I honestly have no idea how to think clearly. Particularly from a blank slate, without prompting or real-time communication with another person, who can dig things out of me I cannot retrieve on my own, by reminding me of things with their questions.
The Rubber-Duck Technique: Get a rubber duck (or a figurine of some kind). When working through a problem, or trying to understand a new concept, explain it to the duck. As if it were a person.
Maybe the silent duck isn’t enough. At least try it before moving on. But you can be the other person digging things out of yourself. You can play both roles; wear a different hat; a different mask. Mentally inhabit each role, as in method acting.
Ancient Greek philosophers sometimes wrote dialogs, with one standing in for the philosopher or teacher, and the other a fictional (or fictionalized) foil. These could make good posts in their own right, or at least the start for them.
Explaining things to real people, and to imagined ones, perhaps in the shoes of another imagined character, was very helpful for me in consolidating, organizing, and seeing the implications of my knowledge, internally. Daydream. In this way. Make it a habit.
Make up fictional characters. Write down their personalities and backstory. Maybe base them on people you know, if that’s easier. Maybe they’re based on a shallow single concept. Maybe they have complex inner lives. Have them talk to each other. Explain what they know.
I hesitate to suggest (because I don’t know how safe this is), but consider tulpamancy: create an imaginary friend, capable of acting independently, out of a fragment of your own psyche, one, who by nature would draw the best out of you. Explain things to them. Have them explain things to you. I think, with your unusual mind, this might work well. Perhaps too well. You may not need to go this far. Be careful here.
That’s enough for elicitation, but you also want it recorded. Perhaps, with better internal organization resulting from your self-dialogs, this will become easier. But techniques can help here too.
the fact that my best thinking is done in the middle of the night when I ought to be asleep
Keep a notebook by your bed. The electronic kind, if that’s easier, but you must be able to keep it on standby and wake it up instantly to start typing, lest you forget things when waiting. The dead-tree kind might have lower latency, but newer computers, or tablets with physical keyboards can do this.
Speak your dialogs aloud and record the audio (or video too). Use dictation software to automatically write the initial draft. Then explain to the duck what is wrong with it. Or imagine one of your characters shredding it with (concrete, specific) criticism. Or ask your tulpa what’s wrong with it. Fix that, and explain it again. Save versions as you go. Git may be overkill, but perhaps you already know it. Split your screen, or get a second monitor. Read your draft on one side, and note the key points in outline form on the right. Then flesh out the outline. Or just retype a better version using the draft as a reference. Whatever, etc.
With the elicitation taken care of, and the initial draft recording, what remains is simply to revise the writing, because quality writing is revised writing. It doesn’t particularly matter how you do it, as long as you’re iterating, and improving. At some point, when it’s “good enough”, you stop. How do you tell? Explain to the duck why it’s good enough. If you can’t, maybe it isn’t. Inhabit another mask and read it with fresh eyes. What would your characters say? Ask the tulpa. Publish.
Shortly after writing this answer, it occurred to me that you could dialog with GPT-3, rather than another human (or yourself). I’m not sure how accessible this is now, but there are certainly many alternatives. If even a silent rubber duck is useful, perhaps even an ELIZA-level chatbot is more useful, but I think options much better than that are freely available now.
As I mentioned in my other reply, silent ducks are not helpful for me, and similarly neither are chatbots. I indeed have used AI Dungeon for this purpose before and found it to be helpful for fictional stuff (as it’s intended), but less effective as a philosophical conversation partner. I have no idea how to access the real, full GPT-3, but I greatly would like to, for this exact reason.
https://www.eleuther.ai/ released GPT-J, which is supposed to have similar or superior performance when compared to GPT-3′s medium-sized models, although it can’t match the largest Davinci model on some tasks. Might be worth a try, but I’m not sure what kind of hardware you need to run it.
DeepMind’s Chinchilla suggests that GPT-3 was undertrained, so it’s possible to get better performance with fewer parameters. This space has been rapidly evolving, so I’m not sure what the current best free options are.
I have often done all the elicitation suggestions you make. I even had tulpas—or more accurately, dissociated alters, since I was quite mentally unhealthy—for years. However, I have much less cognitive empathy than most people and I have never been able to imagine the interior of another person’s mind to any significant extent. Every attempt at writing dialogues, the duck thing, etc has failed. I simply cannot imagine being someone other than who I am. Even when I was dissociative, my “souls”, as I called them, were just aspects of myself with no actual separation. (It is possible I am on the autism spectrum, but for life reasons I’ve never had the opportunity to go to a psychiatrist.)
