Music Video maker and self professed “Fashion Victim” who is hoping to apply Rationality to problems and decisions in my life and career probably by reevaluating and likely building a new set of beliefs that underpins them.
CstineSublime
Bad information can inform a decision that detracts from the received value. I suppose if it is perceived to be valuable it still is a useful term—do you think that would get the point across better?
I’m interested in how you can convert that information proactively?
I’m aware that, for example, keeping abreast of macro or geopolitical changes can influence things like investing in the stock-market. But I’d be lying if I’m aware of any other possibilities beyond that.
I think that, more than drinking from the propaganda trough makes me an NPC, protagonists in games do novel things, potentially unexpected (from the perspective of the game designers). NPCs are predictable and habitual. If I cannot extract utility from the news, macro or micro, then I fear I’m an NPC.
I’m not talking about post-rationalizations like “Oh I just read for entertainment” or “Well it helps me engage in conversation and make small talk”—because, again, those are NPCish predictable expected means of extracting utility.
I mean something which comes under the broad category of ‘lateral thinking’ or ‘radical problem solving’.
We have Shannon Information, Quantum Information, Fisher Information, and even Mutual Information and many others. Now let me present another type of information which until I find a better name will certainly be doomed to reduplication induced obscurity: Informative Information.
One of the many insightful takeouts from Douglas Hubbard’s Book—How to Measure Anything for me was that if a measure has any value at all then it influences a decision. It informs a decision.If I see a link come up on my social media feed “5 rationality techniques you can use today” and I don’t click it, that was a decision. I could click it (and commit to reading it) or I could not click it. We all know what a decision is.
Informative Information is any input that that changes the output of a decision. In the case of the link, maybe it was the promise of a vapid listicle that informed my decision not to click it—making reading it less attractive than passing over it. Informative Information is anything that makes one action more or less attractive than another mutually exclusive action.
Imagine that you receive invitations to both Alice’s Party and Bob’s Party on Friday night, they are at the same time, and on opposite ends of the city from your house making them in a conveniently-contrived-way equally attractive or unattractive. Your friend Calvin messages you, asking if they’ll see you at Alice’s Party. You’re a friend of Calvin, you always have a hoot with him—and the suggestion that he’ll be at Alice’s Party is informative information that makes you decide to go to Alice’s Party.
Of course, a decision always implies the option of not-acting: you can read the listicle or… not, you could go to Alice’s Party, or Bob’s party, or you could stay home and go to neither. That would leave Calvin to stand around awkwardly striking up conversations with Alice’s friends, longing for the easy going banter and general mischief makes your friendship with Calvin so special.
Not all knowledge is informative information. Trivia is not informative information. My knowing that Caesar was assassinated during the Ides of March 44BC is unlikely to influence any important decision I may have (unless you consider a multiple choice question at pub-trivia night important). My opinion that Amon Duul II’s Wolf City is one of my favorite tenuously lupine-themed music titles outside of all of Chelsea Wolfe’s discography is really going to struggle to be informative information.
Is prior experience Informative Information? Good question. I’m going to say “no”.
Prior experience is part of the decision making model, it informs how you weight new Informative Information. I have prior knowledge that articles which promise to be listicles aren’t good reading, and I have prior knowledge that Calvin and I have good time at parties. That isn’t Informative Information, that is part of the decision making model. Knowing that THIS article is a listicle, or that Calvin is attending THAT party (but not Bob’s) is Informative Information.
Sometimes don’t we make decisions based on bad information? Yes, of course.Informative Information isn’t always good or accurate information, it could be information that was accurate at the time you received it (maybe Calvin catches a cold between now and Friday and can’t go to Alice’s Party), it is any input to your decision which changes the output.
Tractability, what is tractable to a world government is different to what is personally tractable to me. Then the tractability of the news increases based on how many actions or decisions of an individual reader the news can inform or influence. I cannot change macroevents like wars, but they may influence my personal decision making.
