Swimmer963 comments on Teaching Introspection - Less Wrong

23 Post author: Swimmer963 01 August 2011 01:10AM

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Comment author: pjeby 01 August 2011 07:43:44PM 4 points [-]

And the easiest way to learn perfect front crawl isn’t to do it over and over again with tiny changes, but to practice exaggerated and simplified “drills” that teach particular fragments of muscle memory.

This reminds me of something that happened in my early years of teaching mind hacking: I noticed that some people were way better at applying the techniques than others, and then began discovering that it was a function of lower-level introspection skills I didn't yet know how to teach. (For example, some people were just better at "shutting up and listening" or not adding interpretations onto their experiences.)

Faced with a given stroke problem, I can look over a list of about eight different front crawl drills to find the one best suited for fixing it. To place some objective measure on the improvements, I can time my swimmers or count their strokes per length.

I certainly wish I had technology that specific: what I have now are mostly mnemonics, rules of thumb, and individual coaching feedback. Objective measures are particularly hard to come by, though I suppose I have a couple of them.

Comment author: Swimmer963 03 August 2011 01:26:27AM 0 points [-]

and then began discovering that it was a function of lower-level introspection skills I didn't yet know how to teach.

Have you experimented or played around with ways of teaching these lower-level skills?

Comment author: pjeby 03 August 2011 03:58:28AM 0 points [-]

Have you experimented or played around with ways of teaching these lower-level skills?

Yes. As a practical matter, it's more like teaching people what to stop doing than what to do - i.e. to stop talking over their experience and speculating about it. Some people are worse about doing that than others; you have to stop them a lot before they "get it".

More recently, I've been teaching people my SEED mnemonic, and it seems to help them realize what they're supposed to be paying attention to, but I don't have any real empirical data on that. I'd have to get a bunch of untrained people and test how quickly they were able to stop abstracting experiences, having split them into a control and experimental group... and then I'd still have no way to blind myself, unless somebody else taught them about SEEDs.