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The Problem of Thinking Too Much (2003) [pdf]
- nathanasmith 7y agoMy problem with thinking too much is when I'm faced with a decision, I find I often have a preferred course of action already in mind and whether that course happens to be objectively better than the alternative is completely immaterial to my ability to think long and abstractly enough about it to reason myself into believing that it is. I have had to train myself to turn off this abstract thinking as necessary. The upshot is when I do, the actual correct answer to the situation often strongly presents itself and immediately seems obvious.
- HNLurker2 7y agoReminds me how chess players (gm) don't calculate 15 moves (for one variation) ahead instead they see 3 moves ahead that are GOOD
- pingec 7y agoHow do you turn it off, how do you train for that? I cannot really do that that's why I ask for a second and third opinion and then talk it out.
- nathanasmith 7y ago>How do you turn it off, how do you train for that? I cannot really do that that's why I ask for a second and third opinion and then talk it out. Imagine you're a programmer and you're in some kind of professional rut. You consider your options. You could learn a functional language, maybe get into mobile development, find something else to do altogether, or any other of myriad paths. If you think long and hard enough about any single option you can probably convince yourself it's the right choice. Or maybe you get overwhelmed and just give up. The question is too abstract and so are the alternatives hence the overthinking. What I do is take the abstract and make it concrete. Instead of looking at this monster problem from the inside, I picture the end result. What am I actually trying to accomplish; what will my life look like when I do. When I see that and it usually comes pretty easily, what to do is simple. Ask myself what's the very next specific action I can take to accomplish that vision. If the answer isn't obvious I get even more specific. Maybe I need to literally get up out of my chair. Whatever. I do that thing, ask the question again, do the next thing, then the next until I'm done.
- mapcars 7y agoLike we learn how to use our hands one should learn how to use our brains when needed, and when not needed how to put it down, that's all.
- kekebo 7y agoJust that learning to halt subvocal speech even for a couple of seconds seems to be a much harder task than learning keeping an untrained hand still. There seems to be active resistance, a compulsion to internally vocalize, even (/especially) when detrimental. Unlearning it seems possible but no easy task, requiring a large amount of hours and determination in my experience.
- kaybe 7y agoIs there a good way to notice you're doing subvocal speech?
- Loughla 7y agoMeditation and mindfulness has helped me. I noticed that my 'internal dialogue' was what started anxiety spirals and depression. Meditation and mindfulness practice seem to help. I think that just like any muscle, the brain can be exercised in a certain direction. But holy shit is it infuriating to start meditating. Do you realize how much time you spend in your own head? Like all of it.
- kekebo 7y agoMindfulness type exercises / learning internal silence was the only effective strategy i found. I can still get carried away in my thoughts but there's a learned recurring return into silence that also gives room for meta cognitions of various sorts. The more I "practice" the more subconscious those silent moments appear, the higher their frequency and the easier it is to maintain longer stretches of them - and the more enjoyable it is to entertain them, in the beginning it can feel like a pointless bore.
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- js8 7y agoI have realized some time ago that when some decision is difficult to make, it is likely that both outcomes are equally good (or bad), or at least, equally indeterminable. If one of them was much better, then the decision would be obvious! So indeed, if you can't decide, spin a penny. You save time and the outcome will be similar.
- stunt 7y agoWhen I hit a similar situation. I'd share it with someone else to verify that both outcomes are equally indeterminable. If that is the case, I often go with my gut feeling.
- amboo7 7y agoBetter, take both if possible.
- kd5bjo 7y agoIn similar situations, I’ve often discovered that I’m hoping the penny will fall one particular way. When that happens, I don’t look at the actual answer and go with the one my subconscious apparently wanted.
- taneq 7y agoThe advice my mum gave me was similar: If you don't know which way to choose, flip a coin, and see how you feel about the outcome. That will tell you what you really wanted to choose.
- wazoox 7y agoThis made my day: To be honest, the academic discussion doesn't shed much light on the practical problem. Here's an illustration: Some years ago I was trying to decide whether or not to move to Harvard from Stanford.I had bored my friends silly with endless discussion. Finally, one of them said, "You're one of our leading decision theorists. Maybe you should make a list of the costs and benefits and try to roughly calculate your expected utility. "Without thinking, I blurted out, "Come on, Sandy, this is serious."
