Thinking about these abilities gives me the impression that highly automated and reinforced sub-conscious routines might not be easily changeable to the more effective or efficient by themselves, but they might be integrated into some higher-order routines, changing their eventual output. These could be more and more automated themselves, thereby achieving an increase in fluid intelligence.
I definitely think that one can become better at understanding and steering the world, by improving their cognitive algorithms. I am just saying that there are some low-level ones that can’t be changed. So improvement needs to happen at a higher level. This then puts some hard limits on how much smarter you can get, and how much effort it takes to gain one unit of smartness.
On the point that you are not sure what you could even do, I just want to say: Did you try? It seems like the most common failure case is to not even try. Another common failure mode to avoid would be to have the wrong expectations about how hard something is, and then give up, because it is so much harder than expected. The hardness is I guess some indication of intelligence. Some people will find doing math just much easier than others, just because they are smarter.
But if you are trying to do something very hard, it might make sense to consider how somebody smart would feel doing this. Would they also struggle and find it difficult, because the problem before you is just intrinsically difficult? I think if you don’t think this thought explicitly, the default implicit assumption is always that what you are doing is easy for everybody else who does it. “Writing a book is a struggle”, is what I heard a professional author once say. Authors are authors, not necessarily because writing is a cakewalk for them. I would think more often than not, it is because they have managed to tune their expectations to reality, such that they no longer feel bad for taking the actually required time for completing whatever task they are working on.
I found what you said about the pre-conscious feeling interesting. It made me slightly improve my model about how to avoid procrastination and depression. Normally I only procrastinate when I feel pretty down (at least the kind of “hardcore” procrastination where you do something that definitely is not productive at all, such as watching a movie or playing a videogame). The problem is that once I am in the state of feeling down it is hard to execute a strategy that actually will make me feel better. For example, doing regular sports and meditation seems to help enormously with changing my general mood for the better. But once I feel really down these things are really hard to do. So what you need to do is develop the habit of carefully paying attention to your experience and notice when you are on a downward spiral, before you have fallen so low that interventions become difficult to implement. And then of cause you still need to actually implement the intervention, but becoming sensitive to subtle emotional trends (which I am still not as good at as I would like) seems to be >25% of the battle.
I think I‘ve read something about the value of seemingly procrastinating behaviour a while ago.
Right now, I have plenty of work to do, yet I am reading your reply and answering.
Is this lost time or procrastination as commonly understood? I don‘t think so. It seems like meaningful exchange to me. And maybe updating my own self-model with the help of others is exactly what I really need right now to do better work later.
As for the feeling that something is going wrong with me: Increased awareness of the downward spiral does not easily translate into being able to stop or transform the process. It‘s part of my daily struggles.
You writing this message reflecting on if writing this message is procrastination is probably an indicator for that it is, at least not the worst form of procrastination, which would be about entering a mental state where you don’t think and in some sense really don’t want to think about if you are procrastinating because whatever procrastination you’re doing makes you feel good or whatever and provides escapism and some parts of your brain wouldn’t want to go away.
At least that’s my experience.
The longer and harder you think about if something is procrastination and come to the conclusion that it isn’t, the more evidence I would say this is that it isn’t procrastination (at least especially if you’re trying to correct for biases).
I definitely think that one can become better at understanding and steering the world, by improving their cognitive algorithms. I am just saying that there are some low-level ones that can’t be changed. So improvement needs to happen at a higher level. This then puts some hard limits on how much smarter you can get, and how much effort it takes to gain one unit of smartness.
On the point that you are not sure what you could even do, I just want to say: Did you try? It seems like the most common failure case is to not even try. Another common failure mode to avoid would be to have the wrong expectations about how hard something is, and then give up, because it is so much harder than expected. The hardness is I guess some indication of intelligence. Some people will find doing math just much easier than others, just because they are smarter.
But if you are trying to do something very hard, it might make sense to consider how somebody smart would feel doing this. Would they also struggle and find it difficult, because the problem before you is just intrinsically difficult? I think if you don’t think this thought explicitly, the default implicit assumption is always that what you are doing is easy for everybody else who does it. “Writing a book is a struggle”, is what I heard a professional author once say. Authors are authors, not necessarily because writing is a cakewalk for them. I would think more often than not, it is because they have managed to tune their expectations to reality, such that they no longer feel bad for taking the actually required time for completing whatever task they are working on.
I found what you said about the pre-conscious feeling interesting. It made me slightly improve my model about how to avoid procrastination and depression. Normally I only procrastinate when I feel pretty down (at least the kind of “hardcore” procrastination where you do something that definitely is not productive at all, such as watching a movie or playing a videogame). The problem is that once I am in the state of feeling down it is hard to execute a strategy that actually will make me feel better. For example, doing regular sports and meditation seems to help enormously with changing my general mood for the better. But once I feel really down these things are really hard to do. So what you need to do is develop the habit of carefully paying attention to your experience and notice when you are on a downward spiral, before you have fallen so low that interventions become difficult to implement. And then of cause you still need to actually implement the intervention, but becoming sensitive to subtle emotional trends (which I am still not as good at as I would like) seems to be >25% of the battle.
I think I‘ve read something about the value of seemingly procrastinating behaviour a while ago. Right now, I have plenty of work to do, yet I am reading your reply and answering. Is this lost time or procrastination as commonly understood? I don‘t think so. It seems like meaningful exchange to me. And maybe updating my own self-model with the help of others is exactly what I really need right now to do better work later.
As for the feeling that something is going wrong with me: Increased awareness of the downward spiral does not easily translate into being able to stop or transform the process. It‘s part of my daily struggles.
You writing this message reflecting on if writing this message is procrastination is probably an indicator for that it is, at least not the worst form of procrastination, which would be about entering a mental state where you don’t think and in some sense really don’t want to think about if you are procrastinating because whatever procrastination you’re doing makes you feel good or whatever and provides escapism and some parts of your brain wouldn’t want to go away.
At least that’s my experience.
The longer and harder you think about if something is procrastination and come to the conclusion that it isn’t, the more evidence I would say this is that it isn’t procrastination (at least especially if you’re trying to correct for biases).