I'm extremely Noticing-pilled.

I think the ability to notice subtle things in your mind, or in the world around you, is one of the foundational rationality skills. It's necessary for building habits[1], for seeing clues that help you solve confusing problems, for diagnosing how you could have thought that faster, and for generally building a mechanistic model of your mind that lets you become a power-user for your brain.

Despite this, I didn't include Noticing in my recent workshops, because it takes awhile to pay off, and many people initially find it disorienting, or overwhelming, or pointless. Instead of teaching people to "notice their metacognition", I just tell them to do "Livelogging", where you write out your train-of-thought in a google doc while you solve a difficult puzzle, and then afterwards can ask questions like "how could I have thought-those-thoughts faster" and "how can I generalize lessons from [...]

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Outline:

(01:21) Seven cognitive states worth noticing

(03:32) Surprise

(04:36) Confusion

(06:06) Nagging off-track feeling

(06:47) Being Stuck

(07:53) Bored / disengaged

(08:52) Huh, odd.

(09:54) Insight

(11:24) How it fits together

(11:41) Noticing Subtler Variants

(12:55) Integrating noticing - skill TAPS

(13:15) Building up to Generalized Noticing

(14:41) Supercharging credit assignment

(16:32) Insight Unpacking

(19:40) Insights dont always matter

(20:24) Detailed Retrospectives and Generalization

(22:18) On-the-fly Purposeful Practice

(23:23) Noticing outside world stuff

(24:26) Summary

(25:09) Noticing Possible Importance

The original text contained 3 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
October 9th, 2024

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XHnAakZtcEktEGvYJ/scaffolding-for-noticing-metacognition

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

“Scaffolding for Noticing Metacognition” by Raemon

LessWrong (30+ Karma)