I recently tried doing a variant of this exercise at a larger workshop about solving physics problems.
Instead of abstract objects, I was aiming to help people observe “themselves.” (i.e. the second part was to list as many observations as they could about their own state, which included thoughts, feelings, body sensations, etc). I was hoping this would be a better intro to introspection than things like “focusing”, for people focused on research.
The exercise fell flat. I think a significant part of this was my execution. Rereading the post… I realize I just totally failed to do the two middle-parts of the first phase. i.e. the part where you observe what your strategies were, and brainstorm new ones. I guess I had just skimmed the post and missed them.
One person reported the first part (observing a concrete object) feeling kinda fake. Another person said “hrm, this whole thing feels pretty different from the main focus of the day.” [the basic loop of which was ’solve Thinking Physics problems]. “It feels more like… Logany naturalism stuff.” And I was like, well, obviously it is Logany naturalism stuff, but, like, it seems pretty obviously connected to me.
This was all on the first day of beta-test workshops, and afterwards my general update was “have the workshops focus on the core loop of ‘solve thinking physics puzzle, then extract insight about how to solve puzzles better’.
On later beta-test days for my workshop, I didn’t teach this exercise explicitly, but I did have people do variations of it in 1-1 contexts while talking to them about their physics-puzzle-problem-solving. This seemed to go better.
I think observing-abstract-objects and observing-self are both connected, though in different ways.
My overall goal with the Thinking Physics workshop was to teach metacognition, with the physics questions grounding out “are you learning metacognition in a way that is demonstrably helpful?”. I think being able to notice whats-going-on-inside-you in high granularity is useful to for noticing what cognitive habits are worth reinforcing.
I think it might have actually been good to start with the abstract-objects version, after doing a physics problem that notably had an abstract-object in it, and have people specifically be trying to generate lots of properties about that abstract object, to give them more handles for how to brainstorm solutions.
I recently tried doing a variant of this exercise at a larger workshop about solving physics problems.
Instead of abstract objects, I was aiming to help people observe “themselves.” (i.e. the second part was to list as many observations as they could about their own state, which included thoughts, feelings, body sensations, etc). I was hoping this would be a better intro to introspection than things like “focusing”, for people focused on research.
The exercise fell flat. I think a significant part of this was my execution. Rereading the post… I realize I just totally failed to do the two middle-parts of the first phase. i.e. the part where you observe what your strategies were, and brainstorm new ones. I guess I had just skimmed the post and missed them.
One person reported the first part (observing a concrete object) feeling kinda fake. Another person said “hrm, this whole thing feels pretty different from the main focus of the day.” [the basic loop of which was ’solve Thinking Physics problems]. “It feels more like… Logany naturalism stuff.” And I was like, well, obviously it is Logany naturalism stuff, but, like, it seems pretty obviously connected to me.
This was all on the first day of beta-test workshops, and afterwards my general update was “have the workshops focus on the core loop of ‘solve thinking physics puzzle, then extract insight about how to solve puzzles better’.
On later beta-test days for my workshop, I didn’t teach this exercise explicitly, but I did have people do variations of it in 1-1 contexts while talking to them about their physics-puzzle-problem-solving. This seemed to go better.
I’m really happy to hear you tried this! Thanks for telling us about it.
>it seems pretty obviously connected to me
I’m curious what happens when you try to spell out why it’s connected.
I think observing-abstract-objects and observing-self are both connected, though in different ways.
My overall goal with the Thinking Physics workshop was to teach metacognition, with the physics questions grounding out “are you learning metacognition in a way that is demonstrably helpful?”. I think being able to notice whats-going-on-inside-you in high granularity is useful to for noticing what cognitive habits are worth reinforcing.
I think it might have actually been good to start with the abstract-objects version, after doing a physics problem that notably had an abstract-object in it, and have people specifically be trying to generate lots of properties about that abstract object, to give them more handles for how to brainstorm solutions.