We encounter ideas and information constantly in our lives. They are processed according to how each of us think, through our mental models and frameworks, then either incorporated into our thinking, or discarded. In the post-Kahneman world that we live in today, people are generally aware of the concept of cognitive biases - the systematic deviation from rational thinking. Despite this objective level awareness however, it’s still very hard for us to realize our own biases in the subjective decision making processes of day-to-day activities. In fact, it’s been said that smarter people may be more prone to falling into the trap of biased thinking, because they are more adept at rationalizing how their own logic is unbiased, which is obviously never true. A decision journal can be used to help with this, but it is often framed in a somewhat one-sided manner. I think an area that is usually overlooked is in the ideas that we discard. Naturally, the thoughts that we reject don’t get much attention, but there are certain unique insights that can be found in them.

The trash pile of discarded ideas is the conceptual opposite of the list of interesting ideas that we may jot down in our notebooks. Just as a periodic review of our recorded ideas can help us sort out our thinking better, there is a completely different set of information in the ideas that we dismiss, if only we kept track of them. Patterns may emerge here that can lead to the discovery of biases that are otherwise invisible to us, which in turn could lead to radical improvements to the way we think.

This happens a lot in academic fields, when revolutionary developments are analyzed in hindsight. For example, the mathematics and scientific community routinely rejected the idea that deterministic processes could yield seemingly random outcomes, and dismissed observations of such phenomena as noise or experimental errors. Until Edward Lorenz discovered chaotic systems and their counterintuitive properties, which eventually formed an entirely new field of research. Perhaps if someone reflected on the discarded ideas of mathematics and noticed the patterns, chaos could have been discovered earlier.

It is difficult to do this for entire subjects of study, but it’s easier to do so at the individual level. I do not yet have any concrete personal examples to demonstrate some real value from evaluating my own discarded ideas, because I have not been keeping track of them. With this realization, I’ve begun to do so recently, in a special section of my notes called “Discarded Ideas”. The tricky part is the evaluation of what constitutes noteworthy in all the ideas that I reject or dismiss. After all there probably isn’t much insight to be found in a rejected pile filled with “flat Earth” style ideas. I think the payoff, if any, will take a long time to materialize, but could be very significant.