I read this and think “ah, yes, this is valuable and important and I should be trying to do that more”. And thought as much when I first read it. I don’t think it stayed on my mind. It’s too compressed and not a ready a cognitive strategy.
But taking a few moments to extrapolate it into something better, starting with why I’m not doing it to begin with:
A reason I don’t do more of this is I can’t do this on the order of 30 seconds. My guess is constructing a picture of what mental operations I did and what I could have done alone is the work of many minutes.
For the kinds of reasoning I really wish I’d done faster, they happened over time and it really would take a bunch of mental excavation to reconstruct my reasoning.
I don’t have a well-specified ontology for mental operations such that it’s easy to specify changes. (In contrast, I have a very clear ontology for driving a car and realize error + rehearse doing it differently in 30 seconds feels doable there). This means the work of figuring out how to do better is trying to carve out descriptions of what went wrong.
The things that went wrong run deep, or something, into weird emotional territory that are hard to analyze.
Solving problems and reaching true conclusions is hard enough that I’m caught up on that level, from one problem to the next, such that I feel too busy for reflection.
Yet I don’t fully buy all the above.
I do think that to do more of this, to make it a habit, it’ll need intentional practice. Scheduled blocks of 30-min on the schedule. Seems worth it, I should add it to ye old exobrain to remind me. I’m forming an intention to try it.
The other piece is the noticing. I don’t think I have a part of my brain that registers a “reached some milestone” event such that other actions could be triggered by it. Something, something Logan’s Noticing sequence. I’ll try that.
Ok, so where does that leave me regarding this crosspost?
I want to give this a 4 because it’s Rationality stuff from Eliezer. I don’t think I can because that great seeming, I don’t see that people will have a lot to do with it, without a bunch of unpacking (as I’m attempting). Then again, if I do the post-inspired work for a while and get great gains, I might want to say “it was short, but it had such a large effect on me it, it was def worth a 4 or even 9!”
I read this and think “ah, yes, this is valuable and important and I should be trying to do that more”. And thought as much when I first read it. I don’t think it stayed on my mind. It’s too compressed and not a ready a cognitive strategy.
But taking a few moments to extrapolate it into something better, starting with why I’m not doing it to begin with:
A reason I don’t do more of this is I can’t do this on the order of 30 seconds. My guess is constructing a picture of what mental operations I did and what I could have done alone is the work of many minutes.
For the kinds of reasoning I really wish I’d done faster, they happened over time and it really would take a bunch of mental excavation to reconstruct my reasoning.
I don’t have a well-specified ontology for mental operations such that it’s easy to specify changes. (In contrast, I have a very clear ontology for driving a car and realize error + rehearse doing it differently in 30 seconds feels doable there). This means the work of figuring out how to do better is trying to carve out descriptions of what went wrong.
The things that went wrong run deep, or something, into weird emotional territory that are hard to analyze.
Solving problems and reaching true conclusions is hard enough that I’m caught up on that level, from one problem to the next, such that I feel too busy for reflection.
Yet I don’t fully buy all the above.
I do think that to do more of this, to make it a habit, it’ll need intentional practice. Scheduled blocks of 30-min on the schedule. Seems worth it, I should add it to ye old exobrain to remind me. I’m forming an intention to try it.
The other piece is the noticing. I don’t think I have a part of my brain that registers a “reached some milestone” event such that other actions could be triggered by it. Something, something Logan’s Noticing sequence. I’ll try that.
Ok, so where does that leave me regarding this crosspost?
I want to give this a 4 because it’s Rationality stuff from Eliezer. I don’t think I can because that great seeming, I don’t see that people will have a lot to do with it, without a bunch of unpacking (as I’m attempting). Then again, if I do the post-inspired work for a while and get great gains, I might want to say “it was short, but it had such a large effect on me it, it was def worth a 4 or even 9!”