I am not familiar with the neuroscience of what’s going on, but a plausible story is that the areas of the brain corresponding to the examples he’s just seen are activated.
This made me cringe. “I don’t know the relevant science, but instead of looking it up, let me speculate anyway.” To be fair, a lot of posts on LW probably do this, but few state it so explicitly. I’m only singling you out because you were so upright about it, which isn’t how it should work. So I’m not downvoting you because of that.
The advice given at the end of this post seemed plausible to me, but the initial speculation about how the brain works seemed speculative and unsupported, and didn’t really add anything to the post itself. I think the post could be improved by deleting everything between the initial paragraph and the one that starts “The fundamental thing you should do...”
Unfortunately, I think some of that section is needed to explain what is the nature of the problem that’s being addressed (i.e. brain tending to do depth-first search). That said, the two sentences about a likely neuroscience story probably should go. I was actually pretty tempted to take them out when posting but somehow talked myself out of it. I’ll go do that now. Hopefully it’s not considered bad form to edit without leaving a note?
This made me cringe. “I don’t know the relevant science, but instead of looking it up, let me speculate anyway.” To be fair, a lot of posts on LW probably do this, but few state it so explicitly. I’m only singling you out because you were so upright about it, which isn’t how it should work. So I’m not downvoting you because of that.
The advice given at the end of this post seemed plausible to me, but the initial speculation about how the brain works seemed speculative and unsupported, and didn’t really add anything to the post itself. I think the post could be improved by deleting everything between the initial paragraph and the one that starts “The fundamental thing you should do...”
Or alternately, include a picture of an fMRI scan.
Unfortunately, I think some of that section is needed to explain what is the nature of the problem that’s being addressed (i.e. brain tending to do depth-first search). That said, the two sentences about a likely neuroscience story probably should go. I was actually pretty tempted to take them out when posting but somehow talked myself out of it. I’ll go do that now. Hopefully it’s not considered bad form to edit without leaving a note?
Thanks for the helpful comment, by the way.