Do you want to help? Any idea of a test you could give me?
Most tests I could give you would would result in you trying to find the right answer and thus not test intuitive language usage. If you had a corpus of English text you wrote previously you could search it for “try” and get the first X examples. Then why could analyse what you meant with the word try.
But I think I can work with the rest of your post.
This means that I can try my best at something, and you can still try harder, if you have more resources that can be invested.
This suggest that investing more resources mean trying harder.
In cases where investing more resources means that success is less likely that notion of trying harder isn’t optimization for a goal.
The woman who’s playing hard to get isn’t “trying”. She isn’t investing resources. She might still use the strategy that produces the best results.
In the case of the hypnosis effect of forgetting the numbers, that’s not something I can achieve while trying to optimize for it. For me that seminar was a reference experience. I sat there and knew that I can only achieve the goal if I would stop trying to optimize for it. The fact that I really wanted to optimize for it and succeed only made it worse.
Investing resources and optimizing is different from doing what’s necessary.
Sometimes “Just be yourself” would be good advice if the answer person could accept it*, because it stops the optimization and the trying that are the biggest problem.
*In practice people can’t accept it so it usually isn’t effective advice.
This means that I can try my best at something, and you can still try harder, if you have more resources that can be invested.
This suggest that investing more resources mean trying harder.
Yes, I just said so
Amount of trying X = How much time, money and other resources one is spending directly on optimizing for X.
But only if the added resources actually goes towards optimizing for winning. More precisely: If and only if I think that adding more resources will improve my expected outcome, then adding more resources, is trying harder.
I know what you mean with the hypnosis, my experience was very similar. But I did less post analysis than you.
I am not going to get in to exactly why I hate the advise “Be yourself”, because it is a bit too personal and also off topic. But because I thought it was such a terrible advise, and why would anyone say that, I did some asking and thinking. Next time you are giving advise, Instead of saying “Be yourself”, say “Focus on others”. As you have already realized, saying “Be yourself” is telling people what not to do, which is not helpful. So tell them what to do instead. The best way to avoid doing X is to do Y instead, and there are extremely few situations where there are no possible Y to focus on. Mediation and trying to be hypnotized are the only examples I can think of, and even in mediation instructions, you are toled to focus on you breathing, or something, because doing nothing is too hard. But in most situations there are things you can focus you attention and efforts on, that are actually useful, and not just an artificial distraction. The circumstance where “Be yourself”, usually pop up is when someone needs advise on how to do a good impression on an other person (date, interview for a job, etc). In these situations, a good choice is to focus on the other person, to get to know them.
Mediation and trying to be hypnotized are the only examples I can think of, and even in mediation instructions, you are toled to focus on you breathing, or something, because doing nothing is too hard.
Being told to focus on breathing is indeed the version of meditation that’s popular for teaching beginners because it’s an easy entry. It isn’t too hard. There are harder version to mediate that don’t work via easy prompts.
The same goes for “Just be yourself” it’s too hard to expect the other person to do it, so you give them another prompt. But generally good social advice is more targeted to the individual person.
Most tests I could give you would would result in you trying to find the right answer and thus not test intuitive language usage. If you had a corpus of English text you wrote previously you could search it for “try” and get the first X examples. Then why could analyse what you meant with the word try.
But I think I can work with the rest of your post.
This suggest that investing more resources mean trying harder.
In cases where investing more resources means that success is less likely that notion of trying harder isn’t optimization for a goal.
The woman who’s playing hard to get isn’t “trying”. She isn’t investing resources. She might still use the strategy that produces the best results.
In the case of the hypnosis effect of forgetting the numbers, that’s not something I can achieve while trying to optimize for it. For me that seminar was a reference experience. I sat there and knew that I can only achieve the goal if I would stop trying to optimize for it. The fact that I really wanted to optimize for it and succeed only made it worse.
Investing resources and optimizing is different from doing what’s necessary.
Sometimes “Just be yourself” would be good advice if the answer person could accept it*, because it stops the optimization and the trying that are the biggest problem.
*In practice people can’t accept it so it usually isn’t effective advice.
Yes, I just said so
But only if the added resources actually goes towards optimizing for winning. More precisely: If and only if I think that adding more resources will improve my expected outcome, then adding more resources, is trying harder.
I know what you mean with the hypnosis, my experience was very similar. But I did less post analysis than you.
I am not going to get in to exactly why I hate the advise “Be yourself”, because it is a bit too personal and also off topic. But because I thought it was such a terrible advise, and why would anyone say that, I did some asking and thinking. Next time you are giving advise, Instead of saying “Be yourself”, say “Focus on others”. As you have already realized, saying “Be yourself” is telling people what not to do, which is not helpful. So tell them what to do instead. The best way to avoid doing X is to do Y instead, and there are extremely few situations where there are no possible Y to focus on. Mediation and trying to be hypnotized are the only examples I can think of, and even in mediation instructions, you are toled to focus on you breathing, or something, because doing nothing is too hard. But in most situations there are things you can focus you attention and efforts on, that are actually useful, and not just an artificial distraction. The circumstance where “Be yourself”, usually pop up is when someone needs advise on how to do a good impression on an other person (date, interview for a job, etc). In these situations, a good choice is to focus on the other person, to get to know them.
Being told to focus on breathing is indeed the version of meditation that’s popular for teaching beginners because it’s an easy entry. It isn’t too hard. There are harder version to mediate that don’t work via easy prompts.
The same goes for “Just be yourself” it’s too hard to expect the other person to do it, so you give them another prompt. But generally good social advice is more targeted to the individual person.