I’m curating this final post as a celebration of the overall Babble Challenge series.
I’m happy about this sequence for at least three reasons:
The core action of “babble 50 things” has just turned out to be a pretty useful tool, which I’ve employed a few times since this series started. I think it’s useful for LessWrong Curation subscribers to give the Babble challenge a try.
On the meta-level, I’m happy to see more explicit exercises on LessWrong. I liked that Jacob didn’t just throw up a single exercise, but experimented with an entire multi-week-long exercise paradigm. This made LessWrong feel a bit more alive as a community-of-practice. It gave many users a good reason to write their first comments. And I expect to reflect back on it when I’m next planning exercises to see what lessons I can take from it’s structure.
This sequence has gotten me thinking about my overall model of cognition and how babble relates to it. I think “babble 50 things” is just the first, easiest task to apply. I personally have a belief that most cognition is babble-based, and that improving babble is a useful core tool in your mental arsenal.
Follow up: @elityre asked to discuss doublecrux ideas and I spent a little more than an hour spewing forth topics. There were 74 in the first 30 minutes and its slowed down from there. I don’t think I would have done that nearly as easily without the babble challenges.
It turns out these were answers to the slightly wrong question, so we had to do a prune pass. I’m not sure if it would have been better to clarify first, or if the absolute babble freedom ended up leading to better post-pruning ideas.
Presumably if Eli had checked in every 10 minutes or so he could have noticed and helped course-correct?
(When I do babbles like this I do definitely sometimes pursue things that aren’t the original question, to see if they unlock new interesting avenues. I’m guessing the ideal outcome here is “Babbler feels totally entitled to violate the question, but, also, they do understand the question.”)
Eli was in fact checking in while I babbled, in retrospect he was putting out feelers for redirection but I was so happy with how generative I was being I wasn’t that responsive, and I think he was reluctant to push back because what if strict separation of babble and prune was the best process? It also might not have been obvious how much transformation my babbled ideas needed to be usable until we did the next step.
I’m curating this final post as a celebration of the overall Babble Challenge series.
I’m happy about this sequence for at least three reasons:
The core action of “babble 50 things” has just turned out to be a pretty useful tool, which I’ve employed a few times since this series started. I think it’s useful for LessWrong Curation subscribers to give the Babble challenge a try.
On the meta-level, I’m happy to see more explicit exercises on LessWrong. I liked that Jacob didn’t just throw up a single exercise, but experimented with an entire multi-week-long exercise paradigm. This made LessWrong feel a bit more alive as a community-of-practice. It gave many users a good reason to write their first comments. And I expect to reflect back on it when I’m next planning exercises to see what lessons I can take from it’s structure.
This sequence has gotten me thinking about my overall model of cognition and how babble relates to it. I think “babble 50 things” is just the first, easiest task to apply. I personally have a belief that most cognition is babble-based, and that improving babble is a useful core tool in your mental arsenal.
Follow up: @elityre asked to discuss doublecrux ideas and I spent a little more than an hour spewing forth topics. There were 74 in the first 30 minutes and its slowed down from there. I don’t think I would have done that nearly as easily without the babble challenges.
It turns out these were answers to the slightly wrong question, so we had to do a prune pass. I’m not sure if it would have been better to clarify first, or if the absolute babble freedom ended up leading to better post-pruning ideas.
From my perspective, it seemed good to answer slightly the wrong question. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
(Is it it...tonally incongruous to use a an shrug emoticon on lesswrong?)
Presumably if Eli had checked in every 10 minutes or so he could have noticed and helped course-correct?
(When I do babbles like this I do definitely sometimes pursue things that aren’t the original question, to see if they unlock new interesting avenues. I’m guessing the ideal outcome here is “Babbler feels totally entitled to violate the question, but, also, they do understand the question.”)
Eli was in fact checking in while I babbled, in retrospect he was putting out feelers for redirection but I was so happy with how generative I was being I wasn’t that responsive, and I think he was reluctant to push back because what if strict separation of babble and prune was the best process? It also might not have been obvious how much transformation my babbled ideas needed to be usable until we did the next step.
Woo!