Uh oh. My first run-through yielded only 11 bugs. Considering I’m not hilariously successful at everything means I’m missing a ton of information. My second search yielded a total of 50 bugs. This is still only half of what you minimally requested. I’m glad this was brought to my attention as it’s a really glaring deficiency, however I’m not sure how to go about remedying this, as it feels like I wrote down everything I could reasonably come up with (and I still ended up scraping the bottom of the barrel for ideas).
Also something that appears at least tangentially related- The Strategic Review by Sebastian Marshall (u/lionhearted) brings up a lot of useful concepts and approaches to bug-fixing. Give it a read for a different perspective.
Not the strangest fix, but it’s the best I’ve got:
When trying to get into making lists and journaling I kept not doing it because of the inconvinence of lugging around a journal. I tried using smaller journals that went into my pocket but then I also needed to carry around a pen. I used a jacket with inside pockets which worked for a while but they were seamed in such a way that it was frustrating to reinsert the journal. Eventually I just went ahead and bought a small purse that I now carry everywhere I go. This completely fixed the problem.
I wouldn’t worry about it, 50 is plenty for now. My hope is that the first cycle will cultivate stronger lateral thinking and expand your comfort zone enough that you’ll be able to come up with plenty more on the next cycle.
There’s a larger point I want to make which is that the reason one wants to be a rationalist is to win in general. If there were a particular one or two domains you care about, then applying force on those domains will get you more for your dollar than working on rationality as such (unless the particular domain has something to do with minds). Therefore, to make maximal use out of rationality you have to be solving lots of disparate problems, which requires that you notice lots of bugs to solve in the first place.
Seconding Qiaochu’s point to an extent: huge families of bugs can all be manifestations of one “real” bug at the bottom. On the other hand I have the sense that the best way to get started on these “real” bugs is to solve some of their small consequences, so being able to fractionate bugs into specific pieces is still useful.
Going for quantity is a nice way to brainstorm and make sure you’ve covered a lot of bases but I wouldn’t stress out too much about it. In my experience people only have a small number of “real” bugs and if they solve those then their other bugs sort of go away automatically or don’t feel like they matter. (The “real” bugs are less like “thing X is going wrong in my life” and more like “I am the sort of person for whom things X, Y, Z, W… go wrong in my life.”)
Uh oh. My first run-through yielded only 11 bugs. Considering I’m not hilariously successful at everything means I’m missing a ton of information. My second search yielded a total of 50 bugs. This is still only half of what you minimally requested. I’m glad this was brought to my attention as it’s a really glaring deficiency, however I’m not sure how to go about remedying this, as it feels like I wrote down everything I could reasonably come up with (and I still ended up scraping the bottom of the barrel for ideas).
Also something that appears at least tangentially related- The Strategic Review by Sebastian Marshall (u/lionhearted) brings up a lot of useful concepts and approaches to bug-fixing. Give it a read for a different perspective.
Not the strangest fix, but it’s the best I’ve got:
When trying to get into making lists and journaling I kept not doing it because of the inconvinence of lugging around a journal. I tried using smaller journals that went into my pocket but then I also needed to carry around a pen. I used a jacket with inside pockets which worked for a while but they were seamed in such a way that it was frustrating to reinsert the journal. Eventually I just went ahead and bought a small purse that I now carry everywhere I go. This completely fixed the problem.
I wouldn’t worry about it, 50 is plenty for now. My hope is that the first cycle will cultivate stronger lateral thinking and expand your comfort zone enough that you’ll be able to come up with plenty more on the next cycle.
There’s a larger point I want to make which is that the reason one wants to be a rationalist is to win in general. If there were a particular one or two domains you care about, then applying force on those domains will get you more for your dollar than working on rationality as such (unless the particular domain has something to do with minds). Therefore, to make maximal use out of rationality you have to be solving lots of disparate problems, which requires that you notice lots of bugs to solve in the first place.
Seconding Qiaochu’s point to an extent: huge families of bugs can all be manifestations of one “real” bug at the bottom. On the other hand I have the sense that the best way to get started on these “real” bugs is to solve some of their small consequences, so being able to fractionate bugs into specific pieces is still useful.
Going for quantity is a nice way to brainstorm and make sure you’ve covered a lot of bases but I wouldn’t stress out too much about it. In my experience people only have a small number of “real” bugs and if they solve those then their other bugs sort of go away automatically or don’t feel like they matter. (The “real” bugs are less like “thing X is going wrong in my life” and more like “I am the sort of person for whom things X, Y, Z, W… go wrong in my life.”)