The missing puzzle piece

I’ve had this experience a couple of times by now:

I have this bug.

I’ve been working on it a lot: I’ve disentangled and mapped out what ‘it’ is about. Tried tackling it with different techniques, from different angles. I’ve also mapped out the entire space around the bug. It feels like I know everything about it.

And still. The bug remains unsolved.

***

In the past, solving some of my biggest bottlenecks involved not more than one single, simple mental move.

A small piece of information that was missing; a simple act of pointing out this one thing I had been disregarding; reframing this one piece of information or emotion, simply looking at it from a different angle; encouraging this intuition I had, but didn’t trust enough to fully buy into; etc. [1]

Once I finally found the missing puzzle pieces, the subsequent ‘moments of resolution’ felt unilaterally very underwhelming and very transformative at the same time. I have mixed feelings about this...

Either way, this made me realize that one failure mode of mine is to be looking for this ‘big, exciting, groundbreaking revelations’ that will allow me to solve my bug.

This expectation, however, can make me blind to what would actually solve the bug.  

An analogy: Our eyes adapt to whether we are looking at things close up or far away from us. We can skim the space for some large object, or we can scan it for some tiny object. If you’ve tried to spot wildlife somewhere in the bushes or savanna, you might have encountered that, once you learned what sort of thing you are looking for, spotting it because much easier. When searching for some visual object, we are primed to what we think is its likely size and shape or colour. This allows us to be better at finding the object of interest - if we are primed right.

What does that mean for rationality?

Insight 1 : When you are onto that bug - having nearly exhausted your arsenal of techniques and sources of information while the bug remains unsolved - you might want to consider the possibility that you are scanning the solution space at a different level of resolution, than where your solution is to be found.

***

In some sense, this is exciting. Big, nasty bugs might just need a teeny tiny gesture in the right direction and they dissolve into warm air.

At the same time, finding that missing puzzle piece is much like finding the needle in the haystack.

The first step is to notice that you might be facing such a situation, so you can consider changing your level of resolution.

I’ve started to develop a taste for bugs that only need a tiny piece of information for everything to fall into place properly. However, even knowing that, it often remains largely intractable to identify what that missing part is about.

Usually, the missing piece has to do with something that involves my ‘ego’. This is probably the main reason why it is really hard to find it myself.

The only somewhat reliable way to go about this (that I’ve discovered and tried so far) is to reach out to other people for help. Their outside perspective on things, and sometimes their additional life experience, can be all that is needed.

At times, I would just throw all I know about the issue at them, letting them do the work of rephrasing my story and pointing at what I might be missing. It can be useful to just ask them to share their understanding of this thing and try to notice where I’m surprise or confused, or spot a mismatch between our models.

Some people are extremely skilled at pointing out these blind spots in others. Given that one cannot really observe anything in particular they’re doing, it often creates the impression of them having a secret magic power. (Which is not the case.)

Here some of my guesses for what makes a person good at this. Most of these people just have a lot of life experience to draw from. They probably simply have had a similar problem in the past and can tell you the password. Also, these people seem to be usually good at spotting patterns, often even based on very scarce information. I guess many patterns are fairly common across humans, so being able to spot pattern likely correlates with life experience.

And so, it happens that ‘big annoying bugs I have been battling with for so long’ are resolved in not more than a minute, due to not more than a tiny gesture.

To be fair, reaching out to people hoping to find the missing puzzle piece can also utterly fail. The times it failed for me, I might have had too big expectations, wanted to outsource the work too  much to someone else? I might have done a really bad job at communicating what I was after, in the first place? I imagine it can feel bewildering when someone comes up to you, lays out the entire map of their bug-landia, and then looks at you, expecting you to do… what exactly??

At the end of the day, you probably just have to try a lot, to find the one person that does have/know about the missing puzzle piece. This attempt might fail a lot. But when it works, well it works.

***

Who best to reach out to in order to help with blind spots? My answer here is bad, namely : it depends.

I have made different experiences. Roughly speaking, there are two categories: i) people that know you very well, and ii) people that hardly know you at all.

People that know me very little also tend to not have their own ego entangled in my story. (This seems to correlate, is not always true though.) This can be helpful in order to bring an outside view and give unbiased advice.

On the other hand, in some situations, it had been essential that the person knew me very well, meaning they had a lot of background information about who I am, how I normally function and where I’m coming from.

***

The next step, after having found the missing puzzle piece, is to properly internalize it and make it a part of yourself. I have recently started to think more about internalization and will treat, and experiment with, it sometime soon - as it’s one sub-skill to master as part of my larger quest(s).

[1] Some examples of puzzle pieces I have been missing:
- Simply and bluntly dismissing an entire bucket of S1 information/input.
- Realizing that what I thought of as being the problem wasn’t necessarily and unilaterally bad.
- Noticing and letting go of ‘shoulds’ and ‘not allowed to think/feel/want this’.
- Realizing that I could also just not do the thing.
- Introducing a sense of playfulness or curiosity.
- Reframing an underlying sense of scarcity.

