whales comments on A self-experiment in training "noticing confusion" - Less Wrong

34 Post author: whales 20 February 2014 01:55AM

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Comment author: Thecommexokid 23 August 2014 06:02:04PM 1 point [-]

At first, I didn't seem to exercise this skill on days where I wasn't doing cognitively demanding work, or when most of my work was not in an academic context (typically weekends). Over time, I began doing so more, although still less than on demanding academic days.

I know quite a bit of time has passed since you posted this, but do you recall any specific instances of non-cognitively-demanding weekend-type confusions you could share?

Comment author: whales 24 August 2014 07:55:27PM 0 points [-]

I wrote down a handful as I was doing this, but not all of them. There were a couple about navigation (where rather than say "well, I don't know where I am, I'll just trust the group" I figured out how I was confused about different positions of landmarks). I avoided overbaking my cookies when the recipe had the wrong time written down. Analytics for a site I run pointed to a recent change causing problems for some people, and I saw the (slight) pattern right away but ignored it until it got caught on my confusion hook. It's also a nice hook for asking questions in casual conversations. People are happy to explain why they like author X but not the superficially similar author Y I've heard them complain about before, for example.