Learned Blankness and Expectations of Solubility
post by brook · 2022-03-18T12:42:49.723Z · LW · GW · 2 commentsEpistemic status: babble
I've observed a difference between the smart and the very smart. It seems like a refinement of learned blankness [LW · GW] which I've found useful for spotting and (where appropriate) avoiding it.
Most people have large swathes of learned blankness [LW · GW]. When I point this out to smart people, one common answer I get is something like "That kind of problem isn't solvable". Believing a solution is impossible, they (quite reasonably) decide not to waste their time looking.
The very smart tend to expect things to be solvable. This doesn't seem to me like an explicit belief so much as a high-level generator [LW · GW] or an alief [? · GW], but it is there. This is the reason people will look at you funny when you say things like "I attached a string to my bedside lamp switch so I can turn it off while in bed" or "Our boiler was making funny noises, and its pressure gauge is outside the range in the manual, so I opened the valve briefly".
An added benefit of the latter approach is that you (hopefully) develop a sense for which types of problems really aren't solvable, leading you to (hopefully) more often tackle truly solvable problems. This should, in turn, improve your solubility-alief to be well-attuned to the world [LW · GW], rather than assuming things-in-general are unsolvable.
Unfortunately, there's a pretty obvious confounder of this observation. The smart-but-not-very-smart could just be right. We don't have to presume that solubility-alief causes you to be smarter; it also seems pretty plausible to me that this alief could come about in the already-very-smart because they really do solve problems more often.
Indirect evidence against this confounder: many of the problems solved because of solubility-alief don't seem especially... well, hard. Like clogged drains [LW · GW], it doesn't seem like an IQ of 150 is required to 1. spot how annoying it is to have to get out of bed to turn your lamp off, and 2. generate the idea of a piece of string. The hard part seems to be somewhere in the valley between 1 and 2, where you have to actually believe that minor annoyances aren't an inherent and unfixable facet of life.
I'm not sure what other observations I'd expect to differ between these two models, short of success or failure of attempts to train/learn solubility-alief. Let me know if you can think of any.
To finish, some exercises for you, if you're an exercises type of person:
- What kinds of problems seem (in)soluble to you? Do you reflectively endorse those aliefs?
- What's something in the last week that you've put into the insoluble box before taking 10 seconds (or, for truly impossible problems, five minutes by the clock [? · GW]) to try to solve them?
- What happens when you do take ten seconds to generate solutions?
- If you find it easier, you could also try doing this the next time you notice yourself implicitly making an insolubility claim
- Who in your life has solubility-alief and who has insolubility-alief? How neat [LW · GW] is the divide? In what areas do they alieve in solubility? What patterns seem to serve well?
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comment by Algon · 2022-03-18T15:19:23.072Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Interestingly, my mother seems to have a selective blankness. When it comes to solving her day to day problems in arenas she's experienced with, she'll just come up with a solution. Whereas if you change it to e.g. dealing with a computer, there are many problems she has but doesn't really try to solve. I wonder though, if she were younger, would she be much more action oriented than she is now? Regardless, she explicitly believes that people can solve anything they put their mind to. On the whole, her position seems healthier, as she tries things much more than the average person.