(I found this pretty readable, and I think I got what you meant)
You bring up the awesome point that focus and attention are limited resources, and that we have to trade off between different kinds of thought processes, but I don’t think that you specified the right macro/micro interplay.
How useful a macro thought is depends on how useful locating a neighborhood in the search space is to you, and the level of abstraction that the assertion is at. If you get the right neighborhood, but lack the information necessary to use it, a small optimization might still be better.
For instance, I know that a good strategy for running a business is to create a service that’s valuable to other people, make an attempt to convince some focused group of people that it’s valuable for them, and then distribute it to them. This is much better than literally everything else that I’ve ever known as a business strategy before this, but it is not at a level of granularity that is actionable in any particular way.
Too much macro, and you might know that something should be possible but not how to do it, too little and everything you know how to do sucks. It seems like a more robust strategy is to be good at using macro level thinking to locate things that are likely to be very important, and then micro thinking to actually carry out a plan in that domain.
In this strategy, it seems like you would mostly be coming up with micro thoughts, just because any given thing you might do has more micro steps than macro thoughts. There are fewer abstract thoughts than detailed thoughts, and the search space is just much much smaller as you get more and more abstract, or macro.
I suppose we might also have different thresholds at which we call something macro or micro. Knowing that your tone of voice is a thing seems macro to me, but knowing that a particular tone of voice generally has this impact is micro. Something which is clearly micro, but probably not in general helpful would be something like reflecting on what tone of voice you should be use if this person brings this particular unlikely thing up in conversation.
(I found this pretty readable, and I think I got what you meant)
You bring up the awesome point that focus and attention are limited resources, and that we have to trade off between different kinds of thought processes, but I don’t think that you specified the right macro/micro interplay.
How useful a macro thought is depends on how useful locating a neighborhood in the search space is to you, and the level of abstraction that the assertion is at. If you get the right neighborhood, but lack the information necessary to use it, a small optimization might still be better.
For instance, I know that a good strategy for running a business is to create a service that’s valuable to other people, make an attempt to convince some focused group of people that it’s valuable for them, and then distribute it to them. This is much better than literally everything else that I’ve ever known as a business strategy before this, but it is not at a level of granularity that is actionable in any particular way.
Too much macro, and you might know that something should be possible but not how to do it, too little and everything you know how to do sucks. It seems like a more robust strategy is to be good at using macro level thinking to locate things that are likely to be very important, and then micro thinking to actually carry out a plan in that domain.
In this strategy, it seems like you would mostly be coming up with micro thoughts, just because any given thing you might do has more micro steps than macro thoughts. There are fewer abstract thoughts than detailed thoughts, and the search space is just much much smaller as you get more and more abstract, or macro.
I suppose we might also have different thresholds at which we call something macro or micro. Knowing that your tone of voice is a thing seems macro to me, but knowing that a particular tone of voice generally has this impact is micro. Something which is clearly micro, but probably not in general helpful would be something like reflecting on what tone of voice you should be use if this person brings this particular unlikely thing up in conversation.