Actually, unless my memory is playing tricks on me, there’ve been reports from people who’ve tried the ‘what would I do if I were smarter’ trick, and had good results with it. It sounds like it shouldn’t work, definitely, but it seems that in practice it does anyway, probably by cashing out to “what would I do if I wasn’t stuck” or something.
Actually, unless my memory is playing tricks on me, there’ve been reports from people who’ve tried the ‘what would I do if I were smarter’ trick, and had good results with it
There seems to be a general trick to expecting more of yourself.
I can get more willpower by thinking “I don’t have enough strength, but I put myself in the hands of the Lord, who’ll give me his strength”—and I discovered that trick long after I became an atheist! I suspect the trick is to enforce the expectation of undepleting willpower, which makes it true.
It might be a rigged self-test. Where else can we test if the trick works?
The being stuck thing sounds like it matters a lot here. Thinking hard is a lot of work to begin with, and most habits people end up stuck with replace needing to think with rote responses that can be broken with a change of mindset.
A follow-up on this might be how well it works on people in different situations. You need to have some idea on what useful smartness is like, and someone who has grown up in very disadvantaged conditions might just not have enough exposure to that to form useful models. Someone with mental issues might not be able to break their habits of behavior to get benefit from the thing. People who are already pushing themselves hard cognitively, like math grad students, pro chess players or stock traders might get less out of it, though the exercise could still help them come up with a new perspective on things.
I wonder if there’s a generalizable attitude here. This reminds me a bit about the pedagogical advice that you should always tell children that their academic success is because they worked hard, not because they are talented, since otherwise they’ll model themselves as having some comfortable level of talent and stop pushing themselves to whatever actual limits their achievement might have.
It doesn’t seem to be just a question of working harder. You can still get stuck to thinking that you’re as smart as you think you are and therefore can keep working like you’ve always worked and do a bunch of ineffective hard work. Thinking what a smarter person would do also makes you question the quality of your metacognition.
Well, it was already pointed out that getting feedback on the usefulness of various horoscopes is a good idea, and coding has commenced with that as part of the plan, so I think the thing to do is actually try it and see how it works.
Actually, unless my memory is playing tricks on me, there’ve been reports from people who’ve tried the ‘what would I do if I were smarter’ trick, and had good results with it. It sounds like it shouldn’t work, definitely, but it seems that in practice it does anyway, probably by cashing out to “what would I do if I wasn’t stuck” or something.
Here’s an example from no less than Claude Shannon.
There seems to be a general trick to expecting more of yourself.
I can get more willpower by thinking “I don’t have enough strength, but I put myself in the hands of the Lord, who’ll give me his strength”—and I discovered that trick long after I became an atheist! I suspect the trick is to enforce the expectation of undepleting willpower, which makes it true.
It might be a rigged self-test. Where else can we test if the trick works?
The being stuck thing sounds like it matters a lot here. Thinking hard is a lot of work to begin with, and most habits people end up stuck with replace needing to think with rote responses that can be broken with a change of mindset.
A follow-up on this might be how well it works on people in different situations. You need to have some idea on what useful smartness is like, and someone who has grown up in very disadvantaged conditions might just not have enough exposure to that to form useful models. Someone with mental issues might not be able to break their habits of behavior to get benefit from the thing. People who are already pushing themselves hard cognitively, like math grad students, pro chess players or stock traders might get less out of it, though the exercise could still help them come up with a new perspective on things.
I wonder if there’s a generalizable attitude here. This reminds me a bit about the pedagogical advice that you should always tell children that their academic success is because they worked hard, not because they are talented, since otherwise they’ll model themselves as having some comfortable level of talent and stop pushing themselves to whatever actual limits their achievement might have.
It doesn’t seem to be just a question of working harder. You can still get stuck to thinking that you’re as smart as you think you are and therefore can keep working like you’ve always worked and do a bunch of ineffective hard work. Thinking what a smarter person would do also makes you question the quality of your metacognition.
Well, it was already pointed out that getting feedback on the usefulness of various horoscopes is a good idea, and coding has commenced with that as part of the plan, so I think the thing to do is actually try it and see how it works.
I had no idea. That’s really cool.