Do you have any real world feedback for this? I think the idea is provisionally great, but the article would be 10x better at conveying the loop of learning to others if you gave many concrete examples where this actually helped and was worth the effort. My guess is that it is really exponential over time.
I have some examples in my feedback loop documents where I do do this and it has really helped.
I also have 2 extra versions where I try 1) using system 1 thinking explicitly for system 2, 2) I skip forward in time and just think about the entire next conversation that would unfold after the one in my present head.
The feedbackloops in escalating “realness” here for me are:
Do I identify principles/skills/habits/etc that seem like they should successfully cut down on time spent on things I regularly do?
Do I successfully identify moments where it seems like I should “think something faster the first time?”, by applying a technique?
Do I do that? Does it seem to save time?
(“does it seem to save time?” isn’t an ironclad feedbackloop obviously. But, I think it + common sense is at least pretty good)
I’ve been doing some-kind-of-variant on this since 2023 with the Thinking Physics exercise “reflection portion”. Everything in Skills from a year of Purposeful Rationality Practice I think at least somewhat counts as habits that I’ve gained that allow me to think either think-things-faster, or, think-things-at-all.
I workshopped and ad-hoc “review your thinking for 10 minutes” after various exercises into the ~hour-long exercise you see here, a few months ago. In that time, some new things I try at least sometimes
Look at my checklist for debugging code, and do the things on it. These so far include:
“actually adopt a stance of ‘form hypotheses and try to disprove them’”
“patiently follow the code all the way up the stack” (instead of bouncing off after the second step)
“binary search for where the problem is by commenting out ~half the code in the relevant section.”
(these may seem obvious but I’m just not that strong a developer, and exercises like this are the main mechanism by which I’ve gotten better at basic debugging skills)
Try the simple dumb thing first. (I still fail to do this an embarrassing amount of time, but am working on it)
b) back in December, when I first was noticing I was struggling to focus, I decided to write the Thinking Assistants post and spin up a Thinking Assistant community. The general form of that is “consider spinning up whole-ass subcommunities to deal with problems.” (I knew from previous experience that finding a single thinking assistant was a brittle solution)
Also when I’m myopically flailing, try forming a more complete model of my constraints (as described in this blogpost), and then solve for them.
The first three things feel like they’re straightforwardly working, although it’s hard to tell how much they actually speed me up. (Often the thing I would previously do when failing to debug code was “ask someone for help”, so it’s less that there’s a speedup exactly and more that I interrupt my colleagues less)
The fourth one, I feel like I’m still workshopping into a form that reliably works for me, because “make a map of the constraints” is made of a lot of subskills, which vary depending on the situation. I anticipate it turning into something pretty important over the next year but it’s too early to tell.
Do you have any real world feedback for this? I think the idea is provisionally great, but the article would be 10x better at conveying the loop of learning to others if you gave many concrete examples where this actually helped and was worth the effort. My guess is that it is really exponential over time.
I have some examples in my feedback loop documents where I do do this and it has really helped.
I also have 2 extra versions where I try 1) using system 1 thinking explicitly for system 2, 2) I skip forward in time and just think about the entire next conversation that would unfold after the one in my present head.
The feedbackloops in escalating “realness” here for me are:
Do I identify principles/skills/habits/etc that seem like they should successfully cut down on time spent on things I regularly do?
Do I successfully identify moments where it seems like I should “think something faster the first time?”, by applying a technique?
Do I do that? Does it seem to save time?
(“does it seem to save time?” isn’t an ironclad feedbackloop obviously. But, I think it + common sense is at least pretty good)
I’ve been doing some-kind-of-variant on this since 2023 with the Thinking Physics exercise “reflection portion”. Everything in Skills from a year of Purposeful Rationality Practice I think at least somewhat counts as habits that I’ve gained that allow me to think either think-things-faster, or, think-things-at-all.
I workshopped and ad-hoc “review your thinking for 10 minutes” after various exercises into the ~hour-long exercise you see here, a few months ago. In that time, some new things I try at least sometimes
Look at my checklist for debugging code, and do the things on it. These so far include:
“actually adopt a stance of ‘form hypotheses and try to disprove them’”
“patiently follow the code all the way up the stack” (instead of bouncing off after the second step)
“binary search for where the problem is by commenting out ~half the code in the relevant section.”
(these may seem obvious but I’m just not that strong a developer, and exercises like this are the main mechanism by which I’ve gotten better at basic debugging skills)
Try the simple dumb thing first. (I still fail to do this an embarrassing amount of time, but am working on it)
When I notice myself flailing around myopically,
a) these days, try getting a Thinking Assistant for the day.
b) back in December, when I first was noticing I was struggling to focus, I decided to write the Thinking Assistants post and spin up a Thinking Assistant community. The general form of that is “consider spinning up whole-ass subcommunities to deal with problems.” (I knew from previous experience that finding a single thinking assistant was a brittle solution)
Also when I’m myopically flailing, try forming a more complete model of my constraints (as described in this blogpost), and then solve for them.
The first three things feel like they’re straightforwardly working, although it’s hard to tell how much they actually speed me up. (Often the thing I would previously do when failing to debug code was “ask someone for help”, so it’s less that there’s a speedup exactly and more that I interrupt my colleagues less)
The fourth one, I feel like I’m still workshopping into a form that reliably works for me, because “make a map of the constraints” is made of a lot of subskills, which vary depending on the situation. I anticipate it turning into something pretty important over the next year but it’s too early to tell.