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<h1 id="post-title">The Technique Trap v2</h1>
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<h1 id="motivation-for-the-reader">Motivation for the reader:</h1>
<p>How many techniques do you have? How many productivity tips, blog posts, magazine articles, and self-help books have you read that purport to improve your lives?</p>
<p>How much has really improved?</p>
<p>I have been a bit of a self-help junkie for a while now. For more than a decade, in fact. Let me just list a few of the books I’ve read that promise to change my life:</p>
<ul>
<li>Study Smarter, not Harder.</li>
</ul>
<p>and so on.</p>
<p>This is to say nothing of the thousands of websites and blog posts I’ve read over the last decade - ever since I had access to the web, really.</p>
<p>Websites like</p>
<ul>
<li>about.com (back in the day),</li>
<li>reddit.com</li>
<li>criticalthinking org</li>
<li>lesswrong.com</li>
<li>paulgraham.com</li>
</ul>
<p>Various blogs</p>
<p>etc.</p>
<p>TODO: Look for actual stats.</p>
<hr />
<p>You have probably read such books in your life. And a dozen such websites.</p>
<p>What happened?</p>
<p>Nothing.</p>
<p>Why the hell not? Let’s find out.</p>
<h1 id="list-of-surprising-things">List of surprising things</h1>
<p>Lead: Feedback is King + Naive Realism in first two paragraphs. (we reach our goals… but when Naive Realism comes in…)</p>
<p>Common Pattern: Goal, Feedback, Short-circuiting.</p>
<p>Do #Counter - two examples each</p>
<p>Need solid examples that will shake you. Places where conventional wisdom is massively wrong.</p>
<p>Examples of doing it right, of short-circuiting, etc.</p>
<p>Aim to deliver something surprising in each section. Else, remove it.</p>
<p>What sort of Predictive Power do I want the reader to get?</p>
<hr />
<p><strong>Corollary of Feedback is King</strong>: You will do whatever it takes to optimize that feedback, even if it is completely out of line with your goal.</p>
<p>Corollary: Align your feedback with your goal, at any cost.</p>
<p>TODO: Do this for each of the below. Example: Feedback is Net Benefits => Affective Death Spiral - blow it up.</p>
<hr />
<p>Chunks (Where do we fail most + Faulty Feedback + What do these perverse incentives engender?):</p>
<p>Acquire techniques, learn them, and apply them.</p>
<ul>
<li><p>Acquire new techniques wantonly and indiscriminately</p>
<p>We judge a technique by the amount of excitement we feel for it. Old techniques, in comparison, seem boring. Heuristics and Biases.</p>
<p>So, we acquire useless techniques and we acquire far more than we need.</p>
<p>Judge all techniques, past and present, by their empirical performance. Sort them and work on those that are actually most promising.</p></li>
<li><p>Learn the technique</p>
<p>We need to judge our grasp of a technique by our performance on various empirical tests.</p>
<p>But instead, we use several misleading smaller tests.</p>
<p>Basically, “Can I do this?” on misinterpreted actions in a small subset of the actual scenarios.</p></li>
<li><p>Apply techniques</p>
<p>Net Benefits Hypothesis and Affective Death Spiral</p>
<p>Because you don’t test yourself empirically here, you reduce the pressure on the previous stages. You can get away with loose tests there and the cycle continues.</p></li>
</ul>
<hr />
<ul>
<li><p>Acquire new techniques</p></li>
<li><p>Sounds good vs is good: Inception of ideas by marketers using Heuristics and Biases</p></li>
<li><p>Techniques exist in our brain, <em>not</em> in the instructions</p></li>
<li><p><em>Lots</em> of possible configurations - need to handle them all</p></li>
<li><p>Don’t have full access to the actual technique in your head - faulty feedback: your own judgment (“Have I covered all the skills I use?”) - can go wrong here</p>
<p>Talk about the double illusion, etc.</p></li>
<li><p>Medium is not rich enough - faulty feedback - can go wrong here</p>
<p>feedback should be: Have I transmitted it well enough that somebody else can come and pick it up?</p>
<p>faulty: does it seem right to me?</p></li>
<li><p>Have to interpret the words into actions - have to get feedback from experts or tools - can go wrong here</p>
<p>faulty feedback: Completely unaware. It’s correct. No worries.</p>
<p>Unaware, hence great possibility of errors.</p></li>
<li><p>Have to take action to build circuits, just knowing about the actions for the technique is not enough</p>
<p>Examples?</p>
<p>Maybe give them one right away</p></li>
