Resolve Cycles
Epistemic status: Anecdotally strong This technique was largely developed by Kenzi Amodei in the context of after-workshop followups and pair debugging. It has been refined and iterated, and has proven highly useful to our alumni, but all theorizing is post-hoc and untested, and direct research into (e.g.) an underlying theory of mind has yet to be done. Consider the following scenarios: * You’ve been assigned a task that feels like it’s going to take about ten or fifteen hours of work, and you’ve been given three weeks to get it done (e.g. a document that needs to be written). * You’re facing a problem that you’ve tried solving off and on again for years, a problem that your friends and family never seem to run into (e.g. a struggle with motivation as you try to learn a new skill). * There’s a thing you need to do, but it seems impossibly huge or vague (e.g. to achieve your goals you’d need to found a company, emigrate to India, or cure a disease), and you don’t know where to begin. * You’re pretty sure you know all the steps between you and your goal, but there are about forty thousand of them (e.g. you’re hoping to run an actual marathon). * You’ve got a to-do list that’s long and growing, and you can only ever manage to get to the ones that are urgent (e.g. getting your car’s registration renewed, two months late). Problems like the ones above can range from trivial to crucial, from simple to complex, and from one-time bugs to persistent, serious drains on your time, attention, and resources. There are a lot of elements in the mix—motivation, creativity, perseverance, prioritization—and a lot of justifiable reasons for thinking that solutions will be hard to come by. Sometimes, though—despite every bit of common sense and experience telling us otherwise—those solutions aren’t hard to come by. Or rather, they might be hard, but they’re not elusive or mysterious or complicated. The resolve cycle technique is o
