“(A friend has reported an analogous “superpower” where they tend to automatically imagine future scenarios such as how an interpersonal interaction might go, which lets them rapidly iterate on plans using “inner simulator” before taking the comparatively expensive step of trying one out in practice.)”
Hmm...I tend to do this too, and assumed it was a common cognitive ability. Getting accurate sims of the future is nontrivial and hard though...a problem that gets worse if one starts extending the simulation temporally. I agree this is a good idea generally speaking...but there is a tradeoff here...every sim needs data to constrain future versions and for model refinement, so I suspect there would be situational constraints on how many such iterations one can run internally. After all, paralysis by analysis is a thing.
“(A friend has reported an analogous “superpower” where they tend to automatically imagine future scenarios such as how an interpersonal interaction might go, which lets them rapidly iterate on plans using “inner simulator” before taking the comparatively expensive step of trying one out in practice.)”
Hmm...I tend to do this too, and assumed it was a common cognitive ability. Getting accurate sims of the future is nontrivial and hard though...a problem that gets worse if one starts extending the simulation temporally. I agree this is a good idea generally speaking...but there is a tradeoff here...every sim needs data to constrain future versions and for model refinement, so I suspect there would be situational constraints on how many such iterations one can run internally. After all, paralysis by analysis is a thing.