I could imagine an intersection between the thing Gordon’s saying about learning stuff, but also flow, where people get into flow states easiest when the difficult is juuust in that narrow range between “challenging, but doable at your current skillset.”
Like, solving a particularly hard puzzle is rewarding. But I don’t get into flowstates doing it. But puzzles that are hard-but-consistently-doable I might get into flow more easily.
So: “how can a group of people coordinate to make rational decisions in response to confusing and fraught situations” might be something that’s hard-enough-you-to-be-REAL-challenging instead of ‘flow-state-level-challenging.’
(You could potentially also map the “my friend will really love this part” thing into Gordon’s model. I think Gordon’s model predicts that you’d stop finding that rewarding if you hit a point where you were able to do that effortlessly all the time, because it’s no longer an interesting learning challenge)
I think I am not actually in flow the majority of the time I’m writing? Like, I get very rare periods where I lose track of time and suddenly it’s the end of the day and 10K words have appeared, and I get shorter snippets of forgetting-the-outside-world, but in the second-to-second timescale there’s often a feeling of effort and of deliberately staying on task. It just seems to be overall reinforcing enough that I will continue to block out time to do it and throw myself at getting through the hard parts, even if it’s been effortful and not felt rewarding in realtime for days or weeks. (I think this has happened more and more as I’ve gotten further into my fanfic, actually, because I’m writing situations that are harder to model.)
Probably another factor is that when I am sufficiently deep in writingmode, not writing is kind of painful and getting it off my mind enough to do other things is even more so.
You might keep doing things even if they are effortless if they satisfy some other set point. After all, breathing is pretty boring to most people and you keep doing it. But once it is no longer something you have enough uncertainty about it will certainly become less interesting and so maybe not a super stimulus.
I agree there is something where if stuff is too hard we don’t seem to view it as a chance to update and instead view it as just requiring more effort than is worthwhile...except in these supercharged states where we’ll put up with more to get what we want. I haven’t thought much about how this might interact with naturally arising flow states people get into. My theory says that should somehow be powered by minimization of prediction error since it says everything ultimately is, I just haven’t thought about how that might work.
I could imagine an intersection between the thing Gordon’s saying about learning stuff, but also flow, where people get into flow states easiest when the difficult is juuust in that narrow range between “challenging, but doable at your current skillset.”
Like, solving a particularly hard puzzle is rewarding. But I don’t get into flowstates doing it. But puzzles that are hard-but-consistently-doable I might get into flow more easily.
So: “how can a group of people coordinate to make rational decisions in response to confusing and fraught situations” might be something that’s hard-enough-you-to-be-REAL-challenging instead of ‘flow-state-level-challenging.’
(You could potentially also map the “my friend will really love this part” thing into Gordon’s model. I think Gordon’s model predicts that you’d stop finding that rewarding if you hit a point where you were able to do that effortlessly all the time, because it’s no longer an interesting learning challenge)
I think I am not actually in flow the majority of the time I’m writing? Like, I get very rare periods where I lose track of time and suddenly it’s the end of the day and 10K words have appeared, and I get shorter snippets of forgetting-the-outside-world, but in the second-to-second timescale there’s often a feeling of effort and of deliberately staying on task. It just seems to be overall reinforcing enough that I will continue to block out time to do it and throw myself at getting through the hard parts, even if it’s been effortful and not felt rewarding in realtime for days or weeks. (I think this has happened more and more as I’ve gotten further into my fanfic, actually, because I’m writing situations that are harder to model.)
Probably another factor is that when I am sufficiently deep in writingmode, not writing is kind of painful and getting it off my mind enough to do other things is even more so.
You might keep doing things even if they are effortless if they satisfy some other set point. After all, breathing is pretty boring to most people and you keep doing it. But once it is no longer something you have enough uncertainty about it will certainly become less interesting and so maybe not a super stimulus.
I agree there is something where if stuff is too hard we don’t seem to view it as a chance to update and instead view it as just requiring more effort than is worthwhile...except in these supercharged states where we’ll put up with more to get what we want. I haven’t thought much about how this might interact with naturally arising flow states people get into. My theory says that should somehow be powered by minimization of prediction error since it says everything ultimately is, I just haven’t thought about how that might work.