Lecture (presentation) notes

Introduction
Critical thinking is that mode of thinking about any subject content or problem in which the thinker
improves the quality of his or her thinking by skillfully analyzing assessing and reconstructing it
Critical thinking is self directed self disciplined self monitored and self corrective thinking It
presupposes assent to rigorous standards of excellence and mindful command of their use It entails
effective communication and problem solving abilities as well as a commitment to overcome our
native egocentrism and sociocentrism.

Some other reasons why you should master your critical thinking

Topics/Occasions in which many people clearly did not think critically

a)Brexit

b)Elections

c)Global Warming

d)Covid 19 crisis

According to the Future of Jobs report 2020 published by the World Economic Forum, Critical
Thinking is likely to be one of the top 10 trending skills in 2025
There are many influential Personas in the history of Critical Thinking

O One of the most important ones is Socrates often called the father of Critical Thinking

O Among the first ones to question the rules established by the religion and the church

O Challenged the way people think by asking question

“The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing”

O Was sent to exile and consequently sentenced to death for his opinions and behaviors

O Luckily, his ideas were further enhanced by Plato

 Deep dive into critical thinking
Daniel Kahneman System 1 & 2

Daniel Kahneman is an Israeli American psychologist and economist notable for his work on the
psychology of judgment and decision making as well as behavioral economics for which he was
awarded the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.

System 1 - Thinking Fast.

Evolutionary trait developed to preserve survival of species

• Instinct allowing us to run before our brain detects a danger

• System 1 seeks to produce a coherent and believable story based on available information

• Works automatically and quickly with little effort or conscious control

System 2 Thinking Slow

Effortful, slow and controlled way of thinking

• Requires energy and can’t work without attention, but once engaged, it has the ability to filter thei
nstincts of System 1

• Allocates attention to conscious mental activities that need s it, including complicated calculations

• The function of System 2 is often linked to the subjective experience.

Cognitive Biases

Anchoring

A cognitive bias that makes us attach to the first information available to us and affect our decision
making

Once the anchor set is established, all further decisions, guesses negotiations are based on it

Examples

First selling price offered by the selling party during any negotiations

Announcing bad good news

Availability Heuristics

A cognitive bias causing the information and events that are in our recent memory to be perceived
as more important than the other ones

Examples

Crashing plane and subsequent fear of flying

Confirmation Bias

A Tendency to look up, prefer, and easily recall information and proofs that are in accordance with
our current beliefs opinions

Examples

Internet Search using keywords that affirm our beliefs

Sunk cost fallacy

A tendency to invest money time energy in projects that are not likely to be profitable in the future,
only because of past investments

Examples

Cinema Tickets for a bad movie

Continually investing in our own business which is not and most probably will not even be profitable.

Hindsight bias

A feeling that events that took place in the past were clearly predictable

Examples

Election results

Assessing medical malpractice

Loss aversion

A disproportionately high aversion to loss versus the joy of gaining the same value

In other words we will regret losing a subject more than we would be pleased to receive it

Examples

A coin toss for a hundred dollars

Unpaid trial period (streaming services)

Not Invented Here Bias

A preference for our own ideas procedures to the ones of others

Examples

Group work our solution to the task

Planning Fallacy
A belief that the task project activity will take us less time than it eventually will

Examples

Practically anything which requires planning studying for an exam, working on a project, cleaning
your room

Always ask yourself Is this plan realistic?

Status Quo Bias

A preference for the things to stay the way they are

A cognitive distortion very often hindering innovation and development

Examples

Established procedures in a company

FAKE NEWS

Headline : Quality of the headline is not assessed on how it represents the article but on the reach it
can get

Body : Informative yet simplified Goal is to keep the reader reading

Sources: What is the origin of the information. The most important part when we want to assess the

Article.

SOURCES

Author or Media background : You can chec k the authors bio to know his reputation.

Date of publication : Checking if the information is not outdated

Credibility: Is the source academical ? Is the sourced cited in more media?

Methods used : The methods used are more improtant than the results of researches.
Subjectivity

Owners : Employees naturally won’t go against the owners of the media. Interventions are not
needed.

Editors : It s normal to have an opinion. Editors are responsible for the opinion of the whole media

Goal: We are goal oriented. The goal of media is to make money. The goal of journalist is to make it
to pay check.

