I would not normally vote on this post, as the technique of “How could I have thought that faster?” seems extremely obvious to me but also very important if you are not in fact trying to improve your thinking after being surprised (or any other shortcoming). Since this post has 241 upvotes and multiple comments from people (example: Said Achmiz, who is not an idiot!) and others disagreeing with the framing, I have review-upvoted this post.
I think the framing of “think it faster” is specifically something you should track, beyond just “What did I learn here really?” (which I see as important subskills that help you figure out how to think it faster) or “How could I have thought that with less information?” (which I see as fully subordinate to thinking it faster, because you get later info later). By focusing on thinking it faster, you focus on cognitive strategies—on how you could’ve approached the issue differently with what you knew at the time, or maybe you should’ve put more/less stock in a certain kind of evidence.
The main problem with this post is that it gives no guide for how to go about learning how to think faster. Maybe you can’t come up with a good guide, but for this sort of thing a list of examples is itself useful.
Here’s a list of examples (that are too abstracted—next time I encounter something that I see how I could’ve thought it faster, I’ll write it down, and when I’ve gotten a bunch I’ll either post about it or add to this comment):
Say I am trying to prove a theorem. I will pursue a couple approaches, and then finally get something that works. When I look back on what I did, I will often find that I should’ve known better. Common problems:
Spending too much time up front trying a direct approach instead of just looking at small examples.
Not previously picking up on a general strategy for problems similar to the one at issue.
Spending a bunch of time trying to prove the theorem true/false and could’ve quickly figured it out had I switched to the other one earlier.
Performing the “error analysis” feels like it’s a significant contributor to my mathematical (or physics) progress.
Likewise, for more mundane life stuff:
Caching a thought on poor justification back when I was younger (and dumber). Especially if I was a kid when I cached it! Examples: Using shaving cream (it in fact actually works to make shaving not hurt), becoming a vegetarian (younger me had some shaky justification for not doing so). The implication is that I should more readily question what I take for granted, and mentally “decay” the trust I put in them as time elapses from when I last considered it.
Rationalizing to myself at multiple earlier points, or that I had ignored intuitive feelings of wrongness or confusion.
Ignoring plenty of early warning signals that I should’ve acted on.
Consistently making an error in the same direction instead veering hard the other way (assuming that it’s not risky to do so). For example, when learning to park a car I noticed that I was constantly turning in too early, and so I then decided to turn way later (against my intuitions). This instantly improved my parking a lot. It also suggests that I should apply this strategy everywhere. For tasks where failing in one direction isn’t much worse than failing in the other, you should shoot for being just as likely to miss in every direction—so if you expect yourself to turn too early, you should turn later until you are just as worried about turning too late (assuming you’re in an empty parking lot where you don’t have to worry about overshoots hitting someone).
Or when I’m surprised by e.g. the news or a factoid, I might’ve:
Under (or over) estimated how common a certain phenomena is (“Weird outcome X actually occurs in 70% of cases”)
Underestimated the state of the art in some field (like gwern’s list of side channel attacks like determining what someone was saying by watching a bag of potato chips or identifying you by your heartbeat as detected by an invisible laser from 200 m away
That there a bunch of pieces of evidence that I failed to notice or consider that could’ve predicted it (usually I discover these by making surprised sounds at my friends. Your mileage might vary if your friends aren’t as good at examining their reasons for not being surprised or if they wouldn’t feel surprised by it either way)
The best updates are more general, but unfortunately those are harder to discover.
I would not normally vote on this post, as the technique of “How could I have thought that faster?” seems extremely obvious to me but also very important if you are not in fact trying to improve your thinking after being surprised (or any other shortcoming). Since this post has 241 upvotes and multiple comments from people (example: Said Achmiz, who is not an idiot!) and others disagreeing with the framing, I have review-upvoted this post.
I think the framing of “think it faster” is specifically something you should track, beyond just “What did I learn here really?” (which I see as important subskills that help you figure out how to think it faster) or “How could I have thought that with less information?” (which I see as fully subordinate to thinking it faster, because you get later info later). By focusing on thinking it faster, you focus on cognitive strategies—on how you could’ve approached the issue differently with what you knew at the time, or maybe you should’ve put more/less stock in a certain kind of evidence.
The main problem with this post is that it gives no guide for how to go about learning how to think faster. Maybe you can’t come up with a good guide, but for this sort of thing a list of examples is itself useful.
Here’s a list of examples (that are too abstracted—next time I encounter something that I see how I could’ve thought it faster, I’ll write it down, and when I’ve gotten a bunch I’ll either post about it or add to this comment):
Say I am trying to prove a theorem. I will pursue a couple approaches, and then finally get something that works. When I look back on what I did, I will often find that I should’ve known better. Common problems:
Spending too much time up front trying a direct approach instead of just looking at small examples.
Not previously picking up on a general strategy for problems similar to the one at issue.
Spending a bunch of time trying to prove the theorem true/false and could’ve quickly figured it out had I switched to the other one earlier. Performing the “error analysis” feels like it’s a significant contributor to my mathematical (or physics) progress.
Likewise, for more mundane life stuff:
Caching a thought on poor justification back when I was younger (and dumber). Especially if I was a kid when I cached it! Examples: Using shaving cream (it in fact actually works to make shaving not hurt), becoming a vegetarian (younger me had some shaky justification for not doing so). The implication is that I should more readily question what I take for granted, and mentally “decay” the trust I put in them as time elapses from when I last considered it.
Rationalizing to myself at multiple earlier points, or that I had ignored intuitive feelings of wrongness or confusion.
Ignoring plenty of early warning signals that I should’ve acted on.
Consistently making an error in the same direction instead veering hard the other way (assuming that it’s not risky to do so). For example, when learning to park a car I noticed that I was constantly turning in too early, and so I then decided to turn way later (against my intuitions). This instantly improved my parking a lot. It also suggests that I should apply this strategy everywhere. For tasks where failing in one direction isn’t much worse than failing in the other, you should shoot for being just as likely to miss in every direction—so if you expect yourself to turn too early, you should turn later until you are just as worried about turning too late (assuming you’re in an empty parking lot where you don’t have to worry about overshoots hitting someone).
Or when I’m surprised by e.g. the news or a factoid, I might’ve:
Under (or over) estimated how common a certain phenomena is (“Weird outcome X actually occurs in 70% of cases”)
Underestimated the state of the art in some field (like gwern’s list of side channel attacks like determining what someone was saying by watching a bag of potato chips or identifying you by your heartbeat as detected by an invisible laser from 200 m away
That there a bunch of pieces of evidence that I failed to notice or consider that could’ve predicted it (usually I discover these by making surprised sounds at my friends. Your mileage might vary if your friends aren’t as good at examining their reasons for not being surprised or if they wouldn’t feel surprised by it either way)
The best updates are more general, but unfortunately those are harder to discover.