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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Tuning your Cognitive Strategies, published by Raemon on April 27, 2023 on LessWrong.
The blogpost author (SquirrelInHell on LessWrong) died awhile ago. I'm not sure who's currently paying for their website or how long it'll be up. I don't have the rights to this, but decided it was important enough to have on LessWrong that I decided to copy-paste this post and... I dunno, own whatever karmic debt I incur.
This is possibly my single-favorite rationality technique. The first day I tried this I immediately ended up teaching myself a valuable rationality-life-lesson due to the feedback loop it created. When I teach this technique at small workshops, typically ~25% of people go "oh wow that was immediately helpful." I haven't gotten as much value out of it as SquirrelInHell suggests (i.e. it's sometimes effortful to think, and they claim if you're doing it right it basically shouldn't be), but I also haven't really sat and trained it deliberately in-depth, and meanwhile I've gotten value from it each time I try it.
Text of original article:
Tuning Your Cognitive Strategies
What do you get out of it?
The good.
Better returns on thinking time.
Your cognition is much more powerful than just the part you have conscious access to, and it's crucial to make good use of it.
A small tweak to how your brain processes information in general is worth more than a big upgrade to your conscious repository of cognitive tricks.
Goal-oriented thinking.
When working on real-life problems, your peak performance matters less than the ability to simply think useful thoughts at all.
For example, if your current top priority is "start my own company", but you keep having insights about "what I'll say to my current boss when I finally quit"... that's maybe not the best way to make progress.
Improved ability to fix cognitive biases.
To the extent that other approaches work, it's because they manage to change your cognitive strategies. It's much easier when you know what you are doing.
More creativity and good ideas just "popping into your head".
There's no magic to it! Once you understand how the process works, it can be optimized for any purpose you choose.
Less anxiety about performing well in cognitive endeavors.
Once you realize exactly what is and what isn't under your conscious control, you stop beating yourself about not doing the impossible.
The bad.
Uncanny valley.
Most people already have a thinking style built on top of excessive conscious cognitive effort.
This often involves relying on side-effects of verbal and conscious thoughts, while mistakenly assigning the full credit for results to those effortful thoughts.
When you already have some conscious/verbal thoughts, it is tempting to imagine they are the only result of your thinking, and then try to pick up from there. But this is limiting, because the most power is in whatever generated that output.
As you tune your cognitive strategies you're likely to lose that thinking style.
While rebuilding from better foundations is certainly a good idea long-term, you'll probably need to slow down and re-learn some old tricks in a new framework.
Control anxiety.
Having good quality thinking happen effortlessly and automatically is great... unless you are a control freak, in which case you should Tune Your Emotional Processing before even reading this page.
How to tell if you have it?
Note: everyone has cognitive strategies, and challenging yourself with intellectual activity tends to improve them (e.g. mathematicians tend to be very good at a certain specific class of strategies). However, it is very unlikely that you have reached your full potential by blind gradient descent.
You know how to think without "trying hard".
The cost you pay for high quality thinking is mostly time, which you know needs to be free from other concerns.
You defin...
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