Cognitive Scaffold

Preparing your thinking workspace

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MENTAL MODEL · M8022

A Thousand Thoughts Yield One Gain

A Thousand Thoughts Yield One Gain
CreatemediumInnovation Methods
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Updated 2026-08-10

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INTRODUCTION

English translation pending.

CORE DEFINITION

From the Yanzi Chunqiu and quoted by Han Xin in the Records of the Grand Historian: even a fool, thinking a thousand times, will produce one good idea, while a wise person thinking a thousand times will make one mistake. The model argues for keeping diversity in the pool of proposals, since a low-quality source can still contribute a valid idea at some probability. The key qualification is that the principle concerns the supply of candidate ideas rather than the decision: filtering must still happen, and the value comes from keeping the search wide while judging strictly.

SCAFFOLDING EFFECT

psychology

Reduce cognitive load

- Pool widening: invite proposals from junior and peripheral people, not only recognized experts. - Source neutrality: admit ideas without pre-judging them by who proposed them. - Filter separation: judge ideas strictly on their merits rather than on their origin.

anchor

Anchor fast decisions

Any single source has a low probability of producing a good idea, but probabilities add across independent attempts, so a large and diverse pool raises the chance that at least one is useful. Diversity matters because different backgrounds generate different candidates rather than more of the same. The requirement is that evaluation be separated from generation, since rejecting ideas by their source removes exactly the low-probability draws the method depends on.

MINIMUM ACTION

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Source support: Explicit

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    zh.wikisource.orghttps://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/%E8%B2%9E%E8%A7%80%E6%94%BF%E8%A6%81/%E5%8D%B710ZH · Explicit
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