That said, I’ve been explaining things to imaginary (totally silent and personality-less) people my whole life. I just never seem to write it down when I do it. Getting myself to notice when I’ve wandered into doing that, and force myself to write it down, may be a key here.
The dictation suggestions are good, though due to thin walls and others in the house I could not speak my ideas aloud at night, nor could I type on a keyboard as it makes noise also. I don’t have a tablet computer but that would likely work if I could get one.
Wow, even the tulpas. Autistic people don’t simply lack empathy. It’s more like it’s undertrained and improves somewhat with experience. More exposure helps, even if it’s fictional.
Anime, particularly the kind emphasizing relationships, was helpful for me. “Great” literature, which lets you get inside someone else’s (fictional) head, should be helpful for the same reason. Shallower pop fiction may be less helpful. Quality varies a great deal. As for your case, I’m not qualified to diagnose it.
Theater sports or pen & paper RPGs (e.g. Dungeons and Dragons), which let you try out different roles might help you imagine being someone else. You might be able to find a D&D group online and even participate over the Internet.
Well, I have no idea if autism is the thing I have, of course. Analyzing the feeling of this confusion about people over the years, I’ve developed the suspicion that I actually have an ugh field around the idea of empathizing with people, rather than necessarily an inability to do so. My mind slides off the thought of trying to in the first place, and goes sort of… strategically blank, if I try to force it to empathize anyway, making it look like I’m not good at it. (And I have a long history of not being interested in other people, preferring things or ideas.)
But when I accidentally, passively empathize with people, predicting how they’re feeling or what they’re thinking without any ulterior motive for doing so, I’m usually as good at it as a neurotypical person. This implies (if it’s correct, and not just yet another confabulated explanation for my inexplicable mental patterns) that I will have to figure out the cause of my discomfort around empathizing and dismantle it.
Maybe the best way to explain my situation is that I can understand what people are thinking and feeling easily—as in the context of fiction, which I’ve always loved and read tons of—but I can’t generate it independently—exactly as if I knew a foreign language well enough to understand it when someone else speaks it, but not well enough to speak it myself.
Voice recording and dictation software is probably the easiest, since it doesn’t interrupt your thought process as much. It’s definitely worth a try, but actually writing may slow you down too much. You might consider picking up shorthand to take notes more quickly. I also wonder if a high-gain mic next to your face could pick up a whisper well enough to be intelligible, if not for dictation software, then at least for you. Could be worth experimenting with.
The Rubber-Duck Technique: Get a rubber duck (or a figurine of some kind). When working through a problem, or trying to understand a new concept, explain it to the duck. As if it were a person.
Maybe the silent duck isn’t enough. At least try it before moving on. But you can be the other person digging things out of yourself. You can play both roles; wear a different hat; a different mask. Mentally inhabit each role, as in method acting.
Ancient Greek philosophers sometimes wrote dialogs, with one standing in for the philosopher or teacher, and the other a fictional (or fictionalized) foil. These could make good posts in their own right, or at least the start for them.
Explaining things to real people, and to imagined ones, perhaps in the shoes of another imagined character, was very helpful for me in consolidating, organizing, and seeing the implications of my knowledge, internally. Daydream. In this way. Make it a habit.
Make up fictional characters. Write down their personalities and backstory. Maybe base them on people you know, if that’s easier. Maybe they’re based on a shallow single concept. Maybe they have complex inner lives. Have them talk to each other. Explain what they know.
I hesitate to suggest (because I don’t know how safe this is), but consider tulpamancy: create an imaginary friend, capable of acting independently, out of a fragment of your own psyche, one, who by nature would draw the best out of you. Explain things to them. Have them explain things to you. I think, with your unusual mind, this might work well. Perhaps too well. You may not need to go this far. Be careful here.
That’s enough for elicitation, but you also want it recorded. Perhaps, with better internal organization resulting from your self-dialogs, this will become easier. But techniques can help here too.
Keep a notebook by your bed. The electronic kind, if that’s easier, but you must be able to keep it on standby and wake it up instantly to start typing, lest you forget things when waiting. The dead-tree kind might have lower latency, but newer computers, or tablets with physical keyboards can do this.
Speak your dialogs aloud and record the audio (or video too). Use dictation software to automatically write the initial draft. Then explain to the duck what is wrong with it. Or imagine one of your characters shredding it with (concrete, specific) criticism. Or ask your tulpa what’s wrong with it. Fix that, and explain it again. Save versions as you go. Git may be overkill, but perhaps you already know it. Split your screen, or get a second monitor. Read your draft on one side, and note the key points in outline form on the right. Then flesh out the outline. Or just retype a better version using the draft as a reference. Whatever, etc.