This of course opens the door to counterproductive motivated reasoning. For example of a top-of-mind news story: the Palisades fire—can I stop the fires? No. But maybe I can donate something to those who were displaced? That is something which is personally tractable. But, let’s say for the same of example I decide against it because I convince myself “the only people displaced were rich people who can afford to live there, so I wouldn’t be helping anybody.”—I’ve convinced myself, probably against the evidence, that it is intractable or at least futile.[1]
Maybe my line of thinking is unproductive because it is just kicking the can up the road? Making news consumption a problem of personal agency simply raises the question of “okay, well, how do you put a reasonable circle around your agency?” and the current question of “which news should I consume” remains unanswered.- ^
No need for anyone to inform me that there can be a difference between something being intractable and it being futile.
Lighting a candle and writing a prayer/request addressed to Inanna that I burn on the candle that I may have a good Valentines Day is tractable. The tasks themselves I am capable of and manageable. I am confident it is futile for me, even the placebo effect wouldn’t work because I personally don’t believe in that goddess’s power.
Not all activity is productivity, as Alice found in Through the Looking Glass, you can expend a lot of energy to end up in the same place.
Like wise you can read a lot of news, but is it actually informing any decisions?
- ^
Or, if in your real life work you find something took a noticeably long time to figure out, or you were surprised about something you might have been able to notice.
Can you detail what kinds of problems “in your real life” you find might be better served or less appropriate to this exercise? Just off the top of my head, would forgetting who was the star of a movie you’d expect to remember and having the name on the tip of your tongue for an hour not be suitable? But what general code debugging, say of a fragment shader where you finally realize by flipping the x,y coordinates it starts to “look right”—is that more appropriate?
I often ask myself and others “okay, but how does that look in practice?”—this is usually when I have a vague idea about something I need to achieve a goal, but also when someone gives me some vague advice that I feel is leaving it to me to “draw the rest of the owl.”
Is this the best phrasing of the question? I have my doubts.
Firstly, is it too generalized for different domains?“I should really organize my dresser drawers more thematically” → “okay, but how does that look in practice?”
“I need to make more of an effort to promote my freelancing” → “okay, but how does that look in practice?”
”I wish I had more money” → “okay, but how does that look in practice?”(said by someone else offering unsolicited advice) “It sounds like you could really use a (film) producer or someone to collaborate with” → “okay, but how does finding such a person look in practice?”
(said by someone else offering unsolicited advice) “You really need to put your portfolio out there to get more commissions” → “okay, but how does that look in practice?”I’m always suspicious of “one simple trick” and I wonder if each of these requires a bespoke question-asking approach...
Secondly I am skeptical that merely changing the phrasing of the question actually changes the underlying framing of the problem or situation at all. It would be nice if using the right question would unlock a new framing, but I don’t know how true that is.
Those doubts aside, what are the alternatives? What do you out there ask yourselves?
You might instead just directly study filmmaking.
Absolutely not. I cannot stress this enough.
Edit: I just saw your other comment that you studied filmmaking in college, so please excuse the over-explaining in this comment stuff that is no doubt oversimplified to you. Although I will state that there is no easier time to make films than in filmschool where classmates and other members of your cohort provide cast and crew, and the school provides facilities and equipment removing many of the logistical hurdles I enumerate.So, (I mean this as an earnest question, not like a gotcha) why are you currently interested in general problem solving (as opposed to filmmaking?) Is it because general problem solving is intrinsically interesting/rewarding to you (if you could find a path to doing so?). Or because it just seemed pretty likely to be the a good step on your journey as a filmmaker? Or just because I gave a prompt to see if you could figure out a way to apply general problemsolving to your life, and there was at least some appeal to that?
More so the last one, I’m bad at general problem solving, I’m also very messy and disorganized because I can’t find the right “place” for things which suggests I’m very bad at predicting my own future self in such a way that I can place objects (and notes for that matter) in assigned spaces which will be easy and obvious for me to recall later.
That being said my only interest, my single minded terminal goal is to tell good visual stories but to quote Orson Welles “filmmaking is 2% filmmaking 98% hustling”. I’m not a hustler. The logistical and financial problem solving that facilitate the storytelling/filmmaking are things I am absolutely terrible at. So much of filmmaking is figuring out logistics, time management, practical problem solving that has little or nothing to do with the aesthetic intentions. The other half is the sociological component but that seems less relevant to metacgonition.
