Morpheus comments on Morpheus’s Shortform

[Morpheus]

Thinking about this thread on “How could I have thought of that faster?”. In practice, I noticed the phrasing doesn’t work well for me and I prefer “How could I have seen this faster”? I especially like this framing for when I have identified a “blindspot”, “developmental milestone” or noticing someone’s wizard power is clearly hinting at a powerful learnable skill or concept I wasn’t aware of and that I don’t yet possess.

I feel this frame helps me to better find areas where there are cached beliefs to correct, and remember hints at the shape of the thing in the past. I do feel like I have an easier time correcting object-level believes, compared to finding good ways to hone heuristics about my own thinking and how I could avoid some types of “going in circles”. I find it hard to account for hindsight, and also memory can be trickery.

Looking back at the original thread:

See, if I’d noticed myself doing anything remotely like that, I’d go back, figure out which steps of thought were actually performing intrinsically necessary cognitive work, and then retrain myself to perform only those steps over the course of 30 seconds. I mean, I suspect that this actually requires something like a fast perceptual view of minds as engines and thoughts as doing work and like actually draws on my mind design knowledge, but, even so, I ask: Do you constantly look back and ask “How could I have thought that faster?” Okay, well, every time I’m surprised by reality I look back and think “What about my model and my way of thinking could I change that would have predicted that better, without predicting a bunch of other things worse?

I currently don’t have a fast perceptual view like that, even though I think I understand the concepts mentioned above. I don’t feel like thinking of my mind as an engine helps me in post-mortems. So either I lack a skill here or this was hinting at a point I’d find elementary.