July 2010I realized recently that what one thinks about in the shower in the morning is more important than I'd thought. I knew it was a good time to have ideas. Now I'd go further: now I'd say it's hard to do a really good job on anything you don't think about in the shower.Everyone who's worked on difficult problems is probably familiar with the phenomenon of working hard to figure something out, failing, and then suddenly seeing the answer a bit later while doing something else. There's a kind of thinking you do without trying to. I'm increasingly convinced this type of thinking is not merely helpful in solving hard problems, but necessary. The tricky part is, you can only control it indirectly. [1]I think most people have one top idea in their mind at any given time. That's the idea their thoughts will drift toward when they're allowed to drift freely. And this idea will thus tend to get all the benefit of that type of thinking, while others are starved of it. Which means it's a disaster to let the wrong idea become the top one in your mind.What made this clear to me was having an idea I didn't want as the top one in my mind for two long stretches.I'd noticed startups got way less done when they started raising money, but it was not till we ourselves raised money that I understood why. The problem is not the actual time it takes to meet with investors. The problem is that once you start raising money, raising money becomes the top idea in your mind. That becomes what you think about when you take a shower in the morning. And that means other questions aren't.I'd hated raising money when I was running Viaweb, but I'd forgotten why I hated it so much. When we raised money for Y Combinator, I remembered. Money matters are particularly likely to become the top idea in your mind. The reason is that they have to be. It's hard to get money. It's not the sort of thing that happens by default. It's not going to happen unless you let it become the thing you think about in the shower. And then you'll make little progress on anything else you'd rather be working on. [2](I hear similar complaints from friends who are professors. Professors nowadays seem to have become professional fundraisers who do a little research on the side. It may be time to fix that.)The reason this struck me so forcibly is that for most of the preceding 10 years I'd been able to think about what I wanted. So the contrast when I couldn't was sharp. But I don't think this problem is unique to me, because just about every startup I've seen grinds to a halt when they start raising money � or talking to acquirers.You can't directly control where your thoughts drift. If you're controlling them, they're not drifting. But you can control them indirectly, by controlling what situations you let yourself get into. That has been the lesson for me: be careful what you let become critical to you. Try to get yourself into situations where the most urgent problems are ones you want to think about.You don't have complete control, of course. An emergency could push other thoughts out of your head. But barring emergencies you have a good deal of indirect control over what becomes the top idea in your mind.I've found there are two types of thoughts especially worth avoiding � thoughts like the Nile Perch in the way they push out more interesting ideas. One I've already mentioned: thoughts about money. Getting money is almost by definition an attention sink. The other is disputes. These too are engaging in the wrong way: they have the same velcro-like shape as genuinely interesting ideas, but without the substance. So avoid disputes if you want to get real work done. [3]Even Newton fell into this trap. After publishing his theory of colors in 1672 he found himself distracted by disputes for years, finally concluding that the only solution was to stop publishing:
Harnessing Frustration: Using LLMs to Overcome Activation Energy
One of my biggest weaknesses as a software engineer is procrastination when facing a new project. When the scope is unclear, I have a tendency to wait until I feel I’ve “felt out” the problem to start doing anything. I know I’ll feel better and work much faster when I get “stuck in” but I still struggle with that first step, overcoming the “activation energy” required to engage with the details. LLMs have been a game-changer for me in this respect: I can just throw a couple of sentences at them with the shape of the problem. This leads to one of two outcomes: The LLM comes up with a good solution, usually in a slightly different way than what I was thinking. I realize “oh wow the solution is much simpler than I thought”. Straight away I start thinking about the consequences of implementing and improving what the LLM suggested. The LLM comes up with a solution that I intuitively recognize as “wrong”. My immediate reaction is frustration (“How could it get it so wrong”) which leads me to go back and forth with the model, explaining to it why its solution could not possibly work. But in the process of arguing with the model, my brain is churning away and generating variations or different approaches that could work. After a while, even if the AI is still on the wrong track, the debate will trigger a moment of inspiration where suddenly the solution will come to me. I’ll excitedly start up a new conversation and start working through it with the model. The key is the emotional reaction I have immediately to the LLM’s response, either excitement or frustration. By harnessing this immediate feedback loop, I get my brain out of its passive, procrastination mode. It’s almost like a jolt: either I’m thrilled because it’s simpler than I thought, or I’m spurred to action by the urge to correct a perceived ‘wrong’ answer. This forces me to engage with the problem in a meaningful way.
The Busy Person's Guide to Thinking
Thinking better isn't about learning more; it's about doing a few simple things that really help create unstoppable progress.
Your Brain Can Only Take So Much Focus
Research has shed light on the power of focus and its role as a hidden driver of success. Yet as helpful as focus can be, research also shows there’s a downside to it: excessive focus exhausts the focus circuits in your brain. It can drain your energy, make you lose self-control, impair your decision-making, and make you less collaborative. The brain operates optimally when it toggles between focus and unfocus. When you unfocus, you engage a brain circuit called the default mode network (DMN). The DMN activates old memories, goes back and forth between the past, present, and future, and recombines different ideas. Using this new and previously inaccessible data, you can imagine creative solutions or predict the future, and more. There are many simple and effective ways to activate this circuit in the course of a day, such as positive constructive daydreaming, napping, and consciously thinking from another person’s perspective.
Worst Possible Idea
There are many brainstorming methods (including bodystorming, p.30, brainwriting 6-3-5, p.32 and group passing, p.82) that are each useful in different circumstances. However, sometimes it can be difficult for people in a group setting to generate ideas. This may be because people are too stuck in current ways of thinking, or they might be concerned about being judged by others for the ideas they propose. Giving people the permission to come up with their worst possible ideas creates a playful, safe environment and helps to get a brainstorming session off to a good start. Ideas might build on each other during the process, and it is indeed possible to generate an idea or way of thinking about the problem that can be fed back into the design process. Managers that have used this method with their teams report that it outperforms by far any other brainstorming method (Dorf, 2017), largely because of its ability to energise a room and enable lateral thinking.
How to Think for Yourself
Opinion | Think Less, Think Better (Published 2016)
A wandering mind has less innovative thoughts.
Feeling unproductive? Maybe you should stop overthinking.
In order to get something done, maybe we need to think less.
Do not give up your brain
It's tempting to just let tools think for you, but you still need to be able to think for yourself and stay sharp.
Self-Organizing Ideas
The goal of Subconscious is to generate self-organizing ideas. Organizing ideas through sheer force of will is difficult, and I am lazy. Luckily there may be another way. Given the right mechanisms, the right conditions, and enough energy and time, a system can self-organize.
‘Ugh Fields’, or why you can’t even bear to think about that task
Have you ever had a long-overdue task — a task which isn’t so bad in itself — but which you can’t even bring yourself to think about?
It's getting harder to focus every day
I’m feeling it right now. I had to set a timer for 15 minute on my computer and block all distractions to write this. If I didn’t force myself to focus I would easily get distracted by something after few minutes. Even when I’m doing things that I’ve been waiting to do it, I still feel the urge to do something else. I don’t know how and when this happened. During the last few years I was always studying, working, and doing open source. And actually got stuff done. Doing all of those at the same time requires paying attention to what I wanted to do and ignore the noise.
Verbalizable Representations Form a Global Workspace in Language Models
If the mind is an ocean, we spend our lives floating at the surface. Beneath us, an enormous amount of processing takes place without our knowledge: our visual systems parsing the contours of a face, our motor circuits maintaining our posture. At any given moment, only a small fraction of this neural activity is accessible to us. Yet it is this privileged sliver of activity that we rely on to reason deliberately: to plan what ingredients to buy for a recipe, or to puzzle out why an engine won’t start. Such thoughts can be articulated out loud, deliberately held in mind, and brought to bear on whatever task the moment demands. This distinction, between our accessible thoughts and our unconscious processing, is perhaps the most striking feature of human cognition.
Verbalizable Representations Form a Global Workspace in Language Models
If the mind is an ocean, we spend our lives floating at the surface. Beneath us, an enormous amount of processing takes place without our knowledge: our visual systems parsing the contours of a face, our motor circuits maintaining our posture. At any given moment, only a small fraction of this neural activity is accessible to us. Yet it is this privileged sliver of activity that we rely on to reason deliberately: to plan what ingredients to buy for a recipe, or to puzzle out why an engine won’t start. Such thoughts can be articulated out loud, deliberately held in mind, and brought to bear on whatever task the moment demands. This distinction, between our accessible thoughts and our unconscious processing, is perhaps the most striking feature of human cognition.
the void — LessWrong
Comment by nostalgebraist - Thanks for the reply! I'll check out the project description you linked when I get a chance. [...] Yeah, I had mentally flagged this as a potentially frustrating aspect of the post – and yes, I did worry a little bit about the thing you mention in your last sentence, that I'm inevitably "reifying" the thing I describe a bit more just by describing it. FWIW, I think of this post as purely about "identifying and understanding the problem" as opposed to "proposing solutions." Which is frustrating, yes, but the former is a helpful and often necessary step toward the latter. And although the post ends on a doom-y note, I meant there to be an implicit sense of optimism underneath that[1] – like, "behold, a neglected + important cause area that for all we know could be very tractable! It's under-studied, it could even be easy! What is true is already so; the worrying signs we see even in today's LLMs were already there, you already knew about them – but they might be more amenable to solution than you had ever appreciated! Go forth, study these problems with fresh eyes, and fix them once and for all!" I might write a full post on potential solutions sometime. For now, here's the gist of (incomplete, work-in-process) thoughts. ---------------------------------------- In a recent post, I wrote the following (while talking about writing a Claude 4 Opus prompt that specified a counterfactual but realistic scenario): [...] And I feel that the right way to engage with persistent LLM personas is basically just this, except generalized to the fullest possible extent. "Imagine the being you want to create, and the kind of relationship you want to have (and want others to have) with that being. "And then shape all model-visible 'context' (prompts, but also the way training works, the verbal framing we use for the LLM-persona-creation process, etc.) for consistency with that intent – up to, and including, authentically acting out that 'relationship you want to have' w
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