Thank you for writing this out. It resonates with what’s happening in my head on a deeper, emotional level (“if I study enough meta, I will become a fearsome champion in my first match, ha ha”).
The meta element of anything is a necessary evil
This is going on a post-it on my desk.
Thanks! Your comment made me realize I built sort of trap for myself: I would go for meta when I would be tired, telling myself “hey, maybe I’m not pushing on The Thing, but at least I’m pushing on it indirectly.” But that slowly moved me farther and farther away from The Thing because if I can keeping pushing on it with less energy by going meta, why would I ever push on the object-level which costs more energy for the same effect?
But the effect is not the same of course. I just tricked myself.
Also, from your other comment, the pots theory really resonated because it sounds so much like play—making 50 pots creates so much space for experimentation and silliness!
I’m a big fan of the Replacing Guilt series. But I’ve always found the “guilt” part troubling because it always felt there was something more behind, something even more primitive.
Perhaps it’s just me or people like me but now I believe that thing is fear. Completely subjectively I had an experience recently while watching my thoughts (inspired by https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bbB4pvAQdpGrgGvXH/tuning-your-cognitive-strategies) and noticed that certain chains if thoughts terminated as if at a wall made up of this panicky feeling, the one where you feel your chest tigthen and your breathing become shallow and difficult. It felt a lot like fear.
Looking forward to your next posts in the series!
Thanks, this is incredibly useful.
I think I understand enough to put together a curriculum to delve into this topic. Starting with the harvard course you recommended.
I’m reminded of a post from not too long ago: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bbB4pvAQdpGrgGvXH/tuning-your-cognitive-strategies
I haven’t run through the exercise that it suggests, but I’ve borrowed an idea that seems in line with the framework in this post. Internally, I call it a brain debugger.
Basically, from time to time I ask myself what am I thinking and what was I thinking before. To better illustrate what I mean in the context of this post, here’s an example:
trying to solve problem at work
trying to solve problem at work
BREAK: I’m thinking about a problem at work. I was thinking about it before.
trying to solve a problem at work
getting upset at coworker for last week’s meeting
BREAK: I’m thinking about how upset I am at my coworker. I was thinking about solving a problem at work. WAT? How did I get here? Coworker X isn’t even here. Wait, I’m in an imaginary situation. Coworker X isn’t here. Why am I arguing with them? Let’s go back to work problem
In other words, it’s helping me catch myself when my brain is getting stuck in a goodharting loop.
(This doesn’t solve the underlying problems, but it does to help with reflection)
This is good advice that I’ve seen work very well, both for myself and others.
There is, however, a related problem, or rather a metaproblem: how do you choose what to whitebox?
Going with the programming example, the field is huge. Do you invest time into ML? Linux? Rust? Data engineering? SRE?
Then, within each of those categories you can find vast categories: as an SRE do you focus on observability or CI/CD or orchestration or...? Each is a 1-3+ year subfield in itself.
You can use a heuristic like “what’s useful for my job” but even then, unless you’re already an expert and working in exactly your domain, the number of categories could be vast.
I’ve been investing my time in seemingly evergreen domains like Linux, programming (python/go), and containers. I want to expand into statistics/metrics.
I’m curious how you and others here have managed this question though.
Thanks! I’ll look this over.
Out of curiosity,
Most people with a strong intuition for statistics have taken courses in probability. It is foundational material for the discipline.
Do some people learn statistics without learning probability? Or, what’s different for someone who learns only stats and not probability?
(I’m trying to grasp what shape/boundaries are at play between these two bodies of knowledge)
Thanks! This is really helpful—I think this is exactly what I’m trying to do.
Are these texts part of a specific academic track/degree or field of study? It sounds like something someone in engineering would spend a semester on. But also like something someone could spend a career on studying.
You raise a good question, but it still relies on following the (historical) authority of the Academy. Perhaps the Academy has changed? Perhaps the environment the Academy is operating has changed, forcing the Academy to adjust?
Of course, this would apply to the non-Academy, ie. broader society, as well—but at different rates, and also different directions.
A stab at answering your question: you should only apply an update based on the Academy if the Academy is an important entity for you. This isn’t binary. Awards factor into my perception of movies, but only play a minor role.
As someone who’s experienced this, I’ve found that Slack is a helpful idea to bring to bear.
Sometimes, trying to utilize the small segments of free time leads to scheduling so much work that one small interruption snowballs into a huge failure. So I’ve often asked myself, “What can I do to create more slack so that I do have the required bigger chunks of time to truly focus on work that matters?”
Many thanks for letting me know!
