Music Video maker and self professed “Fashion Victim” who is hoping to apply Rationality to problems and decisions in my life and career probably by reevaluating and likely building a new set of beliefs that underpins them.
CstineSublime
Karma: 151
How could we test the inverse? How do we test if others believe in rare important truths? Because obviously if they are rare, then that implies that either we don’t share them, therefore do not believe they are truthful or important.
”Mel believes in the Law of Attraction, he believes it is very important even though it’s a load of hooey”
I suppose there are “Known-Unknowns” and things which we know are significant but kept secret (i.e. Google Pagerank Algorithm, in 2008 the ‘appetite’ for debt in European Bond Markets was a very important belief and those who believed the right level avoided disaster), we believe there is something to believe, but don’t know what the sin-qua-non belief is.
Are you alluding to Wittgenstein’s final passage of the Tractatus: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent”?
Yes, I think TAPs are extremely relevant here because it is about bringing attention, as you say, to the rule in the right context.
I suspect a lot of my “try to...” or “you should...” notes and instructions are Actions in search of a Trigger
I’m afraid that doesn’t even come close to answering my questions about how you rank what is important or not, nor why you think visual representations are important, nor how GTD or whatever you use helps you revisit these ideas—as I said in my original post I don’t like the “Someday” bucket of that system. Could you try have another go at explaining it to me?
You mentioned there are more in depth theories, which ones do you work by? Does this influence how you decide what is an important 1 , 2 or 3?
How does the visual representation help you filter or action and actualize ideas rather than just adding them to the pile?
Thank you for the detailed response, to be honest hearing the experience of a disorganized non-model user seems much more valuable than someone who uses it perfectly, like how you don’t find yourself using tags.
[Question] How should I optimize my decision making model for ‘ideas’?
DON’T write instructions like that, instead try this...
“Don’t...” “Stop doing this but instead...” “when you find yourself [operative verb] try to...” headed instructions tend to be more useful and actionable for me than non-refutative instructions. Or to get meta:
Don’t start instructions with the operative verb, instead begin with “Don’t [old habit] instead…[operative verb and instruction]” or “Stop [old habit] and [operative verb and instruction]
I find I’m terrible at making an instruction, advice or a note actionable because it is exceedingly difficult to find suitable cues, situations or contexts to use them. This is further complicated by the struggle to remember the instruction correctly in the ‘fog of war’ as it were.
For example, Nicholas Nassim Taleb notes that people are so prone to “overcausation” that you can get most people to become loquacious by simply asking “why?” (others say ‘why’ can come off as too accusatory and ‘how come?’ is more polite). I may like to see how true this is, but now I need to find a situation to use it in… uhhh… hmmm… okay, next time someone gives a one-word response about their weekend. Sure… now how can I remember it? In the panicky situation where a conversation grows quiet, how can I remember to ask “why?”?
Provided that an instruction or note that begins with “stop...” or “don’t” does in fact describe a habit you have or recurring situation you continue to encounter, then there is already a cue you can recognize.
For example, often when I hit an impasse while brainstorming, I will absentmindedly check my Instagram or a news website or here. That is a cue, and I can say “Don’t check Instagram, instead write down a brief description of what the next step is in your brain storming process.”
To test Taleb’s observation, I’d do well to think of something I often do or notice when a conversation peters out, something like “don’t say ‘haha yeah’, ask ‘why’”? (and trust I have the sense to not implement that robotically and ask ‘why?’ as a non-sequitur)
So my advice to myself: Don’t write instructions or notes that begin with “try to...” “you should...” or even “write instructions that begin with refutations” but instead use “Don’t… but instead” as a template.
It started with me taking notes while playing RPGs, but turned into a daily journal.
Interesting! Is that because you find that your most creative while playing RPGs? How much detail are in those notes? How often do you find you pause the game to write one (reminds me of the Mitch Hedberg joke about thinking of a joke at night, he either needs to get up, or convince himself that the joke isn’t that funny).
How often do you text search for ideas? What seems to trigger revisiting an idea?
