Sequence thinking vs. cluster thinking
The GiveWell Blog, June 10, 2014
Abstract
Note: this is an unusually long and abstract post whose primary purpose is to help a particular subset of our audience understand our style of.
Quotes from this work
[P]eople who rely heavily on sequence thinking often seem to have inferior understanding of subjects they aren’t familiar with, and to ask naive questions, but as their familiarity increases they eventually reach greater depth of understanding; by contrast, cluster-thinking-reliant people often have reasonable beliefs even when knowing little about a topic, but don’t improve nearly as much with more study.