-- and since most writings in psychology are worthless, it is easy to give up on the whole field before one discovers worthwhile writings like “Judgement Under Uncertainty” and “The Moral Animal”.
RI, a large part of my motivatation was simply to practice a mental skill: it is a delightful feeling to improve drastically one’s ability to observe one’s own deliberations. Three decades and a severe bump on the head separate my teenage years from today, and today I am almost completely unable to do this exercise.
BTW, it is my guess that the exercises Eliezer and I describe will confer most of their benefits on exercisers who are still teenagers.
RI, to answer your question: the function that takes thought N into thought N+1 is complex enough that I did not learn anything that could be put into neat sentences, nor do I retain any declarative memories of what I learned except that the deliberation proceeded in a much more “predictable-in-retrospect” manner when I thought about some themes than when I thought about others. E.g., I remember that thinking about my mom produced very opaque chain of thoughts.
The practice Eliezer describes strikes me as of greater potential benefit than the one I describe, but perhaps the one I describe can be accomplished by a greater fraction of teenagers reading these words. Very few individuals are blessed with the delightful hardware that the teenage Eliezer had available for such exercises.
-- and since most writings in psychology are worthless, it is easy to give up on the whole field before one discovers worthwhile writings like “Judgement Under Uncertainty” and “The Moral Animal”.
RI, a large part of my motivatation was simply to practice a mental skill: it is a delightful feeling to improve drastically one’s ability to observe one’s own deliberations. Three decades and a severe bump on the head separate my teenage years from today, and today I am almost completely unable to do this exercise.
BTW, it is my guess that the exercises Eliezer and I describe will confer most of their benefits on exercisers who are still teenagers.
RI, to answer your question: the function that takes thought N into thought N+1 is complex enough that I did not learn anything that could be put into neat sentences, nor do I retain any declarative memories of what I learned except that the deliberation proceeded in a much more “predictable-in-retrospect” manner when I thought about some themes than when I thought about others. E.g., I remember that thinking about my mom produced very opaque chain of thoughts.
The practice Eliezer describes strikes me as of greater potential benefit than the one I describe, but perhaps the one I describe can be accomplished by a greater fraction of teenagers reading these words. Very few individuals are blessed with the delightful hardware that the teenage Eliezer had available for such exercises.