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Ben_LandauTaylor comments on Power and difficulty - Less Wrong
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I've noticed a related phenomenon where, when someone acquires a new insight, they judge its value by how difficult it was to understand, instead of by how much it improves their model of the world. It's the feeling of "Well, I hadn't thought of that before, but I suppose it's pretty obvious." But of course this is a mistake because the important part is "hadn't thought of that before," no matter whether you think you could've realized it in hindsight. (The most pernicious version of this is "Oh, yeah, I totally knew that already. I just hadn't make it so explicit.")
A while back I deliberately switched from thinking of new ideas primarily in my head to thinking on paper, using notebooks or text editors. I had a strong, intuitive sense that the quality of my insights dropped, and nearly stopped. But instead I spent five minutes writing down the ideas I'd had using the two different systems, and found that I had substantially more insights thinking on paper–and those insights were usually better. But because they were easier to obtain, I wasn't valuing them as much.
If you say paper do you mean real physical paper? If so do you digitize it someway?
It depends on the problem. For problems where outline-based thinking works well, I use Checkvist, which is very similar to Workflowy. If a problem doesn't conform to that format I'll generally use pen & paper. I don't usually digitize paper, although I might copy certain useful insights into my spaced repetition deck on ThoughtSaver.