I tested a version of this for like 2 consecutive hours on a puzzle video game (Snakebird) and learned a surprising amount, if I didn’t have a strong commitment this week I’d be devoting a few days to it.
The original instruction was to plan out all my actions ahead of time, and not proceed until I was sure. I’d previously played Snakebird in late 2019 and beaten the core game, but not the bonus levels.
Things I noticed in two hours:
Realized I don’t have to plan the most efficient route, any route will do
Got better at chunking things
Realized I wanted to backwards engineer failures
Redoing puzzles I’d beaten a minute ago was surpisingly helpful/it was shocking how much i forgot seconds after finishing it. I think this might be because my RAM was so overloaded I couldn’t transfer the knowledge.
Recognizing the feeling over overload/quitting.
I want to work on both recognizing how full the meter is before I get overloaded, and of course increasing capacity.
Goddamnit I worked so hard to run at reality head first instead of being in my head all the time and now I have to go back?
I fit in a 10? hours around my core commitment. After the first few levels I tried the bonus levels- still absolutely impossible. After level 30 (of 40) this round I tried again, and beat all six bonus levels over ~3 days.
For those 30 puzzles I tried to pay some attention to process, but it was dominantly a leisure activity so I didn’t push hard on this and wasn’t strict about forming a complete plan before making my first move.
Raemon suggested something like “notes to past myself on principles for solving a level” (as opposed to listing specific moves), as a test for if I was drawing useful general lessons. This turned out to be surprisingly easy to test because I was so bad at remembering solution to puzzles even minutes after solving them. The notes were of mixed efficacy, but sometimes noticing what I’d missed let me draw more useful conclusions the second time around. .
A tip for note-taking while playing Steam games (though I don’t know if you played Snakebird on Steam or on the phone): A recent Steam update added an in-game note-taking widget to the Steam overlay (opened via Shift+Tab → pencil icon). So you can take game-specific notes, and even pin a semi-transparent notes widget over the game.
(Of course one can always tab out of games, or play them in windowed mode, and take notes in a separate app. But the Steam method works even in fullscreen games, plus it automatically stores the game notes with the game in question.)
Anyway, this on-screen note-taking could be used both to document game insights, or to display a “training” checklist. For example: “here’s a checklist of what I want to focus on wrt feedback loops”.
I can learn something (become more capable at a task) without being able to describe in words what I learned unless I spend much more time and effort to create the verbal description than I spent to learn the thing. I’ve seen this happen enough times that it is very unlikely that I am mistaken although I haven’t observed how other people learn things closely enough to know whether what I just said generalizes to other people.
This has happened when I’ve learned a new skill in math, philosophy or “self-psychotherapy” i.e., it is not restricted to those skills (e.g., how to lift weights while minimizing the risk of injury) in which the advantage of a non-verbal means of communication (e.g., video) is obvious.
Something you just wrote makes me wonder whether what I just described is foreign to you.
I tested a version of this for like 2 consecutive hours on a puzzle video game (Snakebird) and learned a surprising amount, if I didn’t have a strong commitment this week I’d be devoting a few days to it.
The original instruction was to plan out all my actions ahead of time, and not proceed until I was sure. I’d previously played Snakebird in late 2019 and beaten the core game, but not the bonus levels.
Things I noticed in two hours:
Realized I don’t have to plan the most efficient route, any route will do
Got better at chunking things
Realized I wanted to backwards engineer failures
Redoing puzzles I’d beaten a minute ago was surpisingly helpful/it was shocking how much i forgot seconds after finishing it. I think this might be because my RAM was so overloaded I couldn’t transfer the knowledge.
Recognizing the feeling over overload/quitting.
I want to work on both recognizing how full the meter is before I get overloaded, and of course increasing capacity.
Goddamnit I worked so hard to run at reality head first instead of being in my head all the time and now I have to go back?
I fit in a 10? hours around my core commitment. After the first few levels I tried the bonus levels- still absolutely impossible. After level 30 (of 40) this round I tried again, and beat all six bonus levels over ~3 days.
For those 30 puzzles I tried to pay some attention to process, but it was dominantly a leisure activity so I didn’t push hard on this and wasn’t strict about forming a complete plan before making my first move.
Raemon suggested something like “notes to past myself on principles for solving a level” (as opposed to listing specific moves), as a test for if I was drawing useful general lessons. This turned out to be surprisingly easy to test because I was so bad at remembering solution to puzzles even minutes after solving them. The notes were of mixed efficacy, but sometimes noticing what I’d missed let me draw more useful conclusions the second time around. .
A tip for note-taking while playing Steam games (though I don’t know if you played Snakebird on Steam or on the phone): A recent Steam update added an in-game note-taking widget to the Steam overlay (opened via Shift+Tab → pencil icon). So you can take game-specific notes, and even pin a semi-transparent notes widget over the game.
(Of course one can always tab out of games, or play them in windowed mode, and take notes in a separate app. But the Steam method works even in fullscreen games, plus it automatically stores the game notes with the game in question.)
Anyway, this on-screen note-taking could be used both to document game insights, or to display a “training” checklist. For example: “here’s a checklist of what I want to focus on wrt feedback loops”.
I can learn something (become more capable at a task) without being able to describe in words what I learned unless I spend much more time and effort to create the verbal description than I spent to learn the thing. I’ve seen this happen enough times that it is very unlikely that I am mistaken although I haven’t observed how other people learn things closely enough to know whether what I just said generalizes to other people.
This has happened when I’ve learned a new skill in math, philosophy or “self-psychotherapy” i.e., it is not restricted to those skills (e.g., how to lift weights while minimizing the risk of injury) in which the advantage of a non-verbal means of communication (e.g., video) is obvious.
Something you just wrote makes me wonder whether what I just described is foreign to you.