>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)
>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)