SquirrelInHell

The blogpost author (SquirrelInHell on LessWrong) died awhile ago. I'm not sure who's currently paying for their website or how long it'll be up. I don't have the rights to this, but decided it was important enough to have on LessWrong that I decided to copy-paste this post and... I dunno, own whatever karmic debt I incur. This is possibly my single-favorite rationality technique. The first day I tried this I immediately ended up teaching myself a valuable rationality-life-lesson due to the feedback loop it created. When I teach this technique at small workshops, typically ~25% of people go "oh wow that was immediately helpful." I haven't gotten as much value out of it as SquirrelInHell suggests (i.e. it's sometimes effortful to think, and they claim if you're doing it right it basically shouldn't be), but I also haven't really sat and trained it deliberately in-depth, and meanwhile I've gotten value from it each time I try it. Text of original article: Tuning Your Cognitive Strategies What do you get out of it? * The good. * Better returns on thinking time. * Your cognition is much more powerful than just the part you have conscious access to, and it's crucial to make good use of it. * A small tweak to how your brain processes information in general is worth more than a big upgrade to your conscious repository of cognitive tricks. * Goal-oriented thinking. * When working on real-life problems, your peak performance matters less than the ability to simply think useful thoughts at all. * For example, if your current top priority is "start my own company", but you keep having insights about "what I'll say to my current boss when I finally quit"... that's maybe not the best way to make progress. * Improved ability to fix cognitive biases. * To the extent that other approaches work, it's because they manage to change your cognitive strategies. It's mu