One of the things that helped a lot with the predictions part was reading Judea Pearl’s Heuristics. It seemed to make me better at noticing that a big part of my problem solving was split into two things: my representation of the problem space, and then my traversal of that space. I would notice more readily when I had stuck myself with an intractably sized space for the traversal speed available, and conclude that I needed to switch to trying to find a different representation that was tractable. Others might get very different insights out of the book, the search-inference framework is pretty flexible (also covered in Baron’s Thinking and Deciding).
The cleanest example is during Ravens testing, noticing that checking a particular set of hypotheses one by one is taking too long. Zooming out and seeing them as a class of hypotheses, what they have in common, and then asking what else is possible. If the different moving parts of the puzzle are slot machines, then it’s an explore exploit problem.
One of the things that helped a lot with the predictions part was reading Judea Pearl’s Heuristics. It seemed to make me better at noticing that a big part of my problem solving was split into two things: my representation of the problem space, and then my traversal of that space. I would notice more readily when I had stuck myself with an intractably sized space for the traversal speed available, and conclude that I needed to switch to trying to find a different representation that was tractable. Others might get very different insights out of the book, the search-inference framework is pretty flexible (also covered in Baron’s Thinking and Deciding).
can you give an example of a time you implemented that shift?
The cleanest example is during Ravens testing, noticing that checking a particular set of hypotheses one by one is taking too long. Zooming out and seeing them as a class of hypotheses, what they have in common, and then asking what else is possible. If the different moving parts of the puzzle are slot machines, then it’s an explore exploit problem.