Part of my overall flow is “during working hours (where I’m trying to apply this sort of thing), any ‘meta’ I do is something that needs to pay off within a week.” (I let myself do meta in weekends/evenings with less restriction, coming more out of my “hobby/after-hours-self-improvement” budget).
“Have a handle on when you’re going overboard and need to focus back on just getting momentum on object-level progress” makes sense as an important foundational skill here.
On my day-to-day, I do the 5-10 minute version of this in the morning.
Do you feel right now like you found a happy balance, or are you kinda in “recovering alcoholic, not even one drink of think-it-faster-meta is safe?”
Part of it’s probably that I work very long hours often 7 days a week (blah blah stash money before ASI kills my differentiator)
The biggest thing is not having a goal of being able to prove a solution to myself
Like stop the search early basically
Don’t need to formalize or document everything or remember every finding
I think most of the time the brain actually does a pretty good job of gradually solving problems over time without conscious thought
We don’t think of it as thought because it’s not conscious or subtitled by our auditory processing system
But it still thought & learning
Relying on that implicit system instead often gets me better results than logically formalized versions
I guess now I’m kind of debating the core premise of the post—that it’s even possible or useful overall to discover or learn in that way, or that it’s real learning
But it probably is helpful for some % of people who are less tunnely / tic-prone
Maybe I’m just jealous that it works for some people after devoting (and largely wasting) so much time on it myself
FYI I do currently think “learn when/how to use your subconcious to process things” is an important tool in the toolbox (I got advice about that from a mentor I went to talk to). Some of the classes of moves here are:
build up intuitions about when it is useful to background process things vs deliberate-process them
if your brain is sort of subconsciously wandering in a rut, use a small amount of agency to direct your thoughts in a new direction, but then let them wander once you get them rolling down the hill in that new direction
I basically discovered the same form of thinking after I learned the concept of amplification and distillation
The long-term results of this was severe OCD that took me 1.5-2 years to cut back
This is not to say that it’s a bad idea, or a bad idea for everyone
But it’s a very, very bad idea for some people
Basically I would spend so many hours every day just thinking, stuck in thought loops, stuck trying to gain some value out of generalizing
Trying to compress mental models that are impossible to learn implicitly into simplified models/memonics and then learn how to use them reflectively
Etc etc
It’s a fucking mess if you go too far
And it’s hard to know if you’ve gone too far
At least it was for me, until I was slowly working through it through months of therapy
And then realized oh this is really all because of that stupid fucking thought pattern thing I’m obsessed with
Especially the idea of trying to think it faster the FIRST time
That in particular can be paralyzing, this sense that you should be able to think it the right way the first time
Very slippery slope
It’s like mindfulness, generally good up to a point, but it’s absolutely possible to go too far and have it cripple your life
Mm, that does make sense, thanks for the warning.
Part of my overall flow is “during working hours (where I’m trying to apply this sort of thing), any ‘meta’ I do is something that needs to pay off within a week.” (I let myself do meta in weekends/evenings with less restriction, coming more out of my “hobby/after-hours-self-improvement” budget).
“Have a handle on when you’re going overboard and need to focus back on just getting momentum on object-level progress” makes sense as an important foundational skill here.
On my day-to-day, I do the 5-10 minute version of this in the morning.
Do you feel right now like you found a happy balance, or are you kinda in “recovering alcoholic, not even one drink of think-it-faster-meta is safe?”
Yeah I like that approach
Part of it’s probably that I work very long hours often 7 days a week (blah blah stash money before ASI kills my differentiator)
The biggest thing is not having a goal of being able to prove a solution to myself
Like stop the search early basically
Don’t need to formalize or document everything or remember every finding
I think most of the time the brain actually does a pretty good job of gradually solving problems over time without conscious thought
We don’t think of it as thought because it’s not conscious or subtitled by our auditory processing system
But it still thought & learning
Relying on that implicit system instead often gets me better results than logically formalized versions
I guess now I’m kind of debating the core premise of the post—that it’s even possible or useful overall to discover or learn in that way, or that it’s real learning
But it probably is helpful for some % of people who are less tunnely / tic-prone
Maybe I’m just jealous that it works for some people after devoting (and largely wasting) so much time on it myself
Not sure
FYI I do currently think “learn when/how to use your subconcious to process things” is an important tool in the toolbox (I got advice about that from a mentor I went to talk to). Some of the classes of moves here are:
build up intuitions about when it is useful to background process things vs deliberate-process them
if your brain is sort of subconsciously wandering in a rut, use a small amount of agency to direct your thoughts in a new direction, but then let them wander once you get them rolling down the hill in that new direction