Geneva to Prague, September 2018 - Resolution

Bugs Mapping - April 2019

[Note: the exercise was originally conceived to map hamming problems. However, when I do the mapping, I tend to quickly 'expand the picture' to also cover other, related (but not necessarily hamming-level) bugs. Which is why I renamed my exercise into (simply) 'Bugs Mapping'.]

Bugs Mapping Exercise

I really like the approach of mapping and modelling my bugs as an interconnected system. I think my mind largely works like this to start with, but last weekend, I had a first go at making this mapping explicit.

The exercise starts with prompts to identify potential hamming problems (and other bugs). In the following a collection of hamming questions and prompts I came across over time: (I'm not claiming any authorship over the following list of questions.) [I want to keep expanding this list (and other prompt lists) over time and collect them in a central location.]

1. What are the most important problems in my life? Which problems in my life are the largest order of magnitude? What changes could I make that would result in a 100x or 1000x increase in either personal satisfaction or positive impact on the world?

2. Rate-limiting steps: What’s the limiting factor on my growth and progress? What’s the key resource I have the least of, or the key bottleneck that’s preventing me from bringing resources to bear?

3. What am I not allowed to want? What do I feel I’m “not allowed to care about,” or that I generally don’t think about because it feels too big or impossible?

4. Genre-savvy: If my life were a novel, what would be the obvious next step? Where is the plot dragging, and what do I need to do to move the story forward? Imagine yourself as the hero in a science fiction story. What are the obvious things the hero needs to do/learn/get better at? What are the obvious things that currently prevent the hero from living up to their role? If you imagine yourself in 10 years, NOT having reached your goal, what were the reasons for this?

5. Pica: What sorts of goals am I already pursuing, but in a bad/convoluted/ inefficient/distorted way?

6. Advice to yourself: Imagine looking at an identical copy of yourself. What does your copy need, what is ‘wrong’ with it, what doesn’t work the way it should?

7. Focusing: If I say “Everything in my life is fine, and I’m on track to achieve all of my goals,” what feels untrue about that? What catches in my throat, that makes it hard to say that sentence out loud? What feels most alive to me right now? Alternately, what feels most endangered?

8. Doom: Ask your friends or colleagues (or anyone else who's judgement you trust or who's perspective might be interesting) what you Hamming Problem is.

Next, you proceed to map the bugs you identified and indicate their relationship to each other by drawing arrows/edges between the nodes. Arrows can point away from the node, pointing into the node, or pointing in both directions (indicating a mutually reinforcing bug-duplex; more on this below). The arrows can be 'positively reinforcing' or 'negative reinforcing'.

[I suspect it could be valuable to further elaborate on different ways bugs can interact with each other, and thereby extending the usefulness of bugs mapping exercise. I intend to simply play with and explore this informally (when doing the exercise for myself), at least for the time being.]

I ended up producing several 'maps' - one (pretty chaotic) trying to capture all/as many bugs as I could and a few other ones, zooming in on a particular topic area or axis at the time. I found it very useful to try doing this exercise several times after each other, while varying venture points or framing. I like to imagine my 'bug-ecosystem' as a high-dimensional complex space, where different cross sections produce different 'screenshots' of the same network.

What do I find particularly valuable about the Bugs Mapping?

For one, it makes self-reinforcing, detrimental (or conducive) links or cycles between multiple bugs more salient. (I was usually aware of these interactions before, but seeing them appear on paper seems to have some added value to the way I can track these cycles in real life.)

Also, it becomes easier to think more creatively about all the possible intervention points and possibilities to tackle one or several bugs. The interesting thing about vicious bug cycles is that you can intervene at many different points. To think of possible interventions, I look both at the bugs themselves and at the connection between bugs.

Furthermore, it is a good way for me to 'get an overview' of a(aa)ll the things I (so desperately) need to work on (!), which is a good (although partial) remedy against overwhelm and confusion (to be treated in more detail in a future post).

(Finally, the exercise inspired a (at this point in time still vague) mental model which I'm planning on exploring in a future post. It's about a way to categories/describe different bugs through a quality I call 'depth'. Later more.)

***

Prague, April 2019 - Connection

'Getting Empirical' with my rationality practice

I've recently been inspired to make my rationality practice more empirical.

Concretely, I envision to start a more rigorous process of coming up with and testing hypotheses about matters related to rationality, my personal productivity, well-being, social life and possibly more. By making this process more explicit, I expect to be able to gather more information, quicker, and make the pseudo-experimentation I've been doing (largely in my head) until now more systematic, more effective, more explicit and better documented.

Why? And what to I hope to get out of make my rationality practice more empirical?

First of all, there is the direct value of generating and testing hypothesis and interventions which will hopefully result in me resolving some of my bugs sooner (rather than later), and, ideally, in a more sustainable manner. Moreover, I pursue second, more indirect/meta goal. Namely, I want to reliably build up certain mental habits that I think are very useful. This is basically what I call 'improving the way I think' and, while I already know how to do these things, what I really I want to get to here is the process of internalizing these standards/mental moves to a degree that they become actual habits, reliable and don't require conscious effort anymore. Concretely, I want:

1. Empirical mindset: get in the habit (always, rather than sometimes) of coming up with falsifiable hypothesis ex ante, making my assumptions explicit, actively looking for ways the experiment could be biased and reasons my hypothesis might be wrong, actually going back to the experiment ex post and consciously process and update on its results).

2. Noticing and original exploration: This is still a little ill-defined and I don’t feel like I have capture everything I’m interested here yet. It's vaguely about training my mind to detect more bugs, more reliably (even the “not ideal but sufficient”-type bugs that I often struggle to detect reliably - write on this at some point) and incite myself to be more creative, original and proactive when it comes to thinking of and trying interventions, and generating hypothesis and models.

In practice: my ‘rationality experiments’

Some first thoughts (non-exhaustive) on how I want the process to go and what sort of parameters I might want to track in any experiment: (I expect this list to be significantly improved, refined and extended overtime. This might also be helpful to make experiments increasingly low effort while keeping a relatively high quality by systemizing the process as good as possible.)

1. Writing up my hypothesis in advanced and making assumptions explicit; ideally, I'd model the issue (using Yeb or on my remarkable) to refine my hypothesis and draw out as many of the underlying assumptions, aliefs as possible before the experiment itslef - I think this would likely increase the informational value I can get from running the experiment

2. Defining what indicators I'm interested in (eg. what would 'success' look like, what are things that might arise but that I am actually not interested in, …) and defining how I want to track them;

3. Thinking about obvious ways the experiment could be biased, invalidated or otherwise screwed. (I.e. how am I to interpret and contextualize the results?)

4. Defining a clear time window (start and end date) for the experiment; not only is this necessary for being able to properly evaluate the experiment, most of all, I think this is a quite reliable way to increase my dedication to 'actually try' and put me in the right mind space, instead of half-heartedly tinkering around.

5. Increase my commitment, rigor  (social accountability) and documentation (external memory) via posting the set up and underlying thoughts of the experiment here.

6. Discuss with a third party (mostly my friends) to reevaluate the set up of the experiment and check for obvious obstacles or blind spots; and set up accountabilities with them if necessary/useful.

7. Set up everything else that is necessary to run a fair experiment (eg. check whether I have actually enough time and mindspace to sufficiently commit to what I've planned)

This type of experiments are obviously limited in many ways and I'm vigilant of not over-updating on any of the results. Most importantly, they are experiments about how I function (usually, n=1=me), and their external validity will in most cases be very low. At most, I'd hope that the experiments and write ups of my mental models and how they change might serve others as inspiration and/or prompts for their own hypothesis generation. In other words, I am hopeful my write ups will ask useful questions, rather than give final, conclusive answers.

Some things I want to run experiments on? (a loose list of very rough ideas)

• Overwhelm (model building, phenomenology; test interventions)

• Distraction, flinching and craving (test interventions)

• Focusing (experiment with usage, ‘personalize’)

• TAPs (experiment with usage, get better at)

• Noticing (test interventions to get better at it; model building/phenomenology (are they substantial differences depending on what I try to be noticing)

• Memorization skills (test techniques; overtraining)

• Status and human interaction (test, explore ideas from Improv)

• Energy balance and Total Energy expansion (test hypothesis, come up with interventions)

• Productivity (test interventions; supposedly strongly related to the above, including things like working structure (focus work, light work, writing, reading, ...), meditation, sports, food, social interactions, thinking time, applications, (daily/weekly/monthly) checklists, etc.)

• Team rationality (?)

• Ways to learn certain skills

• ...

The next experiment I will run (and first under this concrete mental umbrella) will be about noticing when I’m flinching away from certain (non-embraced) thoughts; when I’m not able to do deep focus work but get distracted by too many thoughts.

Particularly, I’ve installed an accountability system with my co-workers to notice this mind state and to it by getting up and doing deliberate focusing. This serves to purposes: a) testing focusing as an intervention to respond to this ‘mind-restlessness’ and b) I expect the information I get from focusing on the source of mind-restlessness to improve my mental model of why my mind starts distracting itself, and hopefully illuminate my understanding of its causal patterns.

However, I will write about the details of the experiment, my underlying hypothesis and assumptions in more detail in a separate post.

Geneva, January 2019 - Thanks, Michael, for living your inner child with me.