I did the exercise because I couldn’t sleep; I didn’t keep careful count of the time, and I didn’t do it all in one sitting. I’d guess I spent about an hour on it total, but I think there’s a case to be made that this was cheating. However, “fresh eyes” is actually a really killer trick when doing this kind of exercise, in my experience, and it’s usually available in practice. So I don’t feel too bad about it.
I really really dislike the experience of saying things I think are totally stupid, and I currently don’t buy that I should start trying to say stupider things. My favorite things in the above list came from refusing to just say another totally stupid thing. Nearly everything in my list is stupid in some way, but the things that are so stupid they don’t even feel interesting basically make me feel sad. I trust my first-round aesthetic pruner to actually be helping to train my babbler in constructive directions.
The following don’t really feel worth having said, to me:
Throw it really hard
Catapult
Kick it really hard
Wormhole
Nuclear explosion based craft
My favorites didn’t come after spewing this stuff; instead they came when I refused to be okay with just saying more of that kind of junk:
Move the thing upward by one foot per day
Name the thing “420 69 Doge To The Moon” and hope Elon takes the bait
The various bogo-send options
Optical tweezers
The difference isn’t really that these are less stupid; in fact they’re kind of more stupid, practically speaking. But I actually viscerally like them, unlike the first group. Forcing myself to produce things I hate feels like a bad strategy on lots of levels.
First: people are different, so, like, definitely do the version of this you think actually helps you. (I’ve updated that “reflect afterward about what worked and didn’t work for you” is a generally important part of cognitive exercises, and should be a part of the Babble exercises)
But I want to flag the reasons I personally think it’s important to have access to the dumb thoughts, and why it at least works for me.
I personally frequently have the experience of feeling totally stuck, writing down “list of strategies for X?”, still feeling totally stuck, and then writing down “bad reasons for X”, and this just totally unsticks me. I typically generate 1-2 bad ideas and then start generating good ideas again.
They’re… free? Nothing bad happens when I generate them. I ignore them and move on and consolidate the good ideas later.
The goal here is train myself to have an easier time generating ideas on the fly. In real life, I don’t generate 50 ideas when babbling, I typically generate like 10. The point of the practice IMO is to sort of overtrain such that the 10 good ideas come easily when you need them and you never feel stuck.
You might not share the experience in #1, in which case, for sure, do what seems good. (To be clear, if you found “actually generate good ideas tho” a prompt that generated useful stuff, seems good to notice and have that prompt in your toolkit)
But FYI my crux for “whether I personally think BenWr benefits from generating bad ideas” is whether you ended up generating more good ideas faster-than-otherwise (which might or might not be true, but you didn’t really address). ((though note: “whether it’s useful to generate bad ideas” is a different question from “whether it’s useful to use the prompt ‘only generate good ideas’. It’s possible for them both to be useful))
I agree that “stop and come back to it later” is often an important aspect of this sort of skill, but in general if I can generate the good ideas in the first place in one sitting that’s better, because then I can just actually finish whatever goal the babbling was in service of.
>They’re… free? Nothing bad happens when you generate them. You ignore them and move on and consolidate the good ideas later.
I understood BenWr to be suggesting this was false. His pruner is rejecting “bad ideas” for a reason, and perhaps it is a good reason; perhaps bad things do happen if he deliberately lets in more “bad ideas”.
If that were true for people in general, or for a significant minority of people, I’d definitely want to understand what the bad thing is, how it works, whether “having bad ideas” tends to be good on net anyway, and how to mitigate the bad thing if so.
I do think that lots of people—at least 85% of people, in my experiences running this kind of exercise with others—experience some kind of pain or suffering when “trying to have bad ideas”, at least at first. (I did a series of mnemonics workshops before I even started using this kind of thing in rationality training, so n is somewhere around… 350?)
It has always appeared to me that the painful parts of the experience are coming from a combination of “doing new things is hard”, “doing things I’ve trained myself not to do is uncomfortable”, and “social image-based stuff like ‘what if people see this and think I’m bad’ or ’what if I see this and think I’m bad”. All of these concerns are important to address in some way, I claim, for a person to get really good at this. I haven’t actually seen anybody investigate what’s going on for them and then decide that they do not want to gain the skillset. (There certainly are people who decide not to use negatively-valenced emotions when committing things to memory, and who decide to keep their “thinking like a villain” knob turned down pretty low, and these decisions seem similar to “try not to have bad ideas”; but I think they’re not dealbreakers for the central skill, and I think “try not to have bad ideas” probably is.)
However, I think I was much, much worse ten years ago at making space for the people I’m teaching to find their own way of doing things. So maybe if I ran mnemonics workshops today, many more people would pipe up to be like “You know what? This is bad for me. No thank you.”
fyi I updated the section to say “I” instead of “you” (I’d set myself the goal of talking about my own experience since this seemed like the sort of thing it was important not to assume too much of others, but then slipped up out of habit. I meant it more in a form “hey, here’s how it is for me, consider whether this is also true of you?’”)
(in general I’ve gotten feedback or picked up vibes that I’m kinda pushy with my frame in a way that’s tramply to people trying to articulate or figure out their own way of doing things, which I’m still trying to figure out)
A line I edited in towards the end, which I think was maybe the most important one, was to distinguish the difference between “explicitly trying to generate good ideas and not accept bad ideas” in a particular way, vs “allowing yourself to generate bad ideas” (which I still don’t know enough to know if it resonates with benwr, but, seemed like the sort of thing that’d be easy to conflate, since the difference is subtle)
Some thoughts after doing this exercise:
I did the exercise because I couldn’t sleep; I didn’t keep careful count of the time, and I didn’t do it all in one sitting. I’d guess I spent about an hour on it total, but I think there’s a case to be made that this was cheating. However, “fresh eyes” is actually a really killer trick when doing this kind of exercise, in my experience, and it’s usually available in practice. So I don’t feel too bad about it.
I really really dislike the experience of saying things I think are totally stupid, and I currently don’t buy that I should start trying to say stupider things. My favorite things in the above list came from refusing to just say another totally stupid thing. Nearly everything in my list is stupid in some way, but the things that are so stupid they don’t even feel interesting basically make me feel sad. I trust my first-round aesthetic pruner to actually be helping to train my babbler in constructive directions.
The following don’t really feel worth having said, to me:
Throw it really hard
Catapult
Kick it really hard
Wormhole
Nuclear explosion based craft
My favorites didn’t come after spewing this stuff; instead they came when I refused to be okay with just saying more of that kind of junk:
Move the thing upward by one foot per day
Name the thing “420 69 Doge To The Moon” and hope Elon takes the bait
The various bogo-send options
Optical tweezers
The difference isn’t really that these are less stupid; in fact they’re kind of more stupid, practically speaking. But I actually viscerally like them, unlike the first group. Forcing myself to produce things I hate feels like a bad strategy on lots of levels.
First: people are different, so, like, definitely do the version of this you think actually helps you. (I’ve updated that “reflect afterward about what worked and didn’t work for you” is a generally important part of cognitive exercises, and should be a part of the Babble exercises)
But I want to flag the reasons I personally think it’s important to have access to the dumb thoughts, and why it at least works for me.
I personally frequently have the experience of feeling totally stuck, writing down “list of strategies for X?”, still feeling totally stuck, and then writing down “bad reasons for X”, and this just totally unsticks me. I typically generate 1-2 bad ideas and then start generating good ideas again.
They’re… free? Nothing bad happens when I generate them. I ignore them and move on and consolidate the good ideas later.
The goal here is train myself to have an easier time generating ideas on the fly. In real life, I don’t generate 50 ideas when babbling, I typically generate like 10. The point of the practice IMO is to sort of overtrain such that the 10 good ideas come easily when you need them and you never feel stuck.
You might not share the experience in #1, in which case, for sure, do what seems good. (To be clear, if you found “actually generate good ideas tho” a prompt that generated useful stuff, seems good to notice and have that prompt in your toolkit)
But FYI my crux for “whether I personally think BenWr benefits from generating bad ideas” is whether you ended up generating more good ideas faster-than-otherwise (which might or might not be true, but you didn’t really address). ((though note: “whether it’s useful to generate bad ideas” is a different question from “whether it’s useful to use the prompt ‘only generate good ideas’. It’s possible for them both to be useful))
I agree that “stop and come back to it later” is often an important aspect of this sort of skill, but in general if I can generate the good ideas in the first place in one sitting that’s better, because then I can just actually finish whatever goal the babbling was in service of.
>They’re… free? Nothing bad happens when you generate them. You ignore them and move on and consolidate the good ideas later.
I understood BenWr to be suggesting this was false. His pruner is rejecting “bad ideas” for a reason, and perhaps it is a good reason; perhaps bad things do happen if he deliberately lets in more “bad ideas”.
If that were true for people in general, or for a significant minority of people, I’d definitely want to understand what the bad thing is, how it works, whether “having bad ideas” tends to be good on net anyway, and how to mitigate the bad thing if so.
I do think that lots of people—at least 85% of people, in my experiences running this kind of exercise with others—experience some kind of pain or suffering when “trying to have bad ideas”, at least at first. (I did a series of mnemonics workshops before I even started using this kind of thing in rationality training, so n is somewhere around… 350?)
It has always appeared to me that the painful parts of the experience are coming from a combination of “doing new things is hard”, “doing things I’ve trained myself not to do is uncomfortable”, and “social image-based stuff like ‘what if people see this and think I’m bad’ or ’what if I see this and think I’m bad”. All of these concerns are important to address in some way, I claim, for a person to get really good at this. I haven’t actually seen anybody investigate what’s going on for them and then decide that they do not want to gain the skillset. (There certainly are people who decide not to use negatively-valenced emotions when committing things to memory, and who decide to keep their “thinking like a villain” knob turned down pretty low, and these decisions seem similar to “try not to have bad ideas”; but I think they’re not dealbreakers for the central skill, and I think “try not to have bad ideas” probably is.)
However, I think I was much, much worse ten years ago at making space for the people I’m teaching to find their own way of doing things. So maybe if I ran mnemonics workshops today, many more people would pipe up to be like “You know what? This is bad for me. No thank you.”
fyi I updated the section to say “I” instead of “you” (I’d set myself the goal of talking about my own experience since this seemed like the sort of thing it was important not to assume too much of others, but then slipped up out of habit. I meant it more in a form “hey, here’s how it is for me, consider whether this is also true of you?’”)
(in general I’ve gotten feedback or picked up vibes that I’m kinda pushy with my frame in a way that’s tramply to people trying to articulate or figure out their own way of doing things, which I’m still trying to figure out)
A line I edited in towards the end, which I think was maybe the most important one, was to distinguish the difference between “explicitly trying to generate good ideas and not accept bad ideas” in a particular way, vs “allowing yourself to generate bad ideas” (which I still don’t know enough to know if it resonates with benwr, but, seemed like the sort of thing that’d be easy to conflate, since the difference is subtle)