<li><p>Goal: Build circuits to handle many possible situations. Only feedback source that can give you such a large amount of information: Reality.</p>
<p>Important: Have to set up a <em>vast</em> number of situations (give example). Then, take action to see if we can produce the desired result.</p>
<p>Faulty feedback: Have I covered the large number of situations?</p>
<p>Next, Faulty feedback mechanism: your own feelings (“I can do it.”)</p>
<p>Hierarchical actions, Cached Thoughts, etc.</p></li>
<li><p>Goal: Apply techniques to get results. Feedback: results.</p>
<p>Faulty feedback: Net Benefits and Superiority</p>
<p>Two levels of Faulty Feedback:</p>
<p>First level: using Net Potential Benefits to feel superior - so you use empirical benefits… to feel superior.</p>
<p>Second level: using an Objective Utility Function. No Superiority. No Comparison. judging yourself against <em>your own</em> standards, not against others.</p></li>
<li><p>Potential benefits means no need to any of the previous things? You’ve got what you wanted.</p></li>
<li><p>Comparison and hoarding</p></li>
<li><p>Share</p></li>
<li><p>Corollary: Illusion of superiority + examples</p></li>
<li><p>Affective Death Spiral - amping up potential benefits</p></li>
<li><p>Ordinary techniques can’t compete</p></li>
</ul>
<hr />
<p>What changes now?</p>
<p>Actions and Feedback.</p>
<ul>
<li><p>example: Get rid of crap “ideas” everywhere. In your Website-Notes, etc.</p>
<p>However, be careful - they probably haven’t given you results so far because you haven’t <em>actually</em> mastered or applied them.</p>
<p>Be thorough - do this for your Website too - get rid of crap essays.</p></li>
<li><p>Be very strict about which new ideas you go through. Are they actually powerful or you using your feelings to judge them?</p></li>
</ul>
<p>Solution?</p>
<h1 id="notes">Notes</h1>
<ul>
<li><p>Empiricism = Tackling the Technique Trap (in the area of techniques and performance)</p>
<p>Mystery completely cleared.</p>
<p>You know EXACTLY what to do when something goes wrong.</p></li>
<li><p>Richest form of information transfer - Master Coaching</p>
<p>Person-to-person. You observe some more skilled person perform the technique.</p>
<p>The coach gives you some simple instructions. You execute them. He corrects you a bit. You do it some more. He corrects you some more. Then, he raises the level of the game and so on.</p>
<p>Books are good for accumulating information over the ages and broadcasting them. But they probably don’t contain as much information as Master Coaching does.</p></li>
<li><p>Important Skill: Set up a quick feedback mechanism for any task.</p>
<p>If Feedback is King, this becomes top priority.</p>
<p>Practice doing this on different kinds of tasks.</p>
<p>Writing - how do I get feedback? For what kinds of things do I get feedback?</p>
<p>Dental health. Fitness (RHR, etc.). Sleep. Wake-up times. Tackling the Technique Trap.</p></li>
<li><p>On your Fingertip: The technique doesn’t just have to be <em>in</em> your mind, it has to be <em>on</em> your mind.</p>
<p>It’s not about being able to <em>recall</em> something (what Spaced Repetition tests), you have to be able to remember to use it in the right situations.</p>
<p>For example, I should remember to use the Technique Trap when reading (and becoming envious) about other people’s achievements or when seeing that other people have read lots of blog posts and books on this subject. If you ask me what the parts of the Technique Trap are, I can recount them pretty well. It’s just that I don’t remember to use it at the right time.</p>
<p>Ditto for Chunking it Up from “Your Brain at Work”. I don’t remember to use it when I get overwhelmed by some task.</p>
<p>It must be there when I need it.</p>
<p>And not just when I consciously need it, like when I’m solving a relevant problem. It must also be available for creative thoughts, when I can combine it with another thought to solve a problem I wasn’t even aware of.</p>
<p>How can I do this?</p>
<p>Maybe I can load it in my head at the start of the day and take it from there?</p>
<p>How many such important ideas do I have?</p>
<p>Also, will it become easier if I practice that technique a lot? Will that just come automatically then?</p></li>
</ul>
<div class="info">Created: May 15, 2015</div>
<div class="info">Last modified: September 28, 2019</div>
<div class="info">Status: finished</div>
<div class="info"><b>Tags</b>: Naive Realism, techniques</div>
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