Man, I have such contradictory feelings about tuning cognitive strategies.
Just now I was out on a walk, and I had to go up a steep hill. And I thought “man I wish I could take this as a downhill instead of an uphill. If this were a loop I could just go the opposite way around. But alas I’m doing an out-and-back, so I have to take this uphill”.
And then I felt some confusion about why the loop-reversal trick doesn’t work for out-and-back routes, and a spark of curiosity, so I thought about that for a bit.
And after I had cleared up my confusion, I was a happy with the result so I wrote down some of my chain of thought and looked over it. And there were many obvious places where I had made random jumps or missed a clue or otherwise made a mistake.
And this is kind of neat, in the way that looking for a more elegant proof once you’ve hacked a basic proof together is neat. And it really feels like if my mind took those cleaner, straighter paths by default, there are a lot of things I could get done a lot faster and better. But it also really feels like I could sit down and do those exercises and never really improve, just ratiocinate and navel gaze and build up complicated structures in my head that don’t actually cash out to winning.
Man, I have such contradictory feelings about tuning cognitive strategies.
Just now I was out on a walk, and I had to go up a steep hill. And I thought “man I wish I could take this as a downhill instead of an uphill. If this were a loop I could just go the opposite way around. But alas I’m doing an out-and-back, so I have to take this uphill”.
And then I felt some confusion about why the loop-reversal trick doesn’t work for out-and-back routes, and a spark of curiosity, so I thought about that for a bit.
And after I had cleared up my confusion, I was a happy with the result so I wrote down some of my chain of thought and looked over it. And there were many obvious places where I had made random jumps or missed a clue or otherwise made a mistake.
And this is kind of neat, in the way that looking for a more elegant proof once you’ve hacked a basic proof together is neat. And it really feels like if my mind took those cleaner, straighter paths by default, there are a lot of things I could get done a lot faster and better. But it also really feels like I could sit down and do those exercises and never really improve, just ratiocinate and navel gaze and build up complicated structures in my head that don’t actually cash out to winning.