Organizing my long-term working memory and forming good habits of thought
Today I talked to a friend who regularly uses Anki about the potential for using spaced repetition to learn good mental motions / thought patterns. This is especially appealing to me because I constantly feel like I have too little space in my head, that things are always falling out of my awareness. This happens on multiple levels: hour by hour, day by day, and week by week. (Maybe this is something like a mindset problem, though. I'd guess a Buddhist would say I'm messing something important up in my attitude towards thoughts and impermanence.) In particular, I read about many things that I think are correct, and many ways of thinking that I think are correct, but I don't tend to apply them very quickly. It takes much repeated exposure to something for it to become an actual habit of thought. And habits of thought are what I want: I want to be able to effectively apply ideas I've learned when I encounter the right contexts in real life.
If you were to do this with spaced repetition, it would have to involve doing a short drill of the mental motion in your mind on demand. Then again, this seems like not quite the right approach. To some degree it's that this problem is difficult (mostly in generating useful unique examples), but I'm not entirely sure. There's something missing: 'brute forcing' the problem like this feels like it's clearly not the way you actually succeed.
Maybe it's that 'habits' aren't really the right frame: you want to be operating from a good set of general principles. A set of principles that are habitual, but are so omnipresent that they are reinforced by everything you do. And then it's those principles that generate habits.
Or, maybe (and this is similar) the best way to practice habits like this is through something closer to end-to-end tests. Some end-to-end tests that people use in practice:
- Reading, which directly trains patterns of thought by having you replicate them. Reinforced by thinking about what you read and even writing about what you read.
- Writing, which directly trains builds up your patterns of thought by having you essentially Loom them.
- Practice. If you read about a set of habits which you could apply to a problem, you could just straightforwardly try out a problem that you need to apply them to.
Still, it might remain helpful to drill certain patterns of thought, or at least set reminders for yourself. I'm still not really sure how to approach this. Currently, I have:
- accumulated a list of adages and good thinking patterns
- started a daily writing habit
- started a daily note-taking habit (on whatever I'm thinking about, a lot of it being links or excerpts)
- reminded myself to each morning read through the previous day's notes and take notes on them.
But, maybe let's think back to this problem of things 'falling off' the stack of my long-term working memory. I'm now also tracking a monthly 'list of things I want to do' separate from a todo list (the difference being that the 'things I want to do' are more intrinsically rewarding, self-directed, long-term helpful or short-term interesting). This includes reading, which is another thing that I feel drops off the stack very often and I'm not happy about. A core innovation here is that it's monthly - i.e. things can't accumulate on the list alone, I have to consciously decide to move them to the next month. It may be better to set this up to be weekly, if it grows too fast. I can also make a promise to myself that I will look at what I wanted to do in the past, which reduces my fear of dropping things. The goal might be to make a hierarchy, such that I know that if I left something behind at any level, I really did think it was less important than everything else.
Writing this daily blog is also helpful, since I know that if I wrote something about an idea, I have at least marked that point as reached, and in some sense 'done.' It's now navigable space; I've made a map of it.
The next thing I might like to add is structured reflection, perhaps in something like a weekly context. This blog might be good enough for thought, but it doesn't directly connect to my actions, and I'd like to be able to keep my agency on track as well. I tried to set this up once, but never even did a single weekly review. I think I could do better this time, but I'd also want to think carefully about what I'm trying to get out of it.