I’ve noticed during my alignment study that just the sheer amount of relevant posts out there is giving me a pretty bad habit of (1) passively engaging with the material and (2) not doing much independent thinking. Just keeping up to date & distilling the stuff in my todo read list takes up most of my time.
I guess the reason I do it is because (at least for me) it takes a ton of mental effort to switch modes between “passive consumption” and “active thinking”:
I noticed then when self-studying math; like, my subjective experience is that I enjoy both “passively listening lectures+taking notes” and “solving practice problems,” the problem is that it takes a ton of mental energy to switch between the two equilibriums.
(This is actually still a problem—too much wide & passive consumption rather than actively practicing them and solving problems.)
Also relevant is wanting to just progress/upskill as fast and wide of a subject as I can, sacrificing mastery for diversity. This probably makes sense to some degree (especially in the sense that having more frames is good), but I think I’m taking this wayyyy too far.
My r for opening new links far exceeds 1. This definitely helped me when I was trying to get a rapid overview of the entire field, but now it’s just a bad adaptation + akrasia.
Okay, then, don’t do that! Some directions to move towards:
Independent brainstorming/investigation sessions to form concrete inside views
There are lots of posts but the actual content is very thing. I would say there is plausibly more content in your real analysis book than there is in the entire alignment field.
I’ve noticed during my alignment study that just the sheer amount of relevant posts out there is giving me a pretty bad habit of (1) passively engaging with the material and (2) not doing much independent thinking. Just keeping up to date & distilling the stuff in my todo read list takes up most of my time.
I guess the reason I do it is because (at least for me) it takes a ton of mental effort to switch modes between “passive consumption” and “active thinking”:
I noticed then when self-studying math; like, my subjective experience is that I enjoy both “passively listening lectures+taking notes” and “solving practice problems,” the problem is that it takes a ton of mental energy to switch between the two equilibriums.
(This is actually still a problem—too much wide & passive consumption rather than actively practicing them and solving problems.)
Also relevant is wanting to just progress/upskill as fast and wide of a subject as I can, sacrificing mastery for diversity. This probably makes sense to some degree (especially in the sense that having more frames is good), but I think I’m taking this wayyyy too far.
My r for opening new links far exceeds 1. This definitely helped me when I was trying to get a rapid overview of the entire field, but now it’s just a bad adaptation + akrasia.
Okay, then, don’t do that! Some directions to move towards:
Independent brainstorming/investigation sessions to form concrete inside views
like the advice from the field guide post, exercises from the MATS model, et
Commitment mechanisms, like making regular posts or shortforms (eg)
There are lots of posts but the actual content is very thing. I would say there is plausibly more content in your real analysis book than there is in the entire alignment field.