"Think it Faster" worksheet

post by Raemon · 2025-02-08T22:02:27.697Z · LW · GW · 8 comments

Contents

  Overview
    Part 1
    Part 2
  Part I: Thinking it Faster
    Steps you actually took
    Magical superintelligence steps
    Iterate on those lists
      What skills, if you’d trained for 20 or 100 hours, would have helped you find the answer intuitively?
      What principles, if you internalized and they came easily to mind, would have allowed you to make some of those leaps ~instantly, or at least much faster?
      What jumps-between-steps feel magical or unrealistic, in “magical short list”? 
      For the “original steps you took”, what steps could you have skipped? What would have been necessary to skip them?
      Overall, what takeaways do you want to remember for later?
      What's the broadest generalization that feels reasonable to draw?
  Part II: Thinking It Faster The First Time
    Generalizing from this exercise 
      First, consolidate your list of skills and principles
      List past situations you could have benefited from those skills or principles
      List future situations where you suspect might benefit from those skills or principles.
      In the next week, what’s 1-3 tasks you’re doing that might benefit from those skills or principles?
    Anticipating Future Life Lessons
      In the next couple days, what's something you're planning to do that you expect to take a long time?
    Getting Detailed, and TAPs
      For one of the past moments, think in detail about how principles/skills would apply.
      Take whatever actions you can take right now.
  Part III: The Five Minute Version
None
8 comments

This is a succinct worksheet version of the "Think It Faster" Exercise [LW · GW]. ^[1]

You can use this worksheet either for purposeful practice, after completing some kind of challenging/confusing intellectual exercise (such as Thinking Physics [LW · GW] or Baba is You [LW · GW]). Or, if in your real life work you find something took a noticeably long time to figure out, or you were surprised about something you might have been able to notice.

The goal is to identify:

• skills you can train
• principles you can apply
• actions you can take (either physical or mental)

…that move you to correct solutions to problems as quickly as possible. 

I recommend setting the standard of "what would have been necessary for me to have figured this out with like 15 minutes of effort?". (This won't always usually be possible, but I find this frame helpful for noticing how high the skill ceiling here is. Imagine 10x programmers or senior UI developers [LW · GW] who intuitively move towards the right solution – what properties do they have, that you don't yet?)

Overview

Part 1

"How could you have Thought it Faster?"

• List the steps you actually took to solve the problem.
• List the minimum steps a magical superintelligence could possibly take (or, a "maximally epistemically lucky^[2] person" would take).
• Add steps to the magical-shortlist until it doesn’t feel magical.
• Identify obvious wasted motion in your original steps.
• List each moment where you could have steered more towards some kind of more productive thought, but didn't. (i.e. clues you almost noticed, ugh fields you considered leaning into but didn't, etc)
• Identify skills or principles that would have helped you solve it quickly.

Part 2

"What did you learn, which’ll let you Think It Faster The First Time, later?

• List past moments you could have benefited from those skills or principles
• List future moments might benefit from those skills or principles
• In the next week, what is…
  • …something you need to do that feels confusing?
  • …a cognitive task you expect to take a lot of time?
• Pick a specific problem you expect to face, and ask: 
  "What life-lessons can I generalize from this puzzle, to help approach that problem in a way that is less confused, less long, so I can Think It Faster the First Time?

Rather than go through each step exhaustively, in sequence, I recommend cycling through them: jot down a few quick ideas for each prompt, circling back to the first one, with each pass giving you a sense of how all the pieces fit together.

Part I: Thinking it Faster

Steps you actually took

In chronological order (as best you remember) what happened?

1.  
2.  
3.  

Magical superintelligence steps

If you were a waaaay smarter version yourself, or if you imagine some other waaaay (unrealistically) smarter genius, what is the shortest number of steps you can possibly imagine this taking? 

(Right now, it's okay for this to feel like cheating)

1.  
2.  
3.  

Iterate on those lists

Identify steps in the first list you could straightforwardly remove, or simplify. And, identify steps to add to the second list until it no longer feels like unrealistic cheating. (i.e. if you're not overfitting. The plan doesn't imply you should spend tons of cognitive overhead all the time on minor, unimportant clues)

Try these prompts to help you:

What skills, if you’d trained for 20 or 100 hours, would have helped you find the answer intuitively?