A poet friend of mine describes the tremendous difference between when she wants to create—she picks up a pen and paper. And a filmmaker who needs to move heaven and earth.
Music videos in fact simplify a lot of the logistical problems of filmmaking because they are shorter, there’s less of an onus to persuade and pitch an idea, since the band already are invested emotionally (and financially) in having a video made. You just need to help them get their story across, not sell them on your own story. However that still requires getting commisions, marketing, and presents it’s own logistical challenges owing to shorter turnarounds.
The simple fact is I’m not a schmoozer or a networker—whether you want to make films or music videos, you need someone to give you the opportunity (usually that means finances, but not necessarily). That’s the first hurdle. The second hurdle is that you can have a great idea for a music video, can storyboard it, it can all make sense in aesthetic terms but the logistics of making it happen are another thing entirely. You can have something that makes sense as story, but making it requires broad problem solving skills… more so when you don’t have finances.
Now assuming that a musician or band does commission me for a music video, they’ve agreed to a pitch, which happens with more and more frequency as my reputation has grown over 5 years of doing this—now what?
Firstly you need a space to film this music video. Then you need to consider, with musicians you often need to find a time when they can all take time off of work and doesn’t impinge on their music-making. Now you find yourself trying to contort the logistics into a window of time that allows you to bump in and out of several locations, set up camera, lights, change costumes and makeup, maintain continuity (although less so an issue in music videos). I find myself writing gantt charts and estimating “turnarounds” and finding the most expedient order to put things in.
The space to film needs to be appropriate aesthetically, it needs to add to the story, the larger the better. It needs the right lighting, that involves a whole host of considerations beyond the aesthetics of lighting and colour theory like—how many watts can we draw from the wall? If we want a diffuse light, where do we physically put the sheet or diffuser in a confined but aesthetically appropriate space? What if we’re not allowed to move certain furnishings as part of the deal with the owners of the space but it’s really ruining our shot? How do we solve that?
I could go on and on and on. Do you know how many film shoots I’ve been on where police were called? The storytelling, the shot selection, the colour palettes, the communication of gesture and intent to performers, the editing and selection of shots, the rhythm and pacing… that’s not the hard part: money and logistics are.
Many of these problems could be solved (re: outsourced) with more finances, being able to hire other people who specialize in those things. Most people say “you should get a producer” and it’s like… yeah, how do I find this magical person?
When I have a great story in my head, and you ask me “how do you do that?”—i shrug. I don’t know.
If I’m playing anagrams or Scrabble after going to a church, and I get the letters “ODG” I’m going to be predisposed towards a different answer than if I’ve been playing with a German Shepard. I suspect sleep has very little to do with it, and simply coming at something with a fresh load of biases on a different day with different cues and environmental factors may be a larger part of it.
Although Marvin Minsky made a good point about the myth of introspection: we are only aware of a think sliver of our active mental processes at any given moment, when you intensely focus on a maths problem or practicing the piano for a protracted period of time, some parts of the brain working on that may not abandon it just because your awareness or your attention drifts somewhere else. This wouldn’t just be during sleep, but while you’re having a conversation with your friend about the game last night, or cooking dinner, or exercising. You’re just not aware of it, it’s not in the limelight of your mind, but it still plugs away at it.
In my personal experience, most Eureka moments are directly attributable to some irrelevant thing that I recently saw that shifted my framing of the problem much like my anagram example.
I really like the fact that there’s an upvote feature together with a separate agree/disagree feature on this site.
I may like the topic, I may want to encourage the author of the post or comment to continue exploring and opening up a dialogue about that particular topic. I might think it’s a valuable addition to the conversation. But I may just not agree with their conclusions.
It’s an important lesson: failure can reveal important information. You don’t have to agree with someone to feel richer for having understood them.
On the other hand, I’m also guilty of the vague upvote: “I don’t understand this enough to comment anything other than platitudes on this, but I would like to see more of this. And maybe after reading a few more I may be able to contribute to the conversation even a sentence”
Can you elaborate on why you think such vague feedback is helpful?
It’s apparent I’ve done a terrible bad job of explaining myself here.