Wish I had heard this sooner. Coming from a place where every purchase had to be planned out weeks in advance, and after finding financial stability, it took me some years to realize I shouldn’t be trying to optimize the purchase of chopsticks or closet hanger.
Thanks for sharing your perspective. I remember you describing your experience in a little more depth some time ago and it makes me doubt my experience. Perhaps I’ve been in less healthy orgs. But more likely there are knobs/patterns I can’t see, so org change work like this feels out of reach for me. I’ve got some thinking to do.
I’ve been thinking about AllAmericanBreakfast’s recent shortform posts about mentition. It’s because I’ve been teaching myself three new things and I noticed that one practice I engage in regularly is playing with problems in my head. But this practice seems to largely depend on how good I am at something.
Anecdotal examples:
Teaching myself TLA+. It’s a programming language used to specify models, which helps verify whether an algorithm behaves like it should, especially concurrent algorithms.
I have a few examples that I’ve looked at (from the course). Throughout the day, I’ll turn these around in my mind, looking at different facets, moving things around and occasionally hit on an insight.
Going through Bayesian Statistics the Fun Way for a much needed refresher on bayesian stats.
Here too I have a few simple examples, problems taken straight from the book, that I turn over in my head. It’s harder, though, because different “objects”, like numerators and denominators, are hard for my mind to hold onto for long. I need more focus.
Writing. Specifically, creative nonfiction.
Here, I have a few essays that I really liked that I’m playing with. But this one is the hardest of all to wrestle with in my mind. Ideas, sentences, paragraphs feel so liquid and unholdable. I can only do this type of work with pen and paper or a text editor.
In the first case, in which I have some years of experience, thinking and focusing feels easy. Even in a weird language I’ve never seen before, I can see “things” and “relationships” and “sequences” and play around with them.
In the last case, there are almost no things, no relationships. It’s all one mixed up soup. Only recently did I learn, thanks to a class, about things like ledes, nut graphs, points/themes, angles, calls to action, etc. and this has been an immense help in slowly learning how to “turn around” these things in my mind.
So, if this generalizes in any way, it seems that ramping up to a state where you can do mentition requires first learning to see the structure of whatever it is you’re learning. Sort of like priming the pump. Afterwards, there’s a lot less “ugh” and a lot more play.
I’ve seen this happen too, along with same end result.
It appears that a common failure mode here is that the middle management layer fails to translate the values into system updates. No one updates performance reviews, no one updates quarterly/half goals, etc. So things just continue as they were before.
Ultimately, it’s the responsibility of leadership to fix this. Whether it’s by direct intervention or a huddle with middle management, they must do something.
(My experience as an individual contributor that attempted to change how performance reviews are done to better align with a value like “engineering excellence” tells me it’s impossible to affect this kind of change as an IC. Unless you’re friends with the CEO, which I wasn’t).
Thanks for posting this. I’ll add it to my collection of “thinking tools.”
These techniques feel like they have the same spirit as some of de Bono’s work, for example, his idea of PO:
PO implies, ’That may be the best way of looking at things or putting the information together. That may even turn out to be the only way. But let us look around for other ways.
The two main functions of PO are first to protect an arrangement of information from judgement and to indicate that it is being used provocatively and second to challenge a particular arrangement of information such as an idea, a concept or a way of putting things.
Some of them also remind me of Gerald Weinberg’s books, but unfortunately I can’t find my notes on them.
In my experience with doing something similar, this practice also helps memorize adjacent concepts.
For example, I was recently explaining to myself Hubbard’s technique that uses Student’s t-stat to figure out the 90% CI of a range of possible values of a population using a small sample.
Having little memory of statistics from school, I had to refresh my understanding of variance and the standard deviation, which are required to use the t-stat table. So now, whenever I need to “access” variance or stdev, I mentally “reach” for the t-stat table and pick up variance and stdev.
Thirding this. Would love more detail or threads to pull on. Going into the constructivism rabbit hole now.
That was my idealism/naivete: that the league of liberal democracies is so mature and strong that they could flip a switch and the war would cease. Maybe they would just tell Putin to stop and he would have to. Because for me, democracy was always a guarantee of peace. But the war made me realize my map was way off from the territory, and Popper’s book, in turn, helped to replace my fantasy with something closer to the territory.
I can see how this can look like procrastination from the outside. But I think in my case, it really is some weird jedi trickery where meta-level replaced the object-level (at much less energy cost—so why would I ever do object level?)
I’ve written more this week than in a long time just by clearly asking myself whether I’m doing something meta (fun, leisure) or object-level (building stuff) and there’s no ugh-field at all!