i haven’t attempted to “switch” modes per se before as i’ve just encountered OP’s framing. so i’ll reply about attempting to do particular things.
for me, attempting to do something is already a lot of the way there. my most common failure case after reaching ‘attempting’ is that i stop doing the thing i started, or only start in a symbolic way. and my actual starting point is not attempting, but the abstract recognizing/knowing that doing something would be (instrumentally) good. it is going from that to doing things (and instead of other, useless things) which i struggle with. (note: i have adhd/chronic fatigue.)
(i could write a fuller answer to ‘what happens’ with examples (many things can happen), but i tried and felt conflicted about sharing it publicly, in which case i have a heuristic not to until at least a day later.)
Not sure I quite parsed, but things that makes me think of:
first, if you’re bottlenecked on health (physical or mental), it may be that finding medication that helps is more important than your mindset.
try success spiralling – start doing small things, build up both a habit/muscle of doing things, and momentum in doing things, escalate to bigger things
if getting started is hard, maybe find a friend or pay a colleague to just sit with you and constantly be like “are you doing stuff?” and spray you with a water bottle if you look like you’re overthinking stuff, until you build up a success spiral / muscle of doing things.
try doing doing doing just fucking do it man and when you’re brain is like “idk that seems like a whole lotta doing what if we’re doing the wrong thing?” be like “it’s okay Thinky Brain this is an experiment we will learn from later so we evetually can calibrate on Optimal Think-to-Do Ratio”
[Warning: speculative advice from pure personal experience/self-analysis]
Right now I am trying the following:
If you are overthinker, it probably means that you are already good at stopping. Try to apply ability to stop to the process of not-doing (being that overthinking or scrolling or doing something that mostly serves as distraction)
After that, find the time and place where you can do stuff safely and just do stuff. Your goal is to shift balance between doing and not-doing towards doing, so you should just lower threshold of starting action. You think you can use a stretch? Stop thinking and stretch. Write serious thoughts on twitter. Cook something or do laundry. Et cetera.
It’s important to be in safe place and time because doing everything you think about is quite dangerous if there are expensive purchases available or unprotected sex/drugs/alcohol.
After that you can move towards doing what you want to do. Keep it “safe” in a sense that you don’t need to, say, write perfect post about your totalizing worldview on Lesswrong. Write a draft. Write to a person you can discuss ideas with and ask LLM for summary of discussion. Do easy tasks around whatever you want to do. It helps me to remember how I was a kid and I just read various science textbooks even if I didn’t get the full understanding of the topic just because reading science stuff is cool.
In the end, if you have executive dysfunction, you are probably going to become tired. While working through tiredness is important, at this point you should recognize tiredness and go rest. In my hypothesis, scrolling is a bad way to rest, because it actually eats up a lot of cognitive power, so you probably should do something unitary and simple (light exercise, simple fiction, etc). Ideally, you should feel like you can work a tiny bit more.
Overall process: stop not-doing—start doing—start doing important stuff—rest—repeat.
My impression is that, unfortunately, there is no centralized mechanism for switching. It’s just multiple different systems in your brain competing in activity and you should try to balance them in timely manner.
Try to apply ability to stop to the process of not-doing
amazing. i just need to turn my tendency towards deconstruction inwards. :p
In my hypothesis, scrolling is a bad way to rest, because it actually eats up a lot of cognitive power
agreed. i archived my twitter last year, but alas, i keep checking lesswrong. (edit: i notice i’m now explicitly noticing when im “scrolling during rest time” and stopping)
Asking “what outputs should I expect to see?”. While this post is about finding ways to build techniques for practicing Rationality Techniques, the examples are also very illustrative for thinking about what something looks like in practice or answering the question “what does that mean (in concrete, doable terms)?”
I also find that using verbs of manner helps make thinking about actions more specific—things that can be done.