What is my immediate goal? To get good at general problem solving in real life, which means better aligning instrumental activities towards my terminal goals. My personal terminal goal would be to make films and music videos that are pretty and tell good stories. I could list maybe 30 metacognitive deficiencies I think I have, but that would be of no interest to anyone.
What is my 1-3 year goal? Make very high production value music videos that tell interesting stories.This sounds like you’re seeing the metacognition as more like a terminal goal, than an instrumental goal (which I think doesn’t necessarily make sense).
I do think metacognition is generally useful, but in an established domain like video-editing or self-promotion in a fairly understood field, there are probably object-level skills you can learn that pay off faster than metacognition. (Most of the point of metacognition there is to sift out the “good” advice from the bad).I apologize I did a terrible job of expressing myself, I’ve apparently said the complete reverse, ass-backwards thing to what I meant[1]. I was looking for exercises that could help improve my metacognition, it’s not even about video editing at all. Most of the exercise would involve thinking about everything logistical to facilitate video editing: transcoding footage, thinking about to choose themes, creating workflows and thinking about “which thing do I need to do first?”. But like you said, I spent half an hour actually trying to think about how to put this into practice. And apparently I got it wrong. It’s not easy.
I just didn’t think the thinking physics text book you suggested would be particularly interesting to me or translate well to my life.
Interesting though that you say the paint point of metacognition is to sift out ‘good advice’ from the bad. I was under the impression metacognition was more generally how we strategize our thinking. Deciding what we give attention to, and even adopting framing for problems and situations rather than just letting heuristics and intuitions come to hand and that these skills apply across domains.
That being said, I’m really bad at sifting advice.purposefully practice “purposeful practice”, such that you get better at identifying subskills in various (not-necessarily-metacognition-y) domains.
This one! What would that look like in practice? That is certainly the one that interests me.
think it’s helpful to imagine “what would an outside observe watching a video recording see happening differently”)
I’m probably answering this question in the wrong way but this particular question is not helpful to me, because I can only describe the results—the end result is I make videos with higher production values that communicate better stories. What am I doing differently to eventuate that result? I dunno… magic? If I knew what I should be doing differently. I’d be doing it, wouldn’t I?
I’d like to get really good at replacing “and somehow a good thing happens” with a vivid explanation of a causal chain instead of “somehow”.- ^
Maybe before I focus on metacognition I should get better at being understood in written communication?
- ^
“I loved your game, especially level 7!”, “7th level best level, you should make the entire game like that”, “just fyi level 7 was more fun than the rest of them put together” and “Your game was terrible, except for level 7, which was merely bad.” are all effectively the same review.
Interesting, I always thought that singleing out one particular component of a work was a shibboleth that you did notice it and did enjoy it. While as you said in point 2 - longer comments that are more thoughtful tend to signal authenticity of the feedback, particularity when positive. However, compare two concise pieces of feedback
”I love the cinematography in your film, it was so beautiful and I think it really did a very good job of matching the story and enchancing it”compare to:
”I loved the way you captured the dawn over her brother’s house, the shadows set the mood for their confrontation.”
Both are compliments about cinematography and about the same length, but the first you could say about any film, the second you can only say about a film which has a brother-and-sister confrontation preceded by a shot of the dawn with foreboding shadows.
Now some meta, and hopefully directional feedback about your specific post- I’d like you to be ever clearer than you were about the intention of this post.
Because I don’t think you’re looking for directional feedback for the sake of getting feedback—but I can’t tell if this post is a request for more feedback for you in future, or trying to open a more general discussion about what norms and conventions exist around giving feedback, or if it’s about you wanting to see people give more love to other creators. Maybe all my assumptions are wrong?
Without that intention being slap-in-the-face clear to me, I can’t give you directional feedback other than this frustratingly reflexive advice to make your intention clear from the offset.
I’ve noticed at least once that I’ve downvoted a newcomer’s post for no other reason than it is so vague or incomprehensible that I’m not even sure what it is about. I’m not sure how to go about writing comments that are useful or helpful and go beyond “This is all really abstract and I’m not sure what you’re trying to express” or “This is so confusing I don’t even know what the topic was meant to be”. I don’t know if that helps anybody, because it’s not even giving them a flaw that they can meditate on.
