undefined | Better HN

0 pointslayer83y ago0 comments

To be honest, why don’t you look up terms you’re unfamiliar with yourself first before asking such a question? It doesn’t take more than 10-20 seconds.

0 comments

avgcorrection3y ago

Yes, I was sarcastically thanking you for linking to Wikipedia, a practice that people do out of spite and condescension.

“Meta” is such a signal for armchair pseudo-technicality in the blogosphere. So no, I won’t just read Wikipedia because I don’t trust that some random, unprompted bullet list will adhere to standard references; they could just as well be referring to whatever term they invented on their blog about 200 blog entries ago.

What makes matters worse is that the apparent meaning here is “thoughts about thoughts”. Which is useless considering that thoughts often follow each other in a train of associations (train of thought). So what then distinguishes thoughts from metathoughts? They’re all associated with other thoughts.

layer8OP3y ago

You wrote “Metacognition seems like a technical term which isn’t defined”, which reads like you weren’t familiar with the term. It’s not a particularly exotic or ill-defined term.

Metacognition doesn’t just mean thoughts about thoughts, it means perception of and thinking about the process of your own thinking, about its mechanisms. It’s recognizing and reflecting about how your mind works.

It seems to me the author of the article is using “metacognition” in the normal meaning, so I’m not sure what the problem is.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse