To bring up a specific instance of this kind of problem: that lw post on open/active curiosity absolutely devastated my ability to think about curiosity for no less than a month. Every time I’d prompt myself to think about curiosity, my thoughts would flow toward the “open/active” concept shapes; I didn’t know how to stop it (and I very much wanted to stop it. I was frustrated, found the shapes of to be misconfigured, a poor fit. I couldn’t access my previous thought configurations on the topic, as they were temporarily overwritten).
The only defense I found in the end was to stop prompting myself on the topic; it took about a month for the shapes to fade, for the forgetting to naturally occur. (I’ve long thought of Forgetting as an important skill in research; the ability to let wrong shapes fade away.)
While we’re on the topic, I’ll note that Logan-concepts, rare as they are, are WAY more likely (than Duncan-concepts, for example) to transfigure or hijack my thinking shapes. I’m not sure what’s up with that yet.
(Something something, the compression level at which Duncan talks about things is not really the compression level at which I like to think, and so the concepts can’t really make a home there and stick? Something to do with a scope mismatch? Not feeling confident on these guesses, though.)
To bring up a specific instance of this kind of problem: that lw post on open/active curiosity absolutely devastated my ability to think about curiosity for no less than a month. Every time I’d prompt myself to think about curiosity, my thoughts would flow toward the “open/active” concept shapes; I didn’t know how to stop it (and I very much wanted to stop it. I was frustrated, found the shapes of to be misconfigured, a poor fit. I couldn’t access my previous thought configurations on the topic, as they were temporarily overwritten).
The only defense I found in the end was to stop prompting myself on the topic; it took about a month for the shapes to fade, for the forgetting to naturally occur. (I’ve long thought of Forgetting as an important skill in research; the ability to let wrong shapes fade away.)
While we’re on the topic, I’ll note that Logan-concepts, rare as they are, are WAY more likely (than Duncan-concepts, for example) to transfigure or hijack my thinking shapes. I’m not sure what’s up with that yet.
(Something something, the compression level at which Duncan talks about things is not really the compression level at which I like to think, and so the concepts can’t really make a home there and stick? Something to do with a scope mismatch? Not feeling confident on these guesses, though.)