All of this is only one possible structure for the underlying goal of “learn to relentlessly find new, useful thoughts every day.”
Is that a learnable skill? Like I’m sure that if you spend a month deliberately blogging about interesting questions, your interesting thoughts per day metric will go up for that month, but you might worry about it reverting to baseline at the end of the exercise. Is there a specific reason to expect lasting skill gain or is this a handwavy “Maybe the brain is like a muscle and thinking about stuff makes you better at thinking in general”?
I’m not sure how much you’ll level up permanently after 30 days – I haven’t run this particular program before. (I think whether you successfully keep / build on it will mostly depend on whether your normal day-to-day life lends itself towards continuing to cultivate the habits. i.e. do you have a reason to keep thinking more new thoughts each day? If not, you probably lose it, comparable to you gaining some muscle in a 30 day physical bootcamp and then going back to a desk job)
I separately think “30 days of new thoughts” is probably fairly valuable whether it turns into a longterm improvement. (maybe not for everyone. But, if that seems valuable to you, probably it is)
Is that a learnable skill? Like I’m sure that if you spend a month deliberately blogging about interesting questions, your interesting thoughts per day metric will go up for that month, but you might worry about it reverting to baseline at the end of the exercise. Is there a specific reason to expect lasting skill gain or is this a handwavy “Maybe the brain is like a muscle and thinking about stuff makes you better at thinking in general”?
I’m quite confident this is a learnable skill.
I’m not sure how much you’ll level up permanently after 30 days – I haven’t run this particular program before. (I think whether you successfully keep / build on it will mostly depend on whether your normal day-to-day life lends itself towards continuing to cultivate the habits. i.e. do you have a reason to keep thinking more new thoughts each day? If not, you probably lose it, comparable to you gaining some muscle in a 30 day physical bootcamp and then going back to a desk job)
I separately think “30 days of new thoughts” is probably fairly valuable whether it turns into a longterm improvement. (maybe not for everyone. But, if that seems valuable to you, probably it is)
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I’m pretty confident I have leveled up at this over 14 years, some of which came from “just trying, at all, to think on purpose” (essentially what this program would be), some came explicitly from Tuning your Cognitive Strategies, and some came from the Feedbackloop-first Rationality agenda and Cognitive Bootcamp). My writeup of my experience is in this comment.