There’s a general-purpose trick I’ve found that should, in theory, be applicable in this context as well, although I haven’t mastered that trick myself yet.
Essentially: when you find yourself in any given cognitive context, there’s almost surely something “visible” from this context such that understanding/mastering/paying attention to that something would be valuable and interesting.
For example, suppose you’re reading a boring, nonsensical continental-philosophy paper. You can:
Ignore the object-level claims and instead try to reverse-engineer what must go wrong in human cognition, in response to what stimuli, to arrive at ontologies that have so little to do with reality.
Start actively building/updating a model of the sociocultural dynamics that incentivize people to engage in this style of philosophy. What can you learn about mechanism design from that? It presumably sheds light on how to align people towards pursuing arbitrary goals, or how to prevent this happening...
Pay attention to your own cognition. How exactly are you mapping the semantic content of the paper to an abstract model of what the author means, or to the sociocultural conditions that created this paper? How do these cognitive tricks generalize? If you find a particularly clever way to infer something form the text, check: would your cognitive policy automatically deploy this trick in all context where it’d be useful, or do you need to manually build a TAP for that?
Study what passages make the feelings of boredom or frustration spike. What does that tell you about how your intuitions/heuristics work? Could you extract any generalizable principles out of that? For example, if a given sentence particularly annoys you, perhaps it’s because it features a particularly flawed logical structure, and it’d be valuable to learn to spot subtler instances of such logical flaws “in the wild”.
The experience of reading the paper’s text almost certainly provides some data uniquely relevant to some valuable questions, data you legitimately can’t source any other way. (In the above examples: sure you can learn more efficiently about the author’s cognition or the sociocultural conditions by reading some biographies or field overviews. But (1) this wouldn’t give you the meta-cognitive data about how you can improve your inference functions for mapping low-level data to high-level properties, (2) those higher-level summaries would necessarily be lossy, and give you a more impoverished picture than what you’d get from boots-on-the-ground observations.)
Similar applies to:
Listening to boring lectures. (For example, you can pay intense attention to the lecturer’s body language, or any tricks or flaws in their presentation.)
Doing a physical/menial task. (Could you build, on the fly, a simple model of the physics (or logistics) governing what you’re doing, and refine it using some simple experiments? Then check afterwards if you got it right. Or: If you were a prehistoric human with no idea what “physics” is, how could you naturally arrive at these ideas from doing such tasks/making such observations? What does that teach you about inventing new ideas in general?)
Doing chores. (Which parts of the process can you optimize/streamline? What physical/biological conditions make those chores necessary? Could you find a new useful takeaway from the same chore every day, and if not, why?)
Et cetera.
There’s a specific mental motion I associate with using this trick, which involves pausing and “feeling out” the context currently loaded in my working memory, looking at it from multiple angles, trying to see anything interesting or usefully generalizable.
In theory, this trick should easily apply to small-talk as well. There has to be something you can learn to track in your mind, as you’re doing small-talk, that would be useful or interesting to you.
One important constraint here is that whatever it is, it has to be such that your outwards demeanour would be that of someone who is enjoying talking to your interlocutor. If the interesting thing you’re getting out of the conversation is so meta/abstract you end up paying most of the attention to your own cognitive processes, not on what the interlocutor is saying, you’ll have failed at actually doing the small-talk. (Similarly, if, when doing a menial task, you end up nerd-sniped by building a physical model of the task, you’ll have failed at actually doing the task.)
You also don’t want to come across as sociopathic, so making a “game” of it where you’re challenging yourself to socially engineer the interlocutor into something is, uh, not a great idea.
The other usual advice for finding ways to enjoy small-talk are mostly specialized instances of the above idea that work for specific people. Steering the small-talk to gradient-descend towards finding emotional common ground, ignoring the object-level words being exchanged and build a social model of the interlocutor, doing a live study of the social construct of “small-talk” by playing around with it, etc.
You’ll probably need to find an instance of the trick that works for your cognition specifically, and it’s also possible the optimization problem is overconstrained in your case. Still, there might be something workable.
