Brilliant idea for a series! I spend a lot of time thinking about this; trying to understand my thoughts and consequently hack them.
It’s really interesting how much variation there is in people’s ability to comprehend the origin of thoughts. Also it’s surprising how little control, or desire for control, some people have over their decisions. Certainly seems like something that can be learnt and changed over time. I’ve seen some significant improvements myself over the past 12 months without many exterior environmental changes.
The main hurdle I hit up against is confidence in my conclusions—introspection can’t be scientific by definition. I find it really difficult to measure improvement over time. Definitely interested to see how you deal with this!
What you observe via introspection, is not accessible to third parties, yes.
But you use those observations to build models of yourself. Those models can be made explicit and communicated to others. And they make predictions about your future behavior, so they can be tested.
Brilliant idea for a series! I spend a lot of time thinking about this; trying to understand my thoughts and consequently hack them.
It’s really interesting how much variation there is in people’s ability to comprehend the origin of thoughts. Also it’s surprising how little control, or desire for control, some people have over their decisions. Certainly seems like something that can be learnt and changed over time. I’ve seen some significant improvements myself over the past 12 months without many exterior environmental changes.
The main hurdle I hit up against is confidence in my conclusions—introspection can’t be scientific by definition. I find it really difficult to measure improvement over time. Definitely interested to see how you deal with this!
What you observe via introspection, is not accessible to third parties, yes.
But you use those observations to build models of yourself. Those models can be made explicit and communicated to others. And they make predictions about your future behavior, so they can be tested.