This series has been raising weird meta thoughts in me (and I feel somewhat bad about having only meta thoughts to contribute)
Each post has seemed obvious useful—the original Sebastian posts are interesting and relevant, the exercises you add seem genuinely, obviously useful. But I haven’t actually done them.
This has been part of an overall realization that once a LW post crosses the gap between “easy-ish to read” and “requires serious cognitive labor to be useful”, I stop investing effort in it.
Which kind of bodes ill.
In particular, once something seems to take real cognitive effort to derive value from, I start wondering “is this really the best use for my [limited] Serious Cognitive Effort” (compared to, say, learning Machine Learning, which currently is a major item on my to-do list)
It’s particularly noteworthy that I think your posts are definitely useful and relevant. I’m not sure if the fact that I haven’t done the exercises is a note about an internal bug on my part, or a reflection of a System-1 belief that even if they’re valuable they’re still not the most valuable thing on my docket.
Actually doing the excerises has also been the highest friction part of writing these. For the earlier ones I would often apply the questions to something I hadn’t given thought to perviously, but for the last few I’ve been using past examples of having done the excersize, sort of copping out.
The only thing that comes to mind on for “being able to act on and do useful excersizes” is the idea of building into one’s routines a time specifically for applying whatever the most recent useful advice has been. Or a micro habit of “spend 5 minutes following through”, though I’m unsure how quickly that particular tactic would consume time, given how much one might read in a day.
This series has been raising weird meta thoughts in me (and I feel somewhat bad about having only meta thoughts to contribute)
Each post has seemed obvious useful—the original Sebastian posts are interesting and relevant, the exercises you add seem genuinely, obviously useful. But I haven’t actually done them.
This has been part of an overall realization that once a LW post crosses the gap between “easy-ish to read” and “requires serious cognitive labor to be useful”, I stop investing effort in it.
Which kind of bodes ill.
In particular, once something seems to take real cognitive effort to derive value from, I start wondering “is this really the best use for my [limited] Serious Cognitive Effort” (compared to, say, learning Machine Learning, which currently is a major item on my to-do list)
It’s particularly noteworthy that I think your posts are definitely useful and relevant. I’m not sure if the fact that I haven’t done the exercises is a note about an internal bug on my part, or a reflection of a System-1 belief that even if they’re valuable they’re still not the most valuable thing on my docket.
Actually doing the excerises has also been the highest friction part of writing these. For the earlier ones I would often apply the questions to something I hadn’t given thought to perviously, but for the last few I’ve been using past examples of having done the excersize, sort of copping out.
The only thing that comes to mind on for “being able to act on and do useful excersizes” is the idea of building into one’s routines a time specifically for applying whatever the most recent useful advice has been. Or a micro habit of “spend 5 minutes following through”, though I’m unsure how quickly that particular tactic would consume time, given how much one might read in a day.
Thanks for the feedback, even if it’s meta.