There’s a general-purpose trick I’ve found that should, in theory, be applicable in this context as well, although I haven’t mastered that trick myself yet.
Essentially: when you find yourself in any given cognitive context, there’s almost surely something “visible” from this context such that understanding/mastering/paying attention to that something would be valuable and interesting.
For example, suppose you’re reading a boring, nonsensical continental-philosophy paper. You can:
Ignore the object-level claims and instead try to reverse-engineer what must go wrong in human cognition, in response to what stimuli, to arrive at ontologies that have so little to do with reality.
Start actively building/updating a model of the sociocultural dynamics that incentivize people to engage in this style of philosophy. What can you learn about mechanism design from that? It presumably sheds light on how to align people towards pursuing arbitrary goals, or how to prevent this happening...
Pay attention to your own cognition. How exactly are you mapping the semantic content of the paper to an abstract model of what the author means, or to the sociocultural conditions that created this paper? How do these cognitive tricks generalize? If you find a particularly clever way to infer something form the text, check: would your cognitive policy automatically deploy this trick in all context where it’d be useful, or do you need to manually build a TAP for that?
Study what passages make the feelings of boredom or frustration spike. What does that tell you about how your intuitions/heuristics work? Could you extract any generalizable principles out of that? For example, if a given sentence particularly annoys you, perhaps it’s because it features a particularly flawed logical structure, and it’d be valuable to learn to spot subtler instances of such logical flaws “in the wild”.
The experience of reading the paper’s text almost certainly provides some data uniquely relevant to some valuable questions, data you legitimately can’t source any other way. (In the above examples: sure you can learn more efficiently about the author’s cognition or the sociocultural conditions by reading some biographies or field overviews. But (1) this wouldn’t give you the meta-cognitive data about how you can improve your inference functions for mapping low-level data to high-level properties, (2) those higher-level summaries would necessarily be lossy, and give you a more impoverished picture than what you’d get from boots-on-the-ground observations.)
Similar applies to:
Listening to boring lectures. (For example, you can pay intense attention to the lecturer’s body language, or any tricks or flaws in their presentation.)
Doing a physical/menial task. (Could you build, on the fly, a simple model of the physics (or logistics) governing what you’re doing, and refine it using some simple experiments? Then check afterwards if you got it right. Or: If you were a prehistoric human with no idea what “physics” is, how could you naturally arrive at these ideas from doing such tasks/making such observations? What does that teach you about inventing new ideas in general?)
Doing chores. (Which parts of the process can you optimize/streamline? What physical/biological conditions make those chores necessary? Could you find a new useful takeaway from the same chore every day, and if not, why?)
Et cetera.
There’s a specific mental motion I associate with using this trick, which involves pausing and “feeling out” the context currently loaded in my working memory, looking at it from multiple angles, trying to see anything interesting or usefully generalizable.
In theory, this trick should easily apply to small-talk as well. There has to be something you can learn to track in your mind, as you’re doing small-talk, that would be useful or interesting to you.
One important constraint here is that whatever it is, it has to be such that your outwards demeanour would be that of someone who is enjoying talking to your interlocutor. If the interesting thing you’re getting out of the conversation is so meta/abstract you end up paying most of the attention to your own cognitive processes, not on what the interlocutor is saying, you’ll have failed at actually doing the small-talk. (Similarly, if, when doing a menial task, you end up nerd-sniped by building a physical model of the task, you’ll have failed at actually doing the task.)
You also don’t want to come across as sociopathic, so making a “game” of it where you’re challenging yourself to socially engineer the interlocutor into something is, uh, not a great idea.
The other usual advice for finding ways to enjoy small-talk are mostly specialized instances of the above idea that work for specific people. Steering the small-talk to gradient-descend towards finding emotional common ground, ignoring the object-level words being exchanged and build a social model of the interlocutor, doing a live study of the social construct of “small-talk” by playing around with it, etc.
You’ll probably need to find an instance of the trick that works for your cognition specifically, and it’s also possible the optimization problem is overconstrained in your case. Still, there might be something workable.