My “c’mon guys” here is not “c’mon the empirical evidence here is overwhelming.” It’s more like “look, which world do you actually expect to result in you making better decisions faster: the one where you spend >0 days on testing and reflecting on your thinking in areas where there is real feedback, or the one where you just spend all your time on ‘object level work’ that doesn’t really have the ability to tell you you were wrong?”.
(and, a host of similar questions, with the meta question is “do you really expect the optimal thing here to be zero effort on metacognition practice of some kind?”)
I mostly agree in general and I feel ya on the “c’mon guys” thing, yet I don’t do my own separate “rationality practice”.
For me, it’s basically the same reason why I don’t spend much time in a weight room anymore; I prefer to keep my strength by doing things that require and use strength. I’m not against weight lifting in principle, and I’ve done a decent amount of it. It’s just that when I have a choice between “exercise muscles for the sake of exercising muscles” and “exercise muscles in the process of doing something else I want to do anyway”, the latter is a pure win if the exercise is anywhere near equivalent. Not only is it “two birds with one stone”, it also streamlines the process of making sure you’re training the right muscles for the uses you actually have, and streamlines the process of maintaining motivation with proof that it is concretely useful.
The option isn’t always available, obviously. If your object level work doesn’t have good feedback, or you’re not strong enough to do your job, then specific training absolutely makes sense. Personally though, I find more than enough opportunities to work on meta cognition as applied to actual things I am doing for object level reasons.
The thing that seems more important to me isn’t whether you’re doing a separate practice for the sake of learning, but whether you’re reflecting on your thinking in areas where there’s real feedback, and you’re noticing that feedback. I do think there’s a place for working on artificial problems, but I also think there’s an under recognized place for picking the right real world problems for your current ability level with an expectation of learning to level up. And an underappreciated skill in finding feedback on less legible problems.
I mostly agree in general and I feel ya on the “c’mon guys” thing, yet I don’t do my own separate “rationality practice”.
For me, it’s basically the same reason why I don’t spend much time in a weight room anymore; I prefer to keep my strength by doing things that require and use strength. I’m not against weight lifting in principle, and I’ve done a decent amount of it. It’s just that when I have a choice between “exercise muscles for the sake of exercising muscles” and “exercise muscles in the process of doing something else I want to do anyway”, the latter is a pure win if the exercise is anywhere near equivalent. Not only is it “two birds with one stone”, it also streamlines the process of making sure you’re training the right muscles for the uses you actually have, and streamlines the process of maintaining motivation with proof that it is concretely useful.
The option isn’t always available, obviously. If your object level work doesn’t have good feedback, or you’re not strong enough to do your job, then specific training absolutely makes sense. Personally though, I find more than enough opportunities to work on meta cognition as applied to actual things I am doing for object level reasons.
The thing that seems more important to me isn’t whether you’re doing a separate practice for the sake of learning, but whether you’re reflecting on your thinking in areas where there’s real feedback, and you’re noticing that feedback. I do think there’s a place for working on artificial problems, but I also think there’s an under recognized place for picking the right real world problems for your current ability level with an expectation of learning to level up. And an underappreciated skill in finding feedback on less legible problems.