This crystallizes a class of strategies which I was aware of, and used sometimes—eg I have in the past had dice-tables of topics to think about in the shower. But I didn’t make the connection to older practices, and I don’t think most people would’ve recognized this as a useful strategy (as opposed to a gimmick). So now the situation is that this post exists to explain the randomized-library-of-strategies approach, but there isn’t much in the way of well curated strategy-libraries to sample from.
In an ideal world, the randomly-sampled strategies would be explicit about what they are (rather than disguising themselves as predictions), and would have a feedback mechanism attached. You’d go to a web page, click “tell me what to think about”, and it says “pay attention to relationships you might be neglecting” or something, and 24 hours later you rate whether that caused you to notice anything important. Hopefully bringing attention to this concept will cause people to build more tools like that.
This crystallizes a class of strategies which I was aware of, and used sometimes—eg I have in the past had dice-tables of topics to think about in the shower. But I didn’t make the connection to older practices, and I don’t think most people would’ve recognized this as a useful strategy (as opposed to a gimmick). So now the situation is that this post exists to explain the randomized-library-of-strategies approach, but there isn’t much in the way of well curated strategy-libraries to sample from.
In an ideal world, the randomly-sampled strategies would be explicit about what they are (rather than disguising themselves as predictions), and would have a feedback mechanism attached. You’d go to a web page, click “tell me what to think about”, and it says “pay attention to relationships you might be neglecting” or something, and 24 hours later you rate whether that caused you to notice anything important. Hopefully bringing attention to this concept will cause people to build more tools like that.
See also: Rationalist Horoscopes