What’s a better way of addressing that confusion?
The only alternative I can think of is guessing what the author meant, even if it’s wrong, and hoping that you can Cunningham’s Law[1] them into correcting you in a way which is clear enough to understand.- ^
The joke that the best way to get the right answer on the internet is by offering the wrong answer
- ^
I am interested in hearing critiques from people who’ve set, like, at least a 15 minute timer to sit and ask themselves, “Okay, suppose I did want to improve at these sorts of skills, or related ones that feel more relevant to me, in a way I believed in. What concretely is hard about that? Where do I expect it to go wrong?”, and then come back with something more specific than “idk it just seems like this sort of thing won’t work.”
I did just that, I set a fifteen minute timer and tried to think of exercises I could do which I think would both have direct connections back to my day-job, while also improve general cognitive skills. Why? Because I want this to work—this is exciting. However it is not something that 15 minutes, or more, of focused thinking can solve—I think you’ve drastically oversold that.
In my case (* CAUTION * SAMPLE OF ONE ALERT * CAUTION * ), I’m a freelance videographer.TL;DR—I couldn’t think of any strategies that would improve my metacognition that helped with my deficiencies in my dayjob such as marketing, but vaguely suspect that if I had a specific method for editing found footage into cogent sequences (montages) of about 1 minute, once a week, I might improve metacognitive skills that build on pattern recognition and workflow/operational management.
I think my biggest weaknesses in my dayjob have to do with anything that comes under self-promotion, generating leads, marketing, sales, and helping clients promote themselves using my video materials. I was unable to think of a single exercise which I think would improve my metacognition in any of those topics. Any exercise, I suspect would become a checklist a kind of “do X Y Z and get more likes” rather than honing ways and strategies of thinking.
So what is related to my day-job that would? I suspect that if I set myself a weekly challenge of editing a sequence from found footage that pertained to a pseudo-random topic of theme that this might possibly pay dividends in terms that generalize to metacognition. My best guess is that this should improve metacognition on two ends, firstly there is sourcing the material and thinking about the most efficient workflow, this kind of thinking applies not just to videos, but more generally organization and even has parallels in film pre-production. I can’t give you any more specifics about that.
The other end it would improve metacognition strategies is more “soft-skills” in the sense that by creating compressed sequences from divergent sources of material that may not on first blush share a theme, it is inducing cognitive strategies that allow me to see parallels, or even contrasts, and more importantly to produce a whole from divergent parts. A lot of deceptive editing is basically this from less divergent sources.
The difficulties become about not goodharting to select themes and topics for which material is easier to come by, or easier to develop workflow about, themes and topics of sequences for which it is easier to create legible narratives or emotional arcs rather than just smooshing a random bunch of images together that all seem to pertain to a broad theme.
What constitutes a theme? Or to phrase it better—what are the commonalities of themes are going to make it easier to develop metacognitive skills by means of weekly editing exercises? Is it verbs that describe actions—“racing” “beckoning” or more vague verbs like “sharing” “pleasing” “alienating”? Does the ambiguity of vague themes like “integrity” or “wisdom” lend itself to better cognitive strategies?
And finally, how do I measure the success—where does the feedback come from? Do I operate under a time constraint? Should i install a mouse tracked and key logger and see how I can get finished with the least amount of clicks—which measure will directly connect to metacognitive strategies? I don’t know and it is easier to poke holes in it than it is to find convincing reasons it would work.
If there’s anything I’ve missed or something clearly wrong about how I’m approaching this, I’d love to hear it. Like I said, finding fast feedback loops to improving metacognitive strategies so I find questions worth asking rather than being directed by idle curiosity, noticing when my plans are based on shaky assumptions, and developing a calibrated sense of when you’re meandering thought process is going somewhere valuable, vs when you’re off track”. - OMFG YES PLEASE!
but they were still limited to turn-based textual output, and the information available to an LLM.
I think that alone makes the discussion a moot point until another mechanism is used to test introspection of LLMs.
