Upon updating my list, I found that dozens of bugs—many of which had been problems for months—“fixed themselves”. Of course, I tackled a good number consciously using the techniques outlined thus far, but I’m quite surprised that I was able to resolve so many others without breaking stride.
My first thought is that the act of enumeration made me more prone to noticing when these problems cropped up, prompting me to take time each day to bugfix without even realizing what I was doing.
An extreme variant of this is an exercise where you spend 5 minutes explaining to yourself why all of your bugs are secretly the same bug, then solving that one.
Yes, totally. At some point you realize that solving every problem consciously is an exercise in futility, and all this intentional rationality practice is really just practice for training your subconscious to automatically think in the right patterns and solve your actual problems with no apparent effort.
Upon updating my list, I found that dozens of bugs—many of which had been problems for months—“fixed themselves”. Of course, I tackled a good number consciously using the techniques outlined thus far, but I’m quite surprised that I was able to resolve so many others without breaking stride.
My first thought is that the act of enumeration made me more prone to noticing when these problems cropped up, prompting me to take time each day to bugfix without even realizing what I was doing.
An extreme variant of this is an exercise where you spend 5 minutes explaining to yourself why all of your bugs are secretly the same bug, then solving that one.
Yes, totally. At some point you realize that solving every problem consciously is an exercise in futility, and all this intentional rationality practice is really just practice for training your subconscious to automatically think in the right patterns and solve your actual problems with no apparent effort.