I feel like items on your current list have of the responsibility for what I'd consider software updates in humans, and that it sorta fails to address almost all the ordinary stuff that goes on when individual humans are learning stuff (from others or independently) or when "humanity is improving its thinking". But that makes me think that maybe I'm missing what you're going for with this list?[1] Continuing with the (possibly different) question I have in mind anyway, here's a list that imo points toward a decent chunk of what is missing from your list, with a focus on the case of independent and somewhat thoughtful learning/[thinking-improving] (as opposed to the case of copying from others, and as opposed to the case of fairly non-thoughtful thinking-improving)[2]:
I will note that when I say , this is wrt a measure that cares a lot about understanding how it is that one improves at doing difficult thinking (like, math/philosophy/science/tech research), and I could maybe see your list covering if one cared relatively more about software updates affecting one's emotional/social life or whatever, but I'd need to think more about that. ↩︎
it has such a focus in large part because such a list was easy for me to provide — the list is copied from here with light edits ↩︎
two sorta-examples: humanity starting to think probabilistically, humanity starting to think in terms of infinitesimals ↩︎
I think I get most value from other people -- hearing about their perspective, getting encouragement and being kinda held responsible -- but it is difficult to meet the right kind of people.
I give those as vague examples - they might work through the pathways mentioned in the post:
Brains are like computers in that the hardware can do all kinds of stuff in principle, but each one tends to run through some particular patterns of activity repeatedly. For computers you can change this by changing programs. What are big ways brain ‘software’ changes?
Some I can think of:
I feel like people talk about many of these as important, but not in one view. I rarely hear someone say, “My brain software seems suboptimal, what are my options for changing it?”, then go down the list. Instead I suppose one hears from a friend that this book helped them, or one decides to have a therapist, and the book or therapist turns out to be one that focuses on CBT, so one does that. Or one changes social groups or responsibilities for some other reason, then remarks that this was a good or bad side-effect. Maybe that makes sense—‘stuff my brain habitually does’ is pretty broad.
I’d be interested to know which things do in practice change people’s mental patterns the most.