 

What principles, if you internalized and they came easily to mind, would have allowed you to make some of those leaps ~instantly, or at least much faster?

 

What jumps-between-steps feel magical or unrealistic, in “magical short list”? 

 

For the “original steps you took”, what steps could you have skipped? What would have been necessary to skip them?

 

Overall, what takeaways do you want to remember for later?

 

What's the broadest generalization that feels reasonable to draw?

 

Part II: Thinking It Faster The First Time

That was the easy part. The hard part is noticing when you're about to think something Too Slowly, and... do something else instead. 

Some suggested triggers:

• Things feel confusing or muddled. You're not sure the right next step to take.
•  
•  

Generalizing from this exercise 

First, consolidate your list of skills and principles

•  
•  
•  

List past situations you could have benefited from those skills or principles

•  
•  
•  

List future situations where you suspect might benefit from those skills or principles.

•  
•  
•  

In the next week, what’s 1-3 tasks you’re doing that might benefit from those skills or principles?

•  
•  
•  

Anticipating Future Life Lessons

The flipside of "how can this exercise generalize to real life?" is "what real life situations are likely to benefit from some kind of exercise?".

So an alternate set of prompts are:

In the next couple days, what's something you're planning to do that you expect to take a long time?

•  
•  
•  

...what's something you're confused about, or where you're not sure how to do it?

•  
•  
•  

...what's something you expect to solve via tinkering/iteration without much of a plan, that you expect to take awhile?

 

•  
•  

These might be situations that don't naturally lend themselves to the most obvious life lessons from the exercise you just did. But, they might give you clues about additional life-lessons to be on the lookout for. Or, might give you clues about which sorts of toy exercises are useful to apply this practice to.

 

Getting Detailed, and TAPs

After you've soaked in some basic ideas for takeways, and some practical places to apply them, you want to get a lot more detailed. Form explicit intentions about when to remind yourself of some advice, and see if it's helpful.

For one of the past moments, think in detail about how principles/skills would apply.

(Imagine doing this whole doc again, for that past moment, and how you wish you’d thought-it-faster then. Don’t do the whole-ass version of the doc, but briefly think about the key moments)

 

 

For the future moments, how would the skills or principles apply? What would you hope you do, in the moment, to avoid taking longer or making mistakes? (When you imagine failing to remember in the moment, why was that? What steps could you take to avoid forgetting?)

 

 

Write down 3 tactical plans for remembering and applying lessons from this exercise during the next week. (They can be bad plans, and they can be short/rough. Ideally, they should include some actions you take right now, and some actions you’ll take later)

 

 

Pick any of the plans that seem worthwhile. Make an explicit prediction about whether it’ll work. (If it doesn’t feel that likely to work, ask “how can I improve this plan?” until you’d be surprised if it failed.)

 

 

Take whatever actions you can take right now.

 

 

Part III: The Five Minute Version

Doing all of this thoroughly takes a long time. I recommend doing it thoroughly the first couple times, to build a complete model of how everything fits together.

But, ultimately, to practice a skill, you need to get a lot of reps in. You can't get a lot of reps in if you have to dedicate an hour each time.

So, what's the five minute version of this? When you look at everything you just thought about, what were the single most important thoughts you had? What prompts would have helped direct you to those important thoughts?

I recommend thinking about this quickly rather than slowly/deliberately, to help practice the art of "just actually think the most important thoughts, don't overthink it", which is it's own skill.

The next time you naturally stumble into a situation you could have Thought Faster, apply the 5 minute version of this exercise. 

You can probably find at least 1-3 moments per week that would benefit from Thinking It Faster. 

1. ^{^}

   I'm not actually sure what makes for a good LessWrong post version of an exercise, and curious whether people would have preferred to read this first or the longer version first.

2. ^{^}

   i.e. at each step in the thought-chain, their brain happened to stumble upon a branch that was along the shortest route towards the correct answer.

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