A bunch of Double Crux posts that I keep promising but am very bad at actually finishing.
The Last Term Problem (or why saving the world is so much harder than it seems) - A abstract decision theoretic problem that has confused me about taking actions at all for the past year.
A post on how the commonly cited paper on how “Introspection is Impossible” (Nisbett and Wilson) is misleading.
Two takes on confabulation—About how the Elephant in the Brain thesis doesn’t imply that we can’t tell what our motivations actually are, just that we aren’t usually motivated to.
A lit review on mental energy and fatigue.
A lit review on how attention works.
Most of my writing is either private strategy documents, or spur of the moment thoughts / development-nuggets that I post here.
This doesn’t capture everything, but one key piece is “People often confuse a lack of motivation to introspect with a lack of ability to introspect. The fact of confabulation does not demonstrate that people are unable articulate what’s actually happening in principle.” Very related to the other post on confabulation I note above.
Also, if I remember correctly, some of the papers in that meta analysis, just have silly setups: testing whether people can introspect into information that they couldn’t have access too. (Possible that I misunderstood or am miss-remembering.)
To give a short positive account:
All introspection depends on comparison between mental states at different points in time. You can’t introspect on some causal factor that doesn’t vary.
Also, the information has to be available at the time of introspection, ie still in short term memory.
But that gives a lot more degrees for freedom that people seem to predict, and in practice I am able to notice many subtle intentions (such as when my behavior is motivated by signalling), that others want to throw out as unknowable.
Some off the top of my head.
A bunch of Double Crux posts that I keep promising but am very bad at actually finishing.
The Last Term Problem (or why saving the world is so much harder than it seems) - A abstract decision theoretic problem that has confused me about taking actions at all for the past year.
A post on how the commonly cited paper on how “Introspection is Impossible” (Nisbett and Wilson) is misleading.
Two takes on confabulation—About how the Elephant in the Brain thesis doesn’t imply that we can’t tell what our motivations actually are, just that we aren’t usually motivated to.
A lit review on mental energy and fatigue.
A lit review on how attention works.
Most of my writing is either private strategy documents, or spur of the moment thoughts / development-nuggets that I post here.
Can you too-tersely summarize your Nisbett and Wilson argument?
Or, like… writer a teaser / movie trailer for it, if you’re worried your summary would be incomplete or inoculating?
This doesn’t capture everything, but one key piece is “People often confuse a lack of motivation to introspect with a lack of ability to introspect. The fact of confabulation does not demonstrate that people are unable articulate what’s actually happening in principle.” Very related to the other post on confabulation I note above.
Also, if I remember correctly, some of the papers in that meta analysis, just have silly setups: testing whether people can introspect into information that they couldn’t have access too. (Possible that I misunderstood or am miss-remembering.)
To give a short positive account:
All introspection depends on comparison between mental states at different points in time. You can’t introspect on some causal factor that doesn’t vary.
Also, the information has to be available at the time of introspection, ie still in short term memory.
But that gives a lot more degrees for freedom that people seem to predict, and in practice I am able to notice many subtle intentions (such as when my behavior is motivated by signalling), that others want to throw out as unknowable.