as reasoning.
The point is phenomenological: a retrieved conclusion and a derived one feel identical from the inside, so there is no internal signal warning that a thought was taken off the shelf. Yudkowsky's remedy is to notice when an opinion arrives too fast for the question's difficulty, which is the only available tell.
In practice
- A view held confidently and never examined was acquired at nineteen from someone whose name has gone.
- A team's instant agreement on an unfamiliar question is evidence that the question was not unfamiliar to the cache.
- Standing
- Consistent with research on fluency and on the illusion of explanatory depth; the specific cache metaphor is the coinage.
- Subject
- Decision-making & Reasoning
- Essay
- Why reasoning works the way it does