Somewhere in the vastnesses of the Internet and the almost equally impenetrable thicket of my bookmark collection, there is a post by someone who was learning Zen meditation...

Someone who was surprised by how many of the thoughts that crossed his mind, as he tried to meditate, were old thoughts - thoughts he had thunk many times before.  He was successful in banishing these old thoughts, but did he succeed in meditating?  No; once the comfortable routine thoughts were banished, new and interesting and more distracting thoughts began to cross his mind instead.

I was struck, on reading this, how much of my life I had allowed to fall into routine patterns.  Once you actually see that, it takes on a nightmarish quality:  You can imagine your fraction of novelty diminishing and diminishing, so slowly you never take alarm, until finally you spend until the end of time watching the same videos over and over again, and thinking the same thoughts each time.

Sometime in the next week - January 1st if you have that available, or maybe January 3rd or 4th if the weekend is more convenient - I suggest you hold a New Day, where you don't do anything old.

Don't read any book you've read before.  Don't read any author you've read before.  Don't visit any website you've visited before.  Don't play any game you've played before.  Don't listen to familiar music that you already know you'll like.  If you go on a walk, walk along a new path even if you have to drive to a different part of the city for your walk.  Don't go to any restaurant you've been to before, order a dish that you haven't had before.  Talk to new people (even if you have to find them in an IRC channel) about something you don't spend much time discussing.

And most of all, if you become aware of yourself musing on any thought you've thunk before, then muse on something else.  Rehearse no old grievances, replay no old fantasies.

If it works, you could make it a holiday tradition, and do it every New Year.

Followup to:  Economic Definition of Intelligence?

After I challenged Robin to show how economic concepts can be useful in defining or measuring intelligence, Robin responded by - as I interpret it - challenging me to show why a generalized concept of "intelligence" is any use in economics.

Well, I'm not an economist (as you may have noticed) but I'll try to respond as best I can.

My primary view of the world tends to be through the lens of AI.  If I talk about economics, I'm going to try to subsume it into notions like expected utility maximization (I manufacture lots of copies of something that I can use to achieve my goals) or information theory (if you manufacture lots of copies of something, my probability of seeing a copy goes up).  This subsumption isn't meant to be some kind of challenge for academic supremacy - it's just what happens if you ask an AI guy an econ question.

So first, let me describe what I see when I look at economics:

I see a special case of game theory in which some interactions are highly regular and repeatable:  You can take 3 units of steel and 1 unit of labor and make 1 truck that will transport 5 units of grain between Chicago and Manchester once per week, and agents can potentially do this over and over again.  If the numbers aren't constant, they're at least regular - there's diminishing marginal utility, or supply/demand curves, rather than rolling random dice every time.  Imagine economics if no two elements of reality were fungible - you'd just have a huge incompressible problem in non-zero-sum game theory.

This may be, for example, why we don't think of scientists writing papers that build on the work of other scientists in terms of an economy of science papers - if you turn an economist loose on science, they may measure scientist salaries paid in fungible dollars, or try to see whether scientists trade countable citations with each other.  But it's much less likely to occur to them to analyze the way that units of scientific knowledge are produced from previous units plus scientific labor.  Where information is concerned, two identical copies of a file are the same information as one file.  So every unit of knowledge is unique, non-fungible, and so is each act of production.  There isn't even a common currency that measures how much a given paper contributes to human knowledge.  (I don't know what economists don't know, so do correct me if this is actually extensively studied.)

Since "intelligence" deals with an informational domain, building a bridge from it to economics isn't trivial - but where do factories come from, anyway?  Why do humans get a higher return on capital than chimpanzees?