For example, “what’s for dinner?” can become “What should I cook for dinner?” which can even become further specified by manneristic verbs like “what should I fry for dinner”, “What should I bake for dinner”, “What should I boil for dinner” or it can become “What should I buy for dinner?”. Bonus points if you use non-agreeing adverbs of manner. “What should I indulgently boil for dinner” suggests a vastly different kind of cooking to “What should I guiltlessly boil for dinner”. I realize that “what should I boil for dinner” sounds awkward, but the point is it guides you to a list of soups or other ingredients which lead you to the answer.
If I may jump in a bit: I’m not sure ‘advice’ can actually hit the right spot here, for “getting out of the car”-style reasons—in this case, something like “trying to look up ‘how to put down the instruction manual and start operating the machine’ in the instruction manual”. That is, if “receiving advice” is a “thinking”-type activity in mental state, the framing obliterates the message in transit. So in some ways the best available answer would be something like “stop waiting for an answer to that question”, but even that is inherently corruptible once put into words, per above. And while there are plausibly more detailed structures that can be communicated around things like “how do you set up life patterns that create the preconditions for that switch more consistently”, those require a lot more shared context to be useful, and it’s really easy to go down a rabbit hole of those as a way of not switching to doing, if there’s emotional blocks or other self-defending inertia in the way of switching. I don’t know if any of that helps.
That is, if “receiving advice” is a “thinking”-type activity in mental state, the framing obliterates the message in transit.
there must be some true description of the switch, for it is a physical process. and i’ve seen advice about doing things, like trigger action plans. so i think advice must be possible.
I don’t think it’s not describable, only that such a description being received by someone whose initial mental state is on “thinking about wanting to get better at switching away from thinking” won’t (by default) play the role of effective advice, because for that to work, it needs to be empowered by the recipient processing the message using a version of what it’s trying to describe. If you already have the pattern for that, then seeing that part described may act as a signal to flatten the chain, as it were; if you don’t, then advice in the usual sense has a high chance of falling flat starting from the mental state you’re processing it in, and you might need something more directly experiential (or at least more indirect and koan-like) to get the necessary start.
do you have advice for switching from thinking to doing?
when you attempt to switch from thinking to doing, what happens instead?
i haven’t attempted to “switch” modes per se before as i’ve just encountered OP’s framing. so i’ll reply about attempting to do particular things.
for me, attempting to do something is already a lot of the way there. my most common failure case after reaching ‘attempting’ is that i stop doing the thing i started, or only start in a symbolic way. and my actual starting point is not attempting, but the abstract recognizing/knowing that doing something would be (instrumentally) good. it is going from that to doing things (and instead of other, useless things) which i struggle with. (note: i have adhd/chronic fatigue.)
(i could write a fuller answer to ‘what happens’ with examples (many things can happen), but i tried and felt conflicted about sharing it publicly, in which case i have a heuristic not to until at least a day later.)
Not sure I quite parsed, but things that makes me think of:
first, if you’re bottlenecked on health (physical or mental), it may be that finding medication that helps is more important than your mindset.
try success spiralling – start doing small things, build up both a habit/muscle of doing things, and momentum in doing things, escalate to bigger things
if getting started is hard, maybe find a friend or pay a colleague to just sit with you and constantly be like “are you doing stuff?” and spray you with a water bottle if you look like you’re overthinking stuff, until you build up a success spiral / muscle of doing things.
try doing doing doing just fucking do it man and when you’re brain is like “idk that seems like a whole lotta doing what if we’re doing the wrong thing?” be like “it’s okay Thinky Brain this is an experiment we will learn from later so we evetually can calibrate on Optimal Think-to-Do Ratio”
[Warning: speculative advice from pure personal experience/self-analysis]
Right now I am trying the following:
If you are overthinker, it probably means that you are already good at stopping. Try to apply ability to stop to the process of not-doing (being that overthinking or scrolling or doing something that mostly serves as distraction)
After that, find the time and place where you can do stuff safely and just do stuff. Your goal is to shift balance between doing and not-doing towards doing, so you should just lower threshold of starting action. You think you can use a stretch? Stop thinking and stretch. Write serious thoughts on twitter. Cook something or do laundry. Et cetera.