With the elicitation taken care of, and the initial draft recording, what remains is simply to revise the writing, because quality writing is revised writing. It doesn’t particularly matter how you do it, as long as you’re iterating, and improving. At some point, when it’s “good enough”, you stop. How do you tell? Explain to the duck why it’s good enough. If you can’t, maybe it isn’t. Inhabit another mask and read it with fresh eyes. What would your characters say? Ask the tulpa. Publish.
Shortly after writing this answer, it occurred to me that you could dialog with GPT-3, rather than another human (or yourself). I’m not sure how accessible this is now, but there are certainly many alternatives. If even a silent rubber duck is useful, perhaps even an ELIZA-level chatbot is more useful, but I think options much better than that are freely available now.
As I mentioned in my other reply, silent ducks are not helpful for me, and similarly neither are chatbots. I indeed have used AI Dungeon for this purpose before and found it to be helpful for fictional stuff (as it’s intended), but less effective as a philosophical conversation partner. I have no idea how to access the real, full GPT-3, but I greatly would like to, for this exact reason.
https://www.eleuther.ai/ released GPT-J, which is supposed to have similar or superior performance when compared to GPT-3′s medium-sized models, although it can’t match the largest Davinci model on some tasks. Might be worth a try, but I’m not sure what kind of hardware you need to run it.
DeepMind’s Chinchilla suggests that GPT-3 was undertrained, so it’s possible to get better performance with fewer parameters. This space has been rapidly evolving, so I’m not sure what the current best free options are.
I have often done all the elicitation suggestions you make. I even had tulpas—or more accurately, dissociated alters, since I was quite mentally unhealthy—for years. However, I have much less cognitive empathy than most people and I have never been able to imagine the interior of another person’s mind to any significant extent. Every attempt at writing dialogues, the duck thing, etc has failed. I simply cannot imagine being someone other than who I am. Even when I was dissociative, my “souls”, as I called them, were just aspects of myself with no actual separation. (It is possible I am on the autism spectrum, but for life reasons I’ve never had the opportunity to go to a psychiatrist.)
That said, I’ve been explaining things to imaginary (totally silent and personality-less) people my whole life. I just never seem to write it down when I do it. Getting myself to notice when I’ve wandered into doing that, and force myself to write it down, may be a key here.
The dictation suggestions are good, though due to thin walls and others in the house I could not speak my ideas aloud at night, nor could I type on a keyboard as it makes noise also. I don’t have a tablet computer but that would likely work if I could get one.
Wow, even the tulpas. Autistic people don’t simply lack empathy. It’s more like it’s undertrained and improves somewhat with experience. More exposure helps, even if it’s fictional.
Anime, particularly the kind emphasizing relationships, was helpful for me. “Great” literature, which lets you get inside someone else’s (fictional) head, should be helpful for the same reason. Shallower pop fiction may be less helpful. Quality varies a great deal. As for your case, I’m not qualified to diagnose it.
Theater sports or pen & paper RPGs (e.g. Dungeons and Dragons), which let you try out different roles might help you imagine being someone else. You might be able to find a D&D group online and even participate over the Internet.
Well, I have no idea if autism is the thing I have, of course. Analyzing the feeling of this confusion about people over the years, I’ve developed the suspicion that I actually have an ugh field around the idea of empathizing with people, rather than necessarily an inability to do so. My mind slides off the thought of trying to in the first place, and goes sort of… strategically blank, if I try to force it to empathize anyway, making it look like I’m not good at it. (And I have a long history of not being interested in other people, preferring things or ideas.)
But when I accidentally, passively empathize with people, predicting how they’re feeling or what they’re thinking without any ulterior motive for doing so, I’m usually as good at it as a neurotypical person. This implies (if it’s correct, and not just yet another confabulated explanation for my inexplicable mental patterns) that I will have to figure out the cause of my discomfort around empathizing and dismantle it.
Maybe the best way to explain my situation is that I can understand what people are thinking and feeling easily—as in the context of fiction, which I’ve always loved and read tons of—but I can’t generate it independently—exactly as if I knew a foreign language well enough to understand it when someone else speaks it, but not well enough to speak it myself.
Voice recording and dictation software is probably the easiest, since it doesn’t interrupt your thought process as much. It’s definitely worth a try, but actually writing may slow you down too much. You might consider picking up shorthand to take notes more quickly. I also wonder if a high-gain mic next to your face could pick up a whisper well enough to be intelligible, if not for dictation software, then at least for you. Could be worth experimenting with.