- fipar 7y agoThanks for this find! The same story, minus the "Sandy", is attributed to the pseudonym Triffat in Antifragile. In light of this text, I think Taleb mischaracterized Diaconis. At least I never would have imagined that the quote was a story "Triffat" was telling about himself!
- conjectures 7y agothe idea of Taleb mischaracterizing something doesn't strain my credulity too much ;)
- gowld 7y agoWhat's mischaracterized?
- Bartweiss 7y agoFeynman tells an intriguingly similar story from another angle. When he moved from Cornell to Caltech, he had a sort of Buridan's Ass situation where each one would beat the other's offer and leave him with no way to make a decision. Even the weather wouldn't cooperate, with the snow driving him out of Cornell and smog driving him out of Caltech. He eventually landed at Caltech, basically arbitrarily, and realized the solution to the problem: "But I decided then never to decide again. Nothing—absolutely nothing—would ever change my mind again. When you’re young, you have all these things to worry about—should you go there, what about your mother. And you worry, and try to decide, but then something else comes up. It’s much easier to just plain decide. Never mind—nothing is going to change your mind." So when Chicago came calling later, trying to recruit him, he refused. Didn't listen to the offer, didn't consider it when they told him, just refused outright over his prior condition. Interesting to see how many people have decided that formal analysis is a hopeless way of approaching this problem.
- throwayEngineer 7y agoThis is a very Academia driven problem. They have been so detached from problem solving that they forget how to problem solve. Modeling a human randomness with math didn't give you perfect data and conclusions? What was the original problem? To solve something unsolvable with our current understanding of biology? Industry asks better questions and finds solutions. Academia waddles around in theoreticals, and makes minimal meaningful progress. Edit, to clarify. Academia picks a unreal problem, and can't find a logic driven solution. Industry picks real problems, and doesn't make money unless they solve it. We should be learning to solve problems from Industry, not our underachieving professors.
- apocalypstyx 7y agoAnd yet much profit has been derived from the privatization of publicly-funded academia.
- throwayEngineer 7y agoThis is the exception, not the rule.
- lukevdp 7y agoAcademia is a process of finding new knowledge and sharing it. Industry is a process of commercialising added value. They both add to society in different ways, and their outcomes aren’t really comparable.
- openfuture 7y agoThis is hopelessly narrow minded. I won't defend all of academia but it is clear that sometimes there's a cache of 'useless knowledge' that suddenly gets cashed in when industry reaches a point where it is actually needed (most famous example being number theory and cryptography). The whole point of academia is for it to be a space for the free exploration of unknown intellectual domains. This exploration will often be worthless but may occasionally bear fruit in completely civilization changing ways. Meanwhile, industry is too busy manipulating the evaluation criteria to make problems magically go away to actually solve anything (this is the counter strawman to your strawman). Seriously though, our econonic systems do not seem to be able to evaluate survival as an important concept. There is no evidence that industry will move by itself in a direction that sacrifices profits to avoid pollution, someone else will just say he did the same and offer a cheaper product. What we want is for our political systems to be more robust and for the gradient between academia and industry to be more smooth. What we have is broken in too many ways to count.
- the_greyd 7y agoThinking should be a time boxed activity, with time proportional to the priority of the thing at hand. As a classic overthinker I've realized my overthinking is a weird amalgamation of perfectionism and procrastination. That took me a long time to accept, since I've always rationalized my overthinking as ultimately a good thing. If you assume that action (instead of thinking) is the primary unit in the world, then you can see that thinking is just a tool which informs action.
- Bartweiss 7y agoThis was a hugely helpful insight for me. First, because I found it much easier to accept "deliberating has a cost, factor that in" than a generalized claim of "stop thinking so much". Second, because thinking more really does help sometimes. "Go with your gut" doesn't sit well with me; every once so often I think about a decision and notice that I've made some major oversight in my first assessment. Aiming for the 'right' amount of thinking, as a function of stakes and urgency and complexity, has been much better for controlling overthinking while still catching those mistakes.
- mercer 7y agoI think going with your gut can be a fine solution, but it's probably worth assessing how well your gut has served you historically. For me, my gut has generally been more right than my over-analytical mind. But I have a number of friends where I think it's the other way around.
- Bartweiss 7y agoThis definitely seems like a "competing needs" thing. People repeat the advice that helps them, but different people need to adjust in different directions. "Look before you leap" versus "he who hesitates", I suppose. There's an interesting result from studying people's prediction accuracy in which they improve simply by being asked to think about their answers and whether they're sure. For me, overthinking often leads me to explain away 'irrational' reactions that were quite accurate, but taking at least one extra look to say "has my first reaction missed something fundamental" is a lifesaver.
- smallnamespace 7y agoIs 'thinking about thinking' correctly actually an unsolvable problem? Let's say I'm trying to do X. - Level 0 might be: do the first thing that comes to mind - Level 1 may be 'consider your possible choices and do a cost-benefit analysis' Most people would say that Level 1 is preferable, but only for 'weighty' decisions where the cost of thinking is outweighed by the benefit of making a better decision. For example, nobody does rational deliberation for 'should I brake at this red light?' So in practice, we seem to do some level of rational metacognition that takes into account the cost of thinking about a problem. What about level 3? Are there large classes of problems where it's not really worth it to 'think about whether to think' - you should always ponder them, or never? And what about levels beyond yet?
- vokep 7y agoOr maybe that is just what level 2 would be? Level 1 is doing cost-benefit analysis on all problems. Level 2 might be doing cheap meta analysis to determine if energy can be saved and a level 0 solution used, or if more thinking is required. I would think there is a top level, which is full memorization of the space in which thinking might occur. Than instead of any thinking taking place, a reference is made to this memory-truth-table and the correct action is produced in response. Such a truth-table sounds maybe a bit paradoxical though. Does it take into account its own presence in the situation?
- mcguire 7y ago"Whenever you’re called on to make up your mind,and you’re hampered by not having any,the best way to solve the dilemma, you’ll find,is simply by spinning a penny.No—not so that chance shall decide the affairwhile you’re passively standing there moping;but the moment the penny is up in the air,you suddenly know what you’re hoping." A friend introduced me to a related version of this that works pretty well: toss a coin, see what result comes out, and then decide if you are happy or disappointed. If you still don't care, go with the coin. Or don't; it doesn't matter.
- skizm 7y agoMost decisions aren't A or B, they're I want A, but B is much safer/easier/etc. So the coin flip method (you'll make up your mind while it is in the air) doesn't help since you already know what you want. Pros and cons lists don't help since you already know them. Probability multiplied by reward doesn't help much, since you'll really only make the decision once, not continuously. The only sure fire thing I've found helps is you imagine the realistic worst possible case scenario if you decide on doing thing A (the thing you really want) and if you can live with that, do thing A.
- augbog 7y agoYup agree. That and also understanding why you want A more than B which usually leads to understand why B doesn't give you those same things. At some point there is a balance of how much risk you are willing to put to get what you want.
- firstinstinct 7y agoRelated: Our first instinct is far too often wrong (finantial times, 10 May 2019, Tim harford, pay walled article). Another related article: Heads or Tails: The Impact of a Coin Toss on Major Life Decisions and Subsequent Happiness Steven D. Levitt https://www.nber.org/papers/w22487 https://www.nber.org/papers/w22487
- norswap 7y agoThe conclusion is where the gold is at: > One of the most useful things to come out of mystudy is a collection of the rules of thumb my friends use in their decision making. For example, one of my Ph.D. advisers, Fred Mosteller, told me, “Other things being equal, finish the job that isnearest done.” A famous physicist offered this advice: “Don’t waste time on obscure fine pointsthat rarely occur.” I’ve been told that Albert Einstein displayed the following aphorism in his office: “Things that are difficult to do are beingdone from the wrong centers and are not worth doing.” Decision theorist I. J. Good writes, “The older we become, the more important it is to usewhat we know rather than learn more.” Galen offered this: “If a lot of smart people have thought about a problem [e.g., God’s existence, life on other planets] and disagree, then it can’t be decided.” > Whenever you’re called on to make up your mind, and you’re hampered by not having any,the best way to solve the dilemma, you’ll find, is simply by spinning a penny. No — not so that chance shall decide the affairwhile you’re passively standing there moping; but the moment the penny is up in the air, you suddenly know what you’re hoping.
- localhostdotdev 7y agooh nice, i didn't know where the coin flipping quote came from: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Piet_Hein https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Piet_Hein