Comment by R S (r-s-2) on The "Think It Faster" Exercise · 2025-02-11T05:01:29.040Z · LW · GW

Yeah I like that approach 

Part of it's probably that I work very long hours often 7 days a week (blah blah stash money before ASI kills my differentiator)

The biggest thing is not having a goal of being able to prove a solution to myself 

Like stop the search early basically

Don't need to formalize or document everything or remember every finding

I think most of the time the brain actually does a pretty good job of gradually solving problems over time without conscious thought 

We don't think of it as thought because it's not conscious or subtitled by our auditory processing system

But it still thought & learning

Relying on that implicit system instead often gets me better results than logically formalized versions

I guess now I'm kind of debating the core premise of the post -- that it's even possible or useful overall to discover or learn in that way, or that it's real learning

But it probably is helpful for some % of people who are less tunnely / tic-prone

Maybe I'm just jealous that it works for some people after devoting (and largely wasting) so much time on it myself

Not sure

Comment by R S (r-s-2) on The "Think It Faster" Exercise · 2025-02-09T19:06:19.414Z · LW · GW

I basically discovered the same form of thinking after I learned the concept of amplification and distillation 

The long-term results of this was severe OCD that took me 1.5-2 years to cut back

This is not to say that it's a bad idea, or a bad idea for everyone 

But it's a very, very bad idea for some people 

Basically I would spend so many hours every day just thinking, stuck in thought loops, stuck trying to gain some value out of generalizing 

Trying to compress mental models that are impossible to learn implicitly into simplified models/memonics and then learn how to use them reflectively 

Etc etc 

It's a fucking mess if you go too far 

And it's hard to know if you've gone too far 

At least it was for me, until I was slowly working through it through months of therapy 

And then realized oh this is really all because of that stupid fucking thought pattern thing I'm obsessed with

Especially the idea of trying to think it faster the FIRST time

That in particular can be paralyzing, this sense that you should be able to think it the right way the first time 

Very slippery slope

It's like mindfulness, generally good up to a point, but it's absolutely possible to go too far and have it cripple your life