There are more in depth theories about how to actually organize your notes,
Which theories have you found suite you best and why? How do you organize your notes?
And having captured your ideas in Obsidian, how do you go about revisiting them and ensuring that they don’t remain captured but forgotten?
I’m not familiar with that app, but could you go into more detail about how you use it with regards to storing and capturing ideas?
Like do you instantly, say when on the bus, or at the dinner table note down an idea? How much detail do you put in?
How does it integrate with your to-do list or calendar or whatever productivity system, formal or informal you have? An idea may not necessarily represent a commitment just yet, so how do you use this app to revisit ideas? How often do you revisit them?
Do you organize or store your “ideas” notes differently to other notes?
Where do you put your ideas?
It’s very interesting how much culture (and I suppose population density and jurisdiction too) can affect driving style.
As for Italy, there’s a throwaway line in a Dave Snowden talk about how drivers in Italy (Naples? Rome?) can be observed to follow the same basic ‘rules’ as a birds in a flock—kind of a Simon’s Ant thing about how seemingly complex behavior actually is operating on a small set of simple rules.
Watching that Cruise video for the first time, I’m struck by how patient and conservative the system is when encountering obstacles or waiting for pedestrians to cross, it doesn’t try to sneak or squeeze past double parked vans in a hurry for example.
I wonder how much safer roads could be if human drivers were all a little more patient? Although, as I understand it the chief benefit of FSD is that it is highly predictable and doesn’t make impulsive choices.
I don’t believe it’s doing a good job of delivering me ‘addictive’ content. Am I in denial or am I a fringe case and for the most part it is good?
I have given you the wrong impression, I assure you I have a very verbal, very longwinged inner monologue which uses a lot of words and sentences. However I wouldn’t consider it the sole or perhaps even the chief source of my planning, although sometimes it is involved in how I plan. So when the author says “verbal conscious planner” are there other ‘planners’ I should be excluding from my personal translation? How would I know?
I’m just wondering if there’s a specific reason that the author has referred to it as a VERBAL conscious planner, and if willpower is therefore only applicable to what is verbal? Because as I understand it, especially in the dual-theory of memory which divides memory into Declarative/Explicit Memory and Non-Declarative/Implicit Memory (to which it is easy to draw an analogy between System 1 and 2, or the Elaboration Likelyhood model of attitudinal change) - the verbal is explicit, the non-verbal is vague in this dichotomy.
Why refer to it as a “verbal conscious planner”—why not just say “conscious planner”? Surely the difference isn’t haphazard?“Our conscious thought processes are all the ones we are conscious of.”
Could you rephrase this less tautologically? - because now I’m wondering a lot of perhaps irrelevant things such as: is it necessary to be conscious of the content of a thought, or only that a thought is currently being held? What micro-macro level of abstraction is necessary? For example, if I’m deliberating if I should check if a pair of shoes are available on an online store still discounted am I conscious of the thought if I think “shoes on online store” or must I refer to “that pair of red converses on ASOS”?
I just worry that this is perhaps a logocentric view of willpower.
As I understand it the reason is that it is too computationally expensive to tailor a feed for each user, I remember seeing somewhere on the Facebook developer blog that that for any given user they take a batch, let’s say 1 million posts/piece-of-content from their wider network, this will likely overlap if not be the same as many other users. From that it personalizes and prunes to whatever number of items they elect to show in your feed (say 100).
Out of the millions of pieces of content posted every day, it couldn’t possibly prune it down for every user a-new every 24 hours, if there’s a 200 million people using a platform at least once every 24 hours, that quickly rockets up. So they use restricted pools which go through successive filters. The problem is if you’re not in the right pool to begin with, or your interests exist across multiple pools—then there is no hope of getting content that is tailored to you.
This is a half-remembered explanation of a much more intricate and multi-layered process as described by Facebook, and I don’t know how similar/different Youtube, TikTok and other platforms are.
I’ve yet to see a personalized filter bubble, I’ve certainly been part of some nebulous other’s filter bubble, but I am constantly and consciously struggling to get social media websites to serve up feeds of content I WANT to interact with.
