For example, I recently found out I did something wrong at a conference. In my bio, in areas of expertise I should have written what I can teach about, and in areas of interest what I want to be taught about. This seems to maximize value for me.
How do I keep that mistake from happening in the future? I don’t know when the next conference will happen. Do I write it on anki and memorize that as a failure mode?
More generally, when you recognize a failure mode in yourself how do you constrain your future self so that it doesn’t repeat this failure mode? How do you proceduralize and install the solution?
For a while I was in the habit of putting my little life lessons in the form of Anki cards and memorizing them. I would also memorize things like conflict resolution protocols and checklists for depressive thinking. Unfortunately it didn’t really work, in the sense that my brain consistently failed to recall the appropriate knowledge in the appropriate context.
I tried using an iOS app caled Lift but I found it difficult to use and not motivating.
I also tried using an iOS app called Alarmed to ping me throughout the day with little reminders like “Posture” and “Smile” and “Notice” to improve my posture, attitude, and level of mindfulness, respectively. This worked better but I eventually got tired of my phone buzzing so often with distracting, non-critical information and turned off the reminders.
My very first post on LessWrong was about proceduralizing rationality lessons, I think it’s one of the biggest blank spots in the curriculum.
I’m not sure this applies to your particular situation, but a general solution for proceduralizing behaviors that was discussed at minicamp (and which I’d actually done before) is: Trigger yourself on a particular physical sensation, by visualizing it and thinking very hard about the thing you want yourself to remember. So an example would be if you want to make sure you do the things on your to-do list as soon as you get home, spend a few minutes trying to visualize with as much detail as you can what the front door of your house looks like, and recall what it feels like to be stepping through it, and think about “To do list time!” at the same time. (Or if you have access to your front door at the time you’re trying to do this, actually stepping through your front door repeatedly while thinking about this might help too.)
And if there’s some way to automate it, then of course that’s ideal, though you said you don’t know when the next conference will happen so that’s more difficult.
Or another kind of automation: maybe you could save the bio you wrote in a Word document, and write a reminder in it to add the edits you want… or just do them now, and save the bio for future use. Then all you have to remember is that you wrote your bio already. Which is another problem, but conceivably a smaller one: I don’t know about your hindbrain, but upon being told it had to write a bio, mine would probably be grasping at ways to avoid doing work, and having it done already is an easy out.
For a problem like this, remembering for something rare in the indefinite future, the important thing is to remember at that time that you know something. At that point, if you’ve put it in a reasonable place, you can find it. It seems to me that the key problem is the jump from “have to write a bio” to “how to write a bio,” that is, making sure you pause and think about what you know or have written down somewhere. Some people claim success with Anki here, but it doesn’t make sense to me.
What most people do with bios is that they reuse them, or at least look at the old one whenever needing a new one. As Maia says, if you write an improved bio now, you can find it next time, when you look for the most recent version. But that doesn’t necessarily help remember why it was an improvement. If you have a standard place for bios, you can store lots of variants (lengths, types of conferences, resume, etc), along with instructions on what distinguishes them. But I think what most people do is search their email for the last one they submitted. If you can’t learn to look in a more organized place, you could send yourself an email with all the bios and the instructions, so that it comes up when you search email.
Discuss the failure in person, face to face, with a helpful colleague. Admit your failure. Make a conversation out of it. Brainstorm the fixes you’ve already made to the bio and any others that come up. Let the conversation have an attached emotion, whether it be a feel good problem solving session or a public shaming.
Memories with emotions stick around better.
I found that even the small act of saying “Yep, I did forgot to update the new widget part number” to a supervisor / team-member helps me remember to in the future.
How do you correct your mistakes?
For example, I recently found out I did something wrong at a conference. In my bio, in areas of expertise I should have written what I can teach about, and in areas of interest what I want to be taught about. This seems to maximize value for me. How do I keep that mistake from happening in the future? I don’t know when the next conference will happen. Do I write it on anki and memorize that as a failure mode?
More generally, when you recognize a failure mode in yourself how do you constrain your future self so that it doesn’t repeat this failure mode? How do you proceduralize and install the solution?
For a while I was in the habit of putting my little life lessons in the form of Anki cards and memorizing them. I would also memorize things like conflict resolution protocols and checklists for depressive thinking. Unfortunately it didn’t really work, in the sense that my brain consistently failed to recall the appropriate knowledge in the appropriate context.
I tried using an iOS app caled Lift but I found it difficult to use and not motivating.
I also tried using an iOS app called Alarmed to ping me throughout the day with little reminders like “Posture” and “Smile” and “Notice” to improve my posture, attitude, and level of mindfulness, respectively. This worked better but I eventually got tired of my phone buzzing so often with distracting, non-critical information and turned off the reminders.
My very first post on LessWrong was about proceduralizing rationality lessons, I think it’s one of the biggest blank spots in the curriculum.
Yes, a blank spot and one that makes everything else near-useless. This needs to be figured out.
I’m not sure this applies to your particular situation, but a general solution for proceduralizing behaviors that was discussed at minicamp (and which I’d actually done before) is: Trigger yourself on a particular physical sensation, by visualizing it and thinking very hard about the thing you want yourself to remember. So an example would be if you want to make sure you do the things on your to-do list as soon as you get home, spend a few minutes trying to visualize with as much detail as you can what the front door of your house looks like, and recall what it feels like to be stepping through it, and think about “To do list time!” at the same time. (Or if you have access to your front door at the time you’re trying to do this, actually stepping through your front door repeatedly while thinking about this might help too.)
And if there’s some way to automate it, then of course that’s ideal, though you said you don’t know when the next conference will happen so that’s more difficult.
Or another kind of automation: maybe you could save the bio you wrote in a Word document, and write a reminder in it to add the edits you want… or just do them now, and save the bio for future use. Then all you have to remember is that you wrote your bio already. Which is another problem, but conceivably a smaller one: I don’t know about your hindbrain, but upon being told it had to write a bio, mine would probably be grasping at ways to avoid doing work, and having it done already is an easy out.
That automation makes sense, thank you. Trying to think of how to generalize it, and how to to merge it with the first suggestion.
For a problem like this, remembering for something rare in the indefinite future, the important thing is to remember at that time that you know something. At that point, if you’ve put it in a reasonable place, you can find it. It seems to me that the key problem is the jump from “have to write a bio” to “how to write a bio,” that is, making sure you pause and think about what you know or have written down somewhere. Some people claim success with Anki here, but it doesn’t make sense to me.
What most people do with bios is that they reuse them, or at least look at the old one whenever needing a new one. As Maia says, if you write an improved bio now, you can find it next time, when you look for the most recent version. But that doesn’t necessarily help remember why it was an improvement. If you have a standard place for bios, you can store lots of variants (lengths, types of conferences, resume, etc), along with instructions on what distinguishes them. But I think what most people do is search their email for the last one they submitted. If you can’t learn to look in a more organized place, you could send yourself an email with all the bios and the instructions, so that it comes up when you search email.
Anki doesn’t work for me on this, agreed. The above suggestion seems to dominate this one.
Discuss the failure in person, face to face, with a helpful colleague. Admit your failure. Make a conversation out of it. Brainstorm the fixes you’ve already made to the bio and any others that come up. Let the conversation have an attached emotion, whether it be a feel good problem solving session or a public shaming.
Memories with emotions stick around better.
I found that even the small act of saying “Yep, I did forgot to update the new widget part number” to a supervisor / team-member helps me remember to in the future.