I’ve been thinking about “shortening the way” a lot lately. I’m really glad to see someone else is too.
I did a super rapid, 20 minutes, collect as many data sources about this as possible a few weeks ago. I still haven’t audited them. But there they are anyway. They’re all markdown still bc I’m typing on mobile. Apologies.
I know some ppl feel like deconcentration of attention has iffy pseudoscientific connotations, but I deliberately use it ~every day when I try to recall threads-of-thought at the periphery of my short-term memory. The correct scope for the technique is fuzzy, and it depends on whether the target-memory is likely to be near the focal point of your concentration or further out.
I also sometimes deliberately slow down the act of zooming-in (concentrating) on a particular question/idea/hunch, if I feel like zooming in too fast is likely to cause me to prematurely lock on to a false-positive in a way that makes it harder to search the neighbourhood (i.e. einstellung / imprinting on a distraction). I’m not clear on when exactly I use this technique, but I’ve built up an intuition for situations in which I’m likely to be einstellunged by something. To build that intuition, consider:
WHEN you notice you’ve einstellunged on a false-positive
I’ve been thinking about “shortening the way” a lot lately. I’m really glad to see someone else is too.
I did a super rapid, 20 minutes, collect as many data sources about this as possible a few weeks ago. I still haven’t audited them. But there they are anyway. They’re all markdown still bc I’m typing on mobile. Apologies.
“How could I have thought that faster?”
Tuning your Cognitive Strategies
What’s up with psychonetics?
deconcentration-of-attention
Deconcentration of Attention: Addressing the Complexity of Software Engineering
Psychonetics: a methodology to work with mind and perception
Ithkuil
Notice your everything
“Focusing,” for skeptics.
Babble and Prune
BE WELL TUNED
PAUSE YOUR FEEDBACK LOOPS
“Fractal Strategy” workshop report
The 5-Second Level
Meditation: a self-experiment
How and Why to Granularize
Native mental representations that give huge speedups on problems?
Brienne Strohl on Hacking Memory
What It’s Like To Notice Things
Agenty Duck
I know some ppl feel like deconcentration of attention has iffy pseudoscientific connotations, but I deliberately use it ~every day when I try to recall threads-of-thought at the periphery of my short-term memory. The correct scope for the technique is fuzzy, and it depends on whether the target-memory is likely to be near the focal point of your concentration or further out.
I also sometimes deliberately slow down the act of zooming-in (concentrating) on a particular question/idea/hunch, if I feel like zooming in too fast is likely to cause me to prematurely lock on to a false-positive in a way that makes it harder to search the neighbourhood (i.e. einstellung / imprinting on a distraction). I’m not clear on when exactly I use this technique, but I’ve built up an intuition for situations in which I’m likely to be einstellunged by something. To build that intuition, consider:
WHEN you notice you’ve einstellunged on a false-positive
eg tip-of-the-tongue experience
THEN check if you could’ve predicted that at the start of that chain-of-thought
After a few occurrences of this, you may start to intuit which chains-of-thought you ought to slow down in.