It’s important to be in safe place and time because doing everything you think about is quite dangerous if there are expensive purchases available or unprotected sex/drugs/alcohol.
After that you can move towards doing what you want to do. Keep it “safe” in a sense that you don’t need to, say, write perfect post about your totalizing worldview on Lesswrong. Write a draft. Write to a person you can discuss ideas with and ask LLM for summary of discussion. Do easy tasks around whatever you want to do. It helps me to remember how I was a kid and I just read various science textbooks even if I didn’t get the full understanding of the topic just because reading science stuff is cool.
In the end, if you have executive dysfunction, you are probably going to become tired. While working through tiredness is important, at this point you should recognize tiredness and go rest. In my hypothesis, scrolling is a bad way to rest, because it actually eats up a lot of cognitive power, so you probably should do something unitary and simple (light exercise, simple fiction, etc). Ideally, you should feel like you can work a tiny bit more.
Overall process: stop not-doing—start doing—start doing important stuff—rest—repeat.
My impression is that, unfortunately, there is no centralized mechanism for switching. It’s just multiple different systems in your brain competing in activity and you should try to balance them in timely manner.
amazing. i just need to turn my tendency towards deconstruction inwards. :p
agreed. i archived my twitter last year, but alas, i keep checking lesswrong. (edit: i notice i’m now explicitly noticing when im “scrolling during rest time” and stopping)
Asking “what outputs should I expect to see?”. While this post is about finding ways to build techniques for practicing Rationality Techniques, the examples are also very illustrative for thinking about what something looks like in practice or answering the question “what does that mean (in concrete, doable terms)?”
I also find that using verbs of manner helps make thinking about actions more specific—things that can be done.
For example, “what’s for dinner?” can become “What should I cook for dinner?” which can even become further specified by manneristic verbs like “what should I fry for dinner”, “What should I bake for dinner”, “What should I boil for dinner” or it can become “What should I buy for dinner?”. Bonus points if you use non-agreeing adverbs of manner. “What should I indulgently boil for dinner” suggests a vastly different kind of cooking to “What should I guiltlessly boil for dinner”. I realize that “what should I boil for dinner” sounds awkward, but the point is it guides you to a list of soups or other ingredients which lead you to the answer.
If I may jump in a bit: I’m not sure ‘advice’ can actually hit the right spot here, for “getting out of the car”-style reasons—in this case, something like “trying to look up ‘how to put down the instruction manual and start operating the machine’ in the instruction manual”. That is, if “receiving advice” is a “thinking”-type activity in mental state, the framing obliterates the message in transit. So in some ways the best available answer would be something like “stop waiting for an answer to that question”, but even that is inherently corruptible once put into words, per above. And while there are plausibly more detailed structures that can be communicated around things like “how do you set up life patterns that create the preconditions for that switch more consistently”, those require a lot more shared context to be useful, and it’s really easy to go down a rabbit hole of those as a way of not switching to doing, if there’s emotional blocks or other self-defending inertia in the way of switching. I don’t know if any of that helps.
there must be some true description of the switch, for it is a physical process. and i’ve seen advice about doing things, like trigger action plans. so i think advice must be possible.
I don’t think it’s not describable, only that such a description being received by someone whose initial mental state is on “thinking about wanting to get better at switching away from thinking” won’t (by default) play the role of effective advice, because for that to work, it needs to be empowered by the recipient processing the message using a version of what it’s trying to describe. If you already have the pattern for that, then seeing that part described may act as a signal to flatten the chain, as it were; if you don’t, then advice in the usual sense has a high chance of falling flat starting from the mental state you’re processing it in, and you might need something more directly experiential (or at least more indirect and koan-like) to get the necessary start.