Written by Ziz
Epistemic Status: Attaching a concept made of neuroscience I don’t understand to a thing I noticed introspectively. “Introspection doesn’t work, so you definitely shouldn’t take this seriously.” If you have any “epistemic standards”, flee.
Update: corrections in comments.
I once spent some time logging all my actions in Google Calendar, to see how I spent time. And I noticed there was a thing I was doing, flipping through shallow content on the internet in the midst of doing certain work. Watching YouTube videos and afterward not remembering anything that was in them.
“Procrastination”, right? But why not remember anything in them? I apparently wasn’t watching them because I wanted to see the content. A variant of the pattern: flipping rapidly (Average, more than 1 image per second) through artwork from the internet I saved on my computer a while ago. (I’ve got enough to occupy me for about an hour without repetition.) Especially strong while doing certain tasks. Writing an algorithm with a lot of layers of abstraction internal to it, making hard decisions about transition.
I paid attention to what it felt like to start to do this, and thinking the reasons to do the Real Work did not feel relevant. It pattern matched to something they talked about at my CFAR workshop, “Trigger action pattern: encounter difficulty -> go to Facebook.” Discussed as a thing to try and get rid of directly or indirectly. I kept coming back to the Real Work about 1-20 minutes later. Mostly on the short end of that range. And then it didn’t feel like there was an obstacle to continuing anymore. I’d feel like I was holding a complete picture of what I was doing next and why in my head again. There’s a sense in which this didn’t feel like an interruption to Real Work I was doing.
While writing this, I find myself going blank every couple of sentences, staring out the window, half-watching music videos. Usually for less than a minute, and then I feel like I have the next thing to write. Does this read like it was written by someone who wasn’t paying attention?
There’s a meme that the best thoughts happen in the shower. There’s the trope, “fridge logic”, about realizing something about a work of fiction while staring into the fridge later. There’s the meme, “sleep on it.” I feel there is a different quality to my thoughts when I’m walking, biking, etc. for a long time, and have nothing cognitively effortful to do which is useful for having a certain kind of thought.
I believe these are all mechanisms to hand over the brain to the default mode network, and my guess-with-terrible-epistemic-standards on its function is to propagate updates through to caches and realize implications of something. I may or may not have an introspective sense of having a picture of where I am relative to the world, that I execute on, which gets fragmented as I encounter things, and which this remakes. Which acting on when fragmented leads to making bad decisions because of missing things. When doing this, for some reason, I like having some kind of sort of meaningful but familiar stimulus to mostly-not-pay-attention-to. Right now I am listening to and glimpsing at this, a bunch of clips I’ve seen a zillion times from a movie I’ve already seen, with the sound taken out, replaced with nonlyrical music. It’s a central example. (And I didn’t pick it consciously, I just sort of found it.)
Search your feelings. If you know this to be true, then I advise you to avoid efforts to be more productive which split time spent into “work” and “non-work” where non-work is this stuff, and that try to convert non-work into work on the presumption that non-work is useless.
Little Free Anarchive
Rechelon
Bad People
Setting The Universe On Fire
Your Freedom is My Freedom
The Distinct Radicalism of Anarchism
You Are Not The Target Audience
Organizations Versus Getting Shit Done
Socialist Programs
Two Definitions Of Power
Ziz
Glossary
Comments on the Glossary
Cached Answers
Trash Can
Airlock Games
Contact
Inconceivable!
Self-Blackmail
Engineering and Hacking your Mind
False Faces
Treaties vs Fusion
Narrative Breadcrumbs vs Grizzly Bear
Optimizing Styles
Judgement Extrapolations
DRM’d Ontology
Social Reality
The Slider Fallacy
Single Responsibility Principle for the Human Mind
Ancient Wisdom Fixed
Subagents Are Not a Metaphor
Don’t Fight Your Default Mode Network
Being Real or Fake
My Journey to the Dark Side
Cache Loyalty
Mana
Fusion
Schelling Reach
Schelling Orders
Justice
Neutral and Evil
Spectral Sight and Good
Aliveness
The O’Brien Technique
Choices Made Long Ago
Lies About Honesty
Assimilation
Hero Capture
Vampires And More Undeath
Gates
Good Erasure
Punching Evil
Net Negative
Rationalist Fleet
Good Group and Pasek’s Doom
Intersex Brains And Conceptual Warfare
Comments on Intersex Brains and Conceptual Warfare
The Matrix is a System
Troll Line in the First Post
Fangs and the Sunlight Problem
The Multiverse
Healing Without Safety
Gwen
Lemurs and the True Human Body Map
Case Study CFAR
Slackmobiles
Maia
Nis
Killing Evil “People”
Cartesian Convexity
Genesis Troll Line
Evil: A Hole?
Caring
Glossary
Troll Lines
Jargon
Living Reference
Cancer Terms