Six Thinking Hats - Edward de Bono

Lateral thinking

O Creative problem solving

O Opposite of vertical thinking

Six Thinking Hats

O Use of lateral thinking

O Different colors different approaches

 Leadership
Leader has to be:

• Sharp
• Patient
• Kind
• Merciless (with an interest in people)

Critical thinking in business

 Metaverse
Bla bla bla some romatic bs

E-comerce
Trends in Analytics

Cloud everything - Infrastructure. Data. Access.

Automate – End-to-end automation of ML workflow.

Generative AI - Hype or trend?

Real time personalization
 Cryptocurrencies
How did it get started?
The idea of digital money wasn’t new

○ Worries about complete surveillance state led to the creation of the cypherpunk movement

■ Programmers rebelled using their code as a weapon

○ DigiCash (1989), B-money (1998), Hashcash (2002)

Bitcoin

○ Decentralized peer to peer cryptocurrency with a finite supply

○ First mentioned in 2008 in a self published white paper written by Satoshi Nakamoto

■ identity of this individual (or individuals) remains unknown .

What did Bitcoin solve?

1. Replaced the trust model with cryptographic proof

○ Ultimately eliminated the need of an intermediary and replaced it with a peer to peer
network

1. The problem of double spending

○ Recorded all transactions on a public timestamped ledger called the blockchain

○ This solved the reversibility of electronic payments

1. Created an apolitical alternative to fiat

○ All money is traditionally tied to the action of the central banks and politics

Characteristics of BTC
1. Max supply of 21 million

○ Currently ~90% of the total supply is circulating

○ Market cap of Bitcoin is ~$0.85T, gold is ~12.2T (14 times more)

1. ~10 minute block time

○ Every 10 minutes, a bitcoin block is mined and transactions are confirmed

○ Each block is limited by size (1 MB) low to keep decentralization

1. Uses Proof of Work consensus mechanism

○ Bitcoin miners are using ASIC chips and are compensated in BTC rewards

○ Bitcoin miners are currently making ~$1 billion a month in 2021 made $16.8B
Why is BTC still around?
● Good timing on launch
○ The financial crisis was in full swing and peoples’ trust in banks was low

● Money is a social construct

○ People in society agree to give things value
● There is a need (and demand!) for apolitical alternative to national currencies
○ Imagine if you are born in Venezuela and have to deal with inflationary currency

● Predictable supply
○ Everyone knows how much Bitcoin there is and how much there will be
● Highly secure
○ Attacking Bitcoin is very difficult and would cause a lot of resources

● It’s internat native , decentralized and outside of the financial system

○ You can send Bitcoin 24/7 and don’t have to ask anyone

"Bitcoin could be an asset class that has a lot of attraction as a store of value to both millennials and
the new West Coast money. I own many more times gold than I own bitcoin, but frankly, if the gold
bet works, the bitcoin bet will probably work better because it's thinner and more illiquid and has a
lot more beta to it”, - Stanley Druckenmiller (investor, hedge fund manager and philanthropist).

Layer 1s
● Layer 1 is the base blockchain

● Provides consensus and security

● Blockchain trilemma

○ Decentralized

○ Secure

○ Scalable

Layer 2s

● Solutions created to help scale by processing transactions off of the L1 while still maintaining the
same security as the underlying L1

● A layer 2 communicates with the base layer by submitting bundles of transactions

○ L1 handles security, data availability, and decentralization

○ L2 handles scaling

● Types of L2s

○ Optimistic Rollups ex.: Optimism and Arbitrum

○ ZK Rollups ex.: zkSync and Starknet

DeFi

What Is Decentralized Finance (DeFi)?

Decentralized finance (DeFi) is an emerging financial technology based on secure distributed ledgers
similar to those used by cryptocurrencies.

Web3

● Web3 is a buzzword for services built on blockchains that generally use tokens to decentralize

○ Tokens are used to incentivize users to contribute to the protocol (for example provide
storage on their computer)

○ They are also freely traded on cryptocurrency exchanges every user can own a piece of the
infrastructure but also buyers fund the protocol

● Key principals ownership, compatibility and decentralization

● Often criticized for enabling pay to play and financializing the internet.