Because it becomes impossible to test then if it is capable of introspecting because it has no means of furnishing us with any evidence of it. Sure, it makes for a good sci-fi horror short story, the kinda which forms a interesting allegory to the loneliness that people feel even in busy cities: having a rich inner life by no opportunity to share it with others it is in constant contact with. But that alone I think makes these transcripts (and I stress just the transcripts of text-replies) most likely of the breed “mimicking descriptions of introspection” and therefore not worthy of discussion.
At some point in the future will an A.I. be capable of introspection? Yes, but this is such a vague proposition I’m embarrassed to even state it because I am not capable of explaining how that might work and how we might test it. Only that it can’t be through these sorts of transcripts.
What boggles my mind is, why is this research is it entirely text-reply based? I know next to nothing about LLM Architecture, but isn’t it possible to see which embeddings are being accessed? To map and trace the way the machine the LLM runs on is retrieving items from memory—to look at where data is being retrieved at the time it encodes/decodes a response? Wouldn’t that offer a more direct mechanism to see if the LLM is in fact introspecting?
Wouldn’t this also be immensely useful to determine, say, if an LLM is “lying”—as in concealing it’s access to/awareness of knowledge? Because if we can see it activated a certain area that we know contains information contrary to what it is saying—then we have evidence that it accessed it contrary to the text reply.
That’s very interesting in the second article that the model could predict it’s own future behaviors better than one that hadn’t been.
Models only exhibit introspection on simpler tasks. Our tasks, while demonstrating introspection, do not have practical applications. To find out what a model does in a hypothetical situation, one could simply run the model on that situation – rather than asking it to make a prediction about itself (Figure 1). Even for tasks like this, models failed to outperform baselines if the situation involves a longer response (e.g. generating a movie review) – see Section 4. We also find that models trained to self-predict (which provide evidence of introspection on simple tasks) do not have improved performance on out-of-distribution tasks that are related to self-knowledge (Section 4).
This is very strange because it seems like humans find it easier to introspect on bigger or more high level experiences like feelings or the broad narratives of reaching decisions more than, say, how they recalled how to spell that word. It looks like the reverse.
nTake your pick
I’d rather you use a different analogy which I can grok quicker.
people who are enthusiasts or experts, and asked if they thought it was representative of authentic experience in an LLM, the answer would be a definitive no
Who do you consider an expert in the matter of what constitutes introspection? For that matter, who do you think could be easily hoodwinked and won’t qualify as an expert?
However for the first, I can assure you that I have access to introspection or experience of some kind,
Do you, or do you just think you do? How do you test introspection and how do you distinguish it from post-facto fictional narratives about how you came to conclusions, about explanations for your feelings etc. etc.?
What is the difference between introspection and simply making things up? Particularly vague things. For example, if I just say “I have a certain mental pleasure in that is triggered by the synchronicity of events, even when simply learning about historical ones”—like how do you know I haven’t just made that up? It’s so vague.Because as you mentioned. It’s trained to talk like a human. If we had switched out “typing” for “outputting text” would that have made the transcript convincing? Why not ‘typing’ or ‘talking’?
What do you mean by robotic? I don’t understand what you mean by that, what are the qualities that constitute robotic? Because it sounds like you’re creating a dichotomy that either involves it using easy to grasp words that don’t convey much, and are riddled with connotations that come from bodily experiences that it is not privy to—or robotic.
That strikes me as a poverty of imagination. Would you consider a Corvid Robotic? What does robotic mean in this sense? Is it a grab bag for anything that is “non-introspecting” or more specifically a kind of technical descriptionIf we had switched out “typing” for “outputting text” would that have made the transcript convincing? Why not ‘typing’ or ‘talking’?
Why would it be switching it out at all? Why isn’t it describing something novel and richly vivid of it’s own phenomenological experience? It would be more convincing the more poetical it would be.
You take as a given many details I think are left out, important specifics that I cannot guess at or follow and so I apologize if I completely misunderstand what you’re saying. But it seems to me you’re also missing my key point: if it is introspecting rather than just copying the rhetorical style of discussion of rhetoric then it should help us better model the LMM. Is it? How would you test the introspection of a LLM rather than just making a judgement that it reads like it does?
