This post feels like it is claiming that removing the need to conform to others’ beliefs is important for creativity, and speculating how you might do so. Is that right? If it is, then I’m eager to hear more. (And yes, I understand the irony of saying that.) This is an important topic to me as I can feel my thoughts are bent out of shape by social pressures.
Being able to sense these pressures is a good thing, in my view. I’m not sure why I can; perhaps my “social detection” circuitry is one of the few parts of my brain which aren’t crippled? But the upshot is that I might learn how to notice when I can think freely, and then cultivate those mind-states.
And though I didn’t intend to use some of the techniques you’ve described for exactly this purpose, I have used them. And variants, too.
Knausgaard’s technique: I’ve tried writing so fast I can’t self censor, but only for a few paragraphs at most. At least, for writing down thoughts whilst focusing/tuning cognitive strategies. Though in those cases, the censor isn’t social. Instead, it is past trauma. When I’m babbling ideas and writing them as a series of bullet points, I might get to a page or so. On some occasions when I’ve had to write something before a deadline, I will explicitly use Knausgaard’s technique to get past a block. But without focusing on what I don’t like, it doesn’t help. Really, all of the techniques I’ve tried in this space require Gendlin’s focusing to fully work.
Introducing a long delay: This technique generalizes beyond averting social pressure, in my experience. If you’re stuck on a problem, there’s probably something wrong with your framing. Coming back to it after you’ve forgotten the framing lets you automatically see it with fresh eyes. In practice, this looks like storing a problem in an Anki deck and thinking about it once you see it again. It works suprisingly often. Which makes me wonder if there’s some sort of optimal scheduling to revisit old problems. If I remember correctly, Anki reminds you of a card when you’ve begun to forget it, so maybe you just need to increase durations by a tad.
And speaking of software solutions, one idea I had whilst reading your post was to automatically re-name all individuals in a text you’re reading. This software would replace Alexander Grothendieck with … Kübra Éliane throughout the essay. Likewise for the other names. The problem with this technique is if the individual’s depicted in an awesome manner within the text, you may still associate their ideas with awe.
A potential fix might be tuning your ontology to decouple ideas from the people who generated them. Unfortunately, BWT doesn’t explain what that means. Here’s someone else’s description of the skill from a commen on LW:
I didn’t know them and can only speak to how I did the tuning ontology thing. For about 2 weeks, I noted any time I was chunking reasoning using concepts. Many of them familiar LW concepts, and lots of others from philosophy, econ, law, common sense sayings, and some of my own that I did or didn’t have names for. This took a bit of practice but wasn’t that hard to train a little ‘noticer’ for. After a while, the pace of new concepts being added to the list started to slow down a lot. This was when I had around 250 concepts. I then played around with the ontology of this list, chunking it different ways (temporal, provenance, natural seeming clusters of related concepts, domain of usefulness, etc.). After doing this for a bit it felt like I was able to get some compressions I didn’t have before and overall my thinking felt cleaner than before. Separately, I also spent some time explicitly trying to compress concepts into as pithy as possible handles using visual metaphors and other creativity techniques to help. This also felt like it cleaned things up. Compression helps with memory because chunking is how we use working memory for anything more complicated than atomic bits of info. Augmenting memory also relied on tracking very closely whether or not a given representation (such as notes, drawing etc.) was actually making it easier to think or was just hitting some other easily goodharted metric, like making me feel more organized etc.
With regard to ‘tracking reality with beliefs’ the most important thing I ever noticed afaict is whether or not my beliefs 1. have fewer degrees of freedom than reality and thus have any explanatory power at all and avoid overfitting, 2. vary with reality in a way that is oriented towards causal models/intervention points that can easily be tested (vs abstraction towers).
This post feels like it is claiming that removing the need to conform to others’ beliefs is important for creativity, and speculating how you might do so. Is that right? If it is, then I’m eager to hear more. (And yes, I understand the irony of saying that.) This is an important topic to me as I can feel my thoughts are bent out of shape by social pressures.
Being able to sense these pressures is a good thing, in my view. I’m not sure why I can; perhaps my “social detection” circuitry is one of the few parts of my brain which aren’t crippled? But the upshot is that I might learn how to notice when I can think freely, and then cultivate those mind-states.
And though I didn’t intend to use some of the techniques you’ve described for exactly this purpose, I have used them. And variants, too.
Knausgaard’s technique: I’ve tried writing so fast I can’t self censor, but only for a few paragraphs at most. At least, for writing down thoughts whilst focusing/tuning cognitive strategies. Though in those cases, the censor isn’t social. Instead, it is past trauma. When I’m babbling ideas and writing them as a series of bullet points, I might get to a page or so. On some occasions when I’ve had to write something before a deadline, I will explicitly use Knausgaard’s technique to get past a block. But without focusing on what I don’t like, it doesn’t help. Really, all of the techniques I’ve tried in this space require Gendlin’s focusing to fully work.
Introducing a long delay: This technique generalizes beyond averting social pressure, in my experience. If you’re stuck on a problem, there’s probably something wrong with your framing. Coming back to it after you’ve forgotten the framing lets you automatically see it with fresh eyes. In practice, this looks like storing a problem in an Anki deck and thinking about it once you see it again. It works suprisingly often. Which makes me wonder if there’s some sort of optimal scheduling to revisit old problems. If I remember correctly, Anki reminds you of a card when you’ve begun to forget it, so maybe you just need to increase durations by a tad.
And speaking of software solutions, one idea I had whilst reading your post was to automatically re-name all individuals in a text you’re reading. This software would replace Alexander Grothendieck with … Kübra Éliane throughout the essay. Likewise for the other names. The problem with this technique is if the individual’s depicted in an awesome manner within the text, you may still associate their ideas with awe.
A potential fix might be tuning your ontology to decouple ideas from the people who generated them. Unfortunately, BWT doesn’t explain what that means. Here’s someone else’s description of the skill from a commen on LW: