Strategies for Intentionally Inducing Thought

Thinking is not always automatic. Every single day, I have moments in which there's a useful next thought to think, a helpful question to ask myself, an effective mental move that I could do, but which I wouldn't think/ask/do, by default. Intentional thinking requires a tiny modicum of effort. My mind's default mode usually follows the path of least effort, which often entails not thinking, or thinking vaguely and unreflectively.

I want to think more and better thoughts, on purpose.

The following is a series of TAPs, habits, and systems that I use for inducing intentional thought.

Hotkey and triggers for explicit metacognition

The two main ways, that I know of, for inducing reflective metacognitive awareness are 1) talking out loud and 2) writing. Both of these force me to clarify my thoughts enough that I have to take them as object, instead of vague background photo-thoughts, that aren't conscious enough to be evaluated or responded to.

Talking is faster than typing, but typing is less disruptive if there are other people around, and gives me extended working memory.

I want to have extremely low activation energy for switching into typing (and having) explicit metacognitive thoughts.

I keep my metacognition log open in my first desktop/ workspace, and I have a hotkey that switches to that workspace and activates the metacognition log, so that I can start typing with a key stroke no matter what I'm doing. From there, I just write what's happening, and my thoughts will automatically chain into useful noticing, analysis, and intentional choice.

Some triggers for explicit, written metacognition:

I notice a flash of frustration.
(Possibly this is a problem to solve immediately, possibly I'll just tag it as a bug to come back to and solve, forever, later.)
Something goes wrong.
Again, for collecting bugs, sometimes to solve later, and sometimes to solve immediately.
I'm stuck, when solving a problem.
This is a trigger to state what's happening and to flow into a problem-solving pattern, like asking myself what my sub-goal is, or doing 5 minutes of brainstorming strategies.
I notice an aversion, something that I'm avoiding.
(This is crucial to catch fast, because some part of me will tend to avoid thinking about the things that I'm averse to!)
Any of a bunch of different kinds of phenomenology: tensions in my gut, headaches, "fuzziness", the feeling of a tired brain, agitatedness, over arousal, etc.
(I have patterns and techniques for responding to all of these: either dialoging with them to draw out relevant info, or intentionally shifting my state, or both.)
I need to make a decision.
[During an intentionality session] if I was briefly distracted.
(Mostly this is to keep me honest. Knowing that I will record my distractions eliminates the sense that I 'can look at twitter real quick', as if that isn't real or doesn't count.)
When I take a stimulant (so that I have a timestamp).

Any of these triggers cause me to hit the hot key and immediately start typing what's happening.

Often, once I've noticed the trigger and taken it as object by making it explicit, the next step (the next question to ask myself, the technique to employ) is obvious or trivial. It's not usually hard to infer that I'm crashing and should take a nap, or reflect that I'm stuck, and I should list some possible strategies for solving the problem.

But if I don't trigger explicit metacognition in the first place, I won't do any of that. That's why it matters so much that the switch to explicitly typing, is seamless, fast, and practiced.

Recording myself

Talking out loud is overpowered. From 21 to about 24, I didn't have my own room, sleeping instead on couches in the group houses I lived in. Around 24, I decided to get my own room (not even a roommate!), close to doubling my living expenses, so that I could talk out loud while I worked.

I'll sometimes record myself thinking about a problem, not so much so that I can listen to the recording later (though I'll sometimes do that), but just because it has a similar effect to talking to a person: it incentivizes me to conceptually-annunciate my thoughts into full sentences, instead of conceptual mumbles.

This is the same effect of rubber-ducking: that articulating a problem often reveals my own confusions and assumptions, or brings to mind new possible solutions.

I'll sometimes walk around the neighborhood narrating to a recording as a way of thinking about something. I do this when I'm mulling on a problem, or reflecting on and making sense of something that's bothering me, or trying to massage ideas into workable sentences while I'm writing.

TAPs and policies for reading

Always write something

For everything I read (a blog post, an article, a tweet thread, a book chapter), I force myself to write something, even if only a single sentence. That might be a summary of the key point, a question I have, an objection to the claim. This shifts reading from a (sometimes) passive activity to an active cognitive activity for me.

If a source is not worth that much effort, then it's not worth my time in the first place.

The point of reading is to have new thoughts. By typing out my thoughts as I read, I'm turning fleeting impressions and barely conscious thoughts into something clearly stated enough to take as object, and reflect on. That gives those impressions the opportunity to generate additional thoughts in response.

To support this, I have a hot key that compresses an open window to one half of my screen and opens Roam in the other half of my screen. As soon as I start reading something, I trigger the hotkey. If I notice that I'm reading and I'm not in split-screen, I trigger the hot key.

Regularly, I start jotting down some thoughts (sometimes only very tangentially related to what I'm reading), and this starts the flow of thinking and writing develops from a would-be-fleeting-impression into a coherent thesis or question-exploration. If there's no reason to keep it private, I'll often publish a slightly edited version on twitter and threadreader via Typefully.

For bock chapters, in particular, I force myself to compress and summarize the key ideas of the chapter after I finish, to help me consolidate my understanding

Quantitative reasoning

Make quantities meaningful for myself

Every time I read a number, I make a point to either visualize something, or make a verbal comparison to a known (or quickly looked up) reference quantity.

I find that by default my mind reflexively defocuses (like the mental equivalent of a "soft gaze"), and I skim over paragraphs that involve any numbers at all, like the numbers themselves and the words that reference them, aren't meaningful, or at least would take effort to parse.

They do take a bit of effort to parse, but I make a point of exerting that effort and doing that parsing.

Specifically, I either relate the number to a number that I already know, or I force myself to pause and visualize something.

I've memorized a bunch of reference quantities to give me a starting point of comparison. Is 300,00 words a lot or a little? Well, I know that the Order of the Phoenix is 250,000 words. This gives me a sense of what 300,000 means: it's a little bigger than the fifth Harry Potter book (which I've read, and have seen on my shelf, and so have an intuitive sense of the length of).

Similarly, I've read a lot of history, and learned a lot of dates, so that when I get to date, instead of skimming over it as arbitrary numerals, I can relate to other events in history. What else was happening around that time, in various parts of the world? What were the cultural and material background conditions like?

Visualizing might mean turning the numbers into a mental image of a graph or time series, or visualizing the the magnitude in concrete terms ("what would it look like if there were 300 people in my backyard? Would they fit"). Sometimes, I'll draw a very quick sketch.

In this way I can make the numbers meaningful to me.

Doing BOTECs

Triggers:
I say that something is bigger than something else.
I say or type the phrase "order of magnitude"
I say or type the phrase "a lot"
I reference the cost or value of some thing
When I read a claim that implies a magnitude

Anytime I make a claim that implicitly depends on a magnitude, or come across a claim like that, I want to take about 2 minutes to check if the claim pencils. This allows me to put feasibility bounds on ideas, and reject lots of possibilities that my brain, and the world, serves up to me.

Basically, I open a spreadsheet and quickly estimate the the key figure that the claim depends on. I'm not very good at this yet, and don't have much content knowledge.