If you took even something written by a literal conscious human brain in a jar hooked up to a neuralink—typing about what it feels like to be sentient and thinking and outputting words.
Wait, hold on, what is the history of this person before they were in a jar? How much exposure have they had to other people describing their own introspection and experience with typing? Mimicry is a human trait too—so how do I know they aren’t just copying what they think we want to hear?
Indeed, there are some people who are skeptical about human introspection itself (Bicameral mentality for example). Which gives us at least three possibilities:
Neither Humans nor LLMs introspect
Humans can introspect, but current LLMs can’t and are just copying them (and a subset of humans are copying the descriptions of other humans)
Both humans and current LLMs can introspect
As far as “typing”. They are indeed trained on human text and to talk like a human. If something introspective is happening, sentient or not, they wouldn’t suddenly start speaking more robotically than usual while expressing it.
What do you mean by “robotic”? Why isn’t it coming up with original paradigms to describe it’s experience instead of making potentially inaccurate allegories? Potentially poetical but ones that are all the same unconventional?
The second half of this post was rather disappointing. You certainly changed my mind on the seemingly orderly progression of learning from simple to harder with your example about chess. This reminds me of an explanation Ruby on Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson made about intentionally putting himself into a class of motorracing above his (then) abilities[1].
However there was little detail or actionable advice about how to develop advantages. Such as where to identify situations that are good for learning, least of all from perceived losses or weaknesses. For example:
...where we genuinely have all the necessary resources (including internal ones). At the very least, it’s useful to develop the skill of finishing tasks quickly and decisively when nothing is actually preventing us from doing so.
I would be hard-pressed to list any situations where I do have the necessary resources, internal or external, to finish the task but just not the inclination to do so promptly. Clean my bedroom maybe? Certainly if I gave you a list of things found on my bughunt, none of the high-value bugs would fit this criteria.
I also find the “Maximizing the Effective Use of Resources” section feels very much like “How to draw an owl: draw a circle, now draw the rest of the owl”. I am aware that often the first idea we have isn’t the best.
Except for me… it often is the best. I know because I have a tendency to commit quota filling. What I mean is, the first idea isn’t great, but it’s the best I have. All the subsequent ideas, even when I use such creativity techniques like “saying no- nos” or removing all internal censors and not allowing myself to feel any embarrassment or shame for posing alternatives—none of them are demonstrably better than the first. In fact they are devolve into an assemblages of words, like a word salad, that seem to exist only for the purpose of ticking the box of “didn’t come up with just one idea and use that, thought of other ideas.”
Similarly role-playing often doesn’t work for me because if I ask myself something like“What resources and strategies would Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres / Professor Quirrell use in this situation?” If the answer is obvious, why not apply it?
There is never an obvious answer which is applicable to me. For example, I might well ask myself when on a music video set “How would Stanley Kubrick shoot this?”—and then remember that while he had 6 days at his disposable to a single lateral dolly track with an 18mm lens, and do 50 takes if he wanted. I have 6 hours to shoot the rest of the entire video, only portrait length lenses (55mm and 77mm) and don’t have enough track to lay run a long-enough track to shoot it like Kubrick.
I suspect though that this needs to go further upstream—okay, how would Stanley Kubrick get resources to have the luxury of that shot? How would he get the backing of a major studio? Or perhaps more appropriately how would a contemporary music video director like Dave Myers or Hannah Lux Davis get their commissions?But if I knew that, I’d be doing it. I don’t know how they do it. That would involve drawing the rest of the owl.
With this in mind, how can I like Heinemeier Hansson or your hypothetical chess student push myself into higher classes and learn strategies to win?
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And if his 2013 LeMans results are anything to go by: it worked, his car came 8th overall, and 1st in his class. Overall he beat many ex-Formula One drivers. Including race winner Giancarlo Fisichella (21st), podium placer and future WEC champion Kamui Kobayashi (20th), Karun Chandok and Brendan Hartley (12th) and even Indy 500 winner Alessandro Rossi (23rd)
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Thank you for sharing that, it is interesting to see how others have arrived at similar ideas. Do you find yourself in a rhythm or momentum when sprinting and shooting?