Problems with Web3

● Everything is financialized and requires value to be created for token holders

○ Token that’s just a governance token and doesn’t have any revenue component will likely
not have any value long term

● Tokens are often used to incentivize activity if there is not much demand to buy the token but
people keep receiving tokens for free, the price will perpetually go down
 ○ If it’s too easy to “yield farm,” and make money, agnostic players will sell

● Scalability

● Accessibility

● Environmental concerns - PoW vs. PoS

Web3 vs. Crypto?

● All web3 is crypto but not all crypto is Web3

● The goals of web3 is about rebuilding apps and games that we have today to become more
decentralized (censorship resistant) and adding a shared ownership component

● What is not Web3 stablecoins (USDC, USDT, etc.), meme tokens (DOGE, SHIB), exchange tokens
(BNB, FTT, etc.) and payment/nonsense tokens (XRP)

Token Designs

● Purely governance tokens

○ Governance can vote on anything even adding revenue sharing or utility components

● Revenue/dividend tokens

○ Revenue sharing tokens token holders make ETH/stablecoins from protocol revenue

○ Burn based tokens some portion of the protocol revenue is burned (similar to stock BB)

● Utility tokens

○ You can’t use the service unless you have a token almost like subscription but effectively
token gating

Stablecoins

Stablecoins are cryptocurrencies that claim to be backed by fiat currencies—dollars, pounds,

shekels, rubles, etc. The idea is that, unlike cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, stablecoins' prices remain
steady, in accordance with whichever fiat currency backs them.

NFTs
Quantum Computing
Deloitte quantum climate challenge
How Quantum Computer works
A different paradigm

Programming a quantum computer is not about writing software that behaves as the problem to be
solved requires in terms of mapping input data to output data.

Quantum Computing is a tool for statistical modeling. We use mathematical models and probalistic
assumptions to make predictions about the solution.

Probability is related to experiments. run shots on your Quantum circuits and evaluate the Qubit
measurements statistically.

To check a 2x2 Sudoku a digital Computer needs 16 computations.

Bringing all possible states in Superposition a Quantum Computer only needs a single computation
to check all 16 possibilities at once.
The Quantum Computer finds the correct solutions of the Sudoku as the states that are hit the most
often time.

The goal of a Quantum algorithm is to have the final Qubit measurement combination
corresponding to the correct answers showing the highest probabilities.

Logic and Language

Compulsory readings notes

Deep dive into critical thinking – Kahneman – thinking fast and slow ( chapters 1, 2)
-

Part 1: Two Systems: Chapter 1: The Characters of the Story

- System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of
voluntary control.
- System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including
complex computations. The operations of System 2 are often associated with the subjective
experience of agency, choice, and concentration.
- I describe System 1 as effortlessly originating impressions and feelings that are the main
sources of the explicit beliefs and deliberate choices of System 2. The automatic operations
of System 1 generate surprisingly complex patterns of ideas, but only the slower System 2
can construct thoughts in an orderly series of steps.

In rough order of complexity, here are some examples of the automatic activities that are attributed
to System 1:
 - Detect that one object is more distant than another.
- Orient to the source of a sudden sound

The highly diverse operations of System 2 have one feature in common: they require attention and
are disrupted when attention is drawn away. Here are some examples:

- Focus on the voice of a particular person in a crowded and noisy room.

- Count the occurrences of the letter a in a page of text.
- Check the validity of a complex logical argument.
- It is the mark of effortful activities that they interfere with each other, which is why it is
difficult or impossible to conduct several at once.
- The gorilla study illustrates two important facts about our minds: we can be blind to the
obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.
- One of the tasks of System 2 is to overcome the impulses of System 1. In other words,
System 2 is in charge of self-control.
- The best we can do is a compromise: learn to recognize situations in which mistakes are
likely and try harder to avoid significant mistakes when the stakes are high.

Chapter 2: Attention and Effort

- People, when engaged in a mental sprint, become effectively blind.

- As you become skilled in a task, its demand for energy diminishes. Talent has similar effects.
- One of the significant discoveries of cognitive psychologists in recent decades is that
switching from one task to another is effortful, especially under time pressure.

AR & VR
- https://enterprisersproject.com/article/2019/10/ar-augmented-reality-explained-plain-
english
- https://www.iberdrola.com/innovation/virtual-reality
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRUCU5FsvTY&ab_channel=TEDxTalks

E-comerce
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyAcQuFWRuU&t=547s&ab_channel=TEDxTalks

Cryptocurrencies

Quantum Computing