My goal right now is to find (toy, concrete) exercises that somehow reflect the real world complexity of making longterm plans, aiming to achieve unclear goals in a confusing world.
Things that seem important to include in the exercise:
“figuring out what the goal actually is”
“you have lots of background knowledge and ideas of where to look next, but the explosion of places you could possibly look is kinda overwhelming”
managing various resources along the way, but it’s not obvious what those resources are.
you get data from the world (but, not necessarily the most important data)
it’s not obvious how long to spend gathering information, or refining your plan
it’s not obvious whether your current strategy is anywhere close to the best one
The exercise should be short (ideally like a couple hours but maybe a day or a hypothetically a week), but, somehow metaphorically reflects all those things.
Previously I asked about strategy/resource management games you could try to beat on your first try. One thing I bump into is that often the initial turns are fairly constrained in your choices, only later does it get complex (which is maybe fine, but, for my real world plans, the nigh-infinite possibilities seem like the immediate problem?)
This sounds like my experience playing the Enigmatica 2: Expert mod in minecraft without looking at the internal tech tree, or any documentation. You could probably speedrun the relevant tech-tree in <1 week (if you want that to be your goal), but this would be basically impossible if you go in blind as the exercise you’re describing suggests.
CRPGs with a lot of open world dynamics might work, where the goal is for the person to identify the most important experiments to run in a limited time window in order to manmax certain stats.
My general plan is to mix “work on your real goals” (which takes months to find out if you were on the right track) and “work on faster paced things that convey whether you’ve gained some kind of useful skill you didn’t have before”.
I think most people have short term, medium term, and long term goals. E.g., right about now many people probably have the goal of doing their taxes, and depending on their situation those may match many of your desiderata.
I used to put a lot of effort into creating exercises, simulations, and scenarios that matched up with various skills I was teaching, but ultimately found it much more effective to just say “look at your todo list, and find something that causes overwhelm”. Deliberate practice consists of finding a thing that causes overwhelm, seeing how to overcome that overwhelm, working for two minutes, then finding another task that induces overwhelm. I also use past examples, imagining in detail what it would have been like to act in this different way
You’re operating in a slightly different domain, but still I imagine people have plenty of problems and sub problems in either their life or research where the things you’re teaching applies, and you can scope them small enough to get tighter feedback loops.
My goal right now is to find (toy, concrete) exercises that somehow reflect the real world complexity of making longterm plans, aiming to achieve unclear goals in a confusing world.
Things that seem important to include in the exercise:
“figuring out what the goal actually is”
“you have lots of background knowledge and ideas of where to look next, but the explosion of places you could possibly look is kinda overwhelming”
managing various resources along the way, but it’s not obvious what those resources are.
you get data from the world (but, not necessarily the most important data)
it’s not obvious how long to spend gathering information, or refining your plan
it’s not obvious whether your current strategy is anywhere close to the best one
The exercise should be short (ideally like a couple hours but maybe a day or a hypothetically a week), but, somehow metaphorically reflects all those things.
Previously I asked about strategy/resource management games you could try to beat on your first try. One thing I bump into is that often the initial turns are fairly constrained in your choices, only later does it get complex (which is maybe fine, but, for my real world plans, the nigh-infinite possibilities seem like the immediate problem?)
This sounds like my experience playing the Enigmatica 2: Expert mod in minecraft without looking at the internal tech tree, or any documentation. You could probably speedrun the relevant tech-tree in <1 week (if you want that to be your goal), but this would be basically impossible if you go in blind as the exercise you’re describing suggests.
CRPGs with a lot of open world dynamics might work, where the goal is for the person to identify the most important experiments to run in a limited time window in order to manmax certain stats.
Why not just have people spend some time working with their existing goals?
My general plan is to mix “work on your real goals” (which takes months to find out if you were on the right track) and “work on faster paced things that convey whether you’ve gained some kind of useful skill you didn’t have before”.
I think most people have short term, medium term, and long term goals. E.g., right about now many people probably have the goal of doing their taxes, and depending on their situation those may match many of your desiderata.
I used to put a lot of effort into creating exercises, simulations, and scenarios that matched up with various skills I was teaching, but ultimately found it much more effective to just say “look at your todo list, and find something that causes overwhelm”. Deliberate practice consists of finding a thing that causes overwhelm, seeing how to overcome that overwhelm, working for two minutes, then finding another task that induces overwhelm. I also use past examples, imagining in detail what it would have been like to act in this different way
You’re operating in a slightly different domain, but still I imagine people have plenty of problems and sub problems in either their life or research where the things you’re teaching applies, and you can scope them small enough to get tighter feedback loops.
They are probably too long but at one point I ran this exercise with Master of Orion and Stardew Valley
Two hours to build a paper tower as high as you can outside in the wind
Looking forward to see what exercises you land on!