Now while I am in someone else’s bubble—there is certainly a progressive slant to most of the external or reshared content I see on Meta platforms (and it seems to be American-centric despite the fact I’m not in the United States), it took me an incredibly long time to curate my ‘for you/Explore’ page in Instagram, to remove all ‘meme’ videos, basically anything with a white-background and text like “wait for it” or “watch until the end” or intentionally impractical craft projects. It is only through aggressively using the “not interested” option on almost every item in the For You page, it now shows me predominantly High Fashion photography.
Alas, one stray follow (i.e., following a friend of a friend) or like and Voompf the bubble bursts and I’ll start seeing stuff I have no interest in like “top 5 almond croissants” or “homemade vicks”—I have never EVER liked any local cuisine content ever and I’m really against the idea of getting medicinal craft projects from popular reels, sorry.
I suspect the filter bubble is grossly exaggerated - (Counter theory: I am not profitable enough for the algorithm to build such a bubble) - I suspect that much the fear and shock when you see Google ads delivered to you that match a conversation you had just 3 hours ago (although there is a lot of truth to the idea that smart devices are spying on you). Likely this is a combination of good old fashioned Clustering Illusion and the ego-deflating idea that the topic of that conversation you had just isn’t that unique or uncommon (particularly). I’ve had three different people DM me the same OK GO Reel in one week recently. I never interacted with it directly—clearly the algorithm was aggressively pumping that to EVERYONE.
Spotify ads suggest I’m a parent who plays golf.
Instgaram Ads are slightly better these days—I just flicked through and most had to do with music and photography. But recently it was serving me a lot of obvious scam ads, with a photoshop image of a prominent political figure with a black eye. (again—politics. I don’t follow or interact with ANY political content.)
It’s someone else’s bubble, I’m just living in it.
P.S. do not allow Spotify to add suggested tracks to the end of your playlist if you’re not a fan of top 50 pop music, it will start playing Taylor Swift et. al., and you won’t be able to remove it from your ‘taste profile’ rendering certain mixes unlistanble as it won’t just be her music but every other top 50 artist.
Feedback loops I think are the principle bottleneck in my skill development, aside from the fact that if you’re a novice you don’t even know what you should be noticing (even if you have enough awareness to be cognizant of all signs and outputs of an act).
To give an example, I’m currently trying to learn how to generate client leads through video content for Instagram. Unless someone actually tells me about a video they liked and what they liked about it, figuring out how to please the algorithm to generate more engagement is hard. The only thing that “works”—tagging other people. Nothing about the type of content, the framing of the shots, the subject matter, the audio… nope… just whether or not one or more other Instagram accounts are tagged in it. (Of course since the end objective is - ‘get commissioned’ perhaps optimizing for Instagram engagement is not even the thing I should be optimizing at all… how would I know?)
Feedback loops are hard. A desirbale metaskill to have would be developing tight feedback loops.
I could be drawing too long of a bow, but this seems to recall the distinction Marvin Minsky makes between Logic and Common-Sense thinking. Logic is a single “thin” chain of true or false propositions, if any single link in the chain is false, the whole chain collapses. Commonsense, in his parlance, is less discrete, we can have degrees of belief in any part of a chain, some parts of the train will be deeper and stronger than others.
He also greatly admired a passage in Aristotle’s De Anima that shows how a single object can be represented in multiple ways, which Minsky saw as being very significant to operating in the world.
Am I conflating different things by saying this reads as similar to the idea of favoring Cross-Entropy rather than the shortest program?
Minsky extended to the idea of multiple representations to what he called Papert’s Principle—that it is how we administer and use these multiple representations together, or when we opt for one and exclude others which is the most important part of ‘mental growth’.
Returning to replacing axioms and how this relates to Minsky’s ideas about multiple representations, take for example making an omelette. I may use a stone bench-top, a tiled backsplash, a spoon, or any sort of ‘hard’ surface to crack the egg. The “crack the egg” part of the process/recipe stays the same, with the same anticipated result, but it becomes replaced by mental representations about the perceived hardness of many different objects.
Does any of this seem relevant or have I made some crude, tenuous connections?