It’s interesting to compare this to the other curated posts I got in my inbox over the last week, What is malevolence? and How will we update about scheming. Both of those (especially the former) I bounced off of due to length. But this one I stuck with for quite a while, before I started skimming in the worksheet section.
I think the instinct to apply a length filter before sending a post to many peoples’ inboxes is a good one. I just wish it were more consistently applied :)
These posts always leave me feeling a little melancholy that my life doesn’t seem to have that many challenges where thinking faster/better/harder/sooner would actually help.
Most of my waking hours are spent on my job, where cognitive performance is not at all the bottleneck. (I honestly believe that if you made me 1.5x “better at thinking”, this would not give a consistent boost in output as valued by the business. I’m a software engineer.) I have some intellectual spare-time hobbies, but the most demanding of them is Japanese studying, which is more about volume, exposure, and spaced repetition than clever strategies. I am intrigued by making myself more productive in my programming side projects, but I think the biggest force multiplier for me there is learning how to leverage AI agents more effectively. (Besides the raw time savings, rapid iteration speed can also lessen the need for thinking of the right solution the first time around.)
I can easily see how this would be an important skill for someone doing novel academic-ish research, however. And I wish some of the examples were about that, instead of Thinking Physics and video games!