Besides being a thing I can just decide, my decision to stay sane is also something that I implement by not writing an expectation of future insanity into my internal script / pseudo-predictive sort-of-world-model that instead connects to motor output.
Does implementing a trigger action plan by simulating observing the trigger and then taking the action, which needs to call up your visual, kinaesthetic and other senses, route through similar machinery to what you’re describing here? Because it sounds vaguely similar, but: A) I wouldn’t describe what I do the way you did, B) the interpretation I’m making feels vague and free-floating instead of rigidly binding to my experience with interfacing with my unconscious cognition, so I suspect talking about different things even if the rest of your description (e.g. the brain having a muddled type system) felt familiar.
That does sound similar to me! But I haven’t gotten a lot of mileage out of TAPs and if you’re referring to some specific advanced version of it, maybe I’m off. But the basic concept of mentally rehearsing the trigger, the intended action, and (in some variations) the later sequence of events leading up to an outcome you feel is good, sure sounds to me like trying to load a plan into a predictorlike thing that has been repurposed to output plan images.
Hmm, interesting. I think what confused me is: 1) Your warning. 2) You sound like you have deeper access to your unconscious, somehow “closer to the metal”, rather than what I feel like I do, which is submitting an API request of the right type. 3) Your use cases sound more spontaneous.
I’m not referring to more advanced TAPs, just the basics, which I also haven’t got much mileage out of. (My bottleneck is that a lot of the most useful actions require pretty tricky triggers. Usually, I can’t find a good cue to anchor on, and have to rely on more delicate or abstract sensations, which are too subtle for me to really notice in the moment, recall or simulate. I’d be curious to know if you’ve got a solution to this problem.)
That said, playing with TAPs helped me realize what type of conscious signals my unconscious can actually pick up on, which is useful. For me, a big use case is updating my value estimator for various actions. I query my estimator, do the action, reflect on the experience, and submit it to my unconscious and blam! Suddenly I’m more enthusiastic about pushing through confusion when doing maths.
BTW, is this class of skills we’re discussing all that you meant by “thinking at the 5-second level”? Because for some reason, I thought you meant I should reconstruct your entire mental stack-trace during the 5 seconds I made an error, simulate plausible counterfactual histories and upvote the ones that avoid the error. This takes like an hour to do, even for chains of thought that last like 10 seconds, which was entirely impractical. Yet, I’ve just been assuming you could somehow do this in like 30s, which meant I had a massive skill issue. It would be good to know if that’s not the case so I can avoid a dead-end in the cognitive-surgery skill tree.
Does implementing a trigger action plan by simulating observing the trigger and then taking the action, which needs to call up your visual, kinaesthetic and other senses, route through similar machinery to what you’re describing here? Because it sounds vaguely similar, but: A) I wouldn’t describe what I do the way you did, B) the interpretation I’m making feels vague and free-floating instead of rigidly binding to my experience with interfacing with my unconscious cognition, so I suspect talking about different things even if the rest of your description (e.g. the brain having a muddled type system) felt familiar.
That does sound similar to me! But I haven’t gotten a lot of mileage out of TAPs and if you’re referring to some specific advanced version of it, maybe I’m off. But the basic concept of mentally rehearsing the trigger, the intended action, and (in some variations) the later sequence of events leading up to an outcome you feel is good, sure sounds to me like trying to load a plan into a predictorlike thing that has been repurposed to output plan images.
Hmm, interesting. I think what confused me is: 1) Your warning. 2) You sound like you have deeper access to your unconscious, somehow “closer to the metal”, rather than what I feel like I do, which is submitting an API request of the right type. 3) Your use cases sound more spontaneous.
I’m not referring to more advanced TAPs, just the basics, which I also haven’t got much mileage out of. (My bottleneck is that a lot of the most useful actions require pretty tricky triggers. Usually, I can’t find a good cue to anchor on, and have to rely on more delicate or abstract sensations, which are too subtle for me to really notice in the moment, recall or simulate. I’d be curious to know if you’ve got a solution to this problem.)
That said, playing with TAPs helped me realize what type of conscious signals my unconscious can actually pick up on, which is useful. For me, a big use case is updating my value estimator for various actions. I query my estimator, do the action, reflect on the experience, and submit it to my unconscious and blam! Suddenly I’m more enthusiastic about pushing through confusion when doing maths.
BTW, is this class of skills we’re discussing all that you meant by “thinking at the 5-second level”? Because for some reason, I thought you meant I should reconstruct your entire mental stack-trace during the 5 seconds I made an error, simulate plausible counterfactual histories and upvote the ones that avoid the error. This takes like an hour to do, even for chains of thought that last like 10 seconds, which was entirely impractical. Yet, I’ve just been assuming you could somehow do this in like 30s, which meant I had a massive skill issue. It would be good to know if that’s not the case so I can avoid a dead-end in the cognitive-surgery skill tree.