I'm turning 33 in a few days and I think that has me reflecting on my status in life. What surprises me is that I sometimes feel like a mid-twenty-something, and people often mistake me for that and treat me accordingly. I'm certainly more confident now than I was when I was, say, 26. Experience has shown me what I'm good at and for those things I'm bad at, it's given me the maturity to seek out help and improve to the extent feasible. But I still don't quite have the authority I associate with some of my peers in age, let alone my elders. Maybe it has something to do with having kids. You could say they exude a parental authority.
I've been recently having the experience of working alongside people who are particularly competent in at least a couple specific areas. It has me realizing how much better I can be at certain things, and wondering what sort of fundamental phenomena underlie the performance I'm observing. Two very fundamental intelligences or abilities are emerging in the theory I've got so far. The first is decisiveness: a capacity to make quick, sufficiently effective decisions. I think the key here is avoiding paralysis analysis that's driven by anxiety. That's driven by such internal monologue as, "Did I forget something?" and leads you to keep doubling-back to the same areas of mental exploration, never coming to a solid mental clarity on the state of a particular aspect, and making progress difficult. In the process you also risk losing the bigger picture, since by spreading ad hoc mental analysis out in time you push the limits of short-term memory. It's rumination. It's obsessive and compulsive. Some people just don't do it but those who do need to be able to recognize it and intervene to keep it from gumming up their thought process. This is reminding me of an article I read long ago about the nature of genius, describing it as a quicker certainty of analysis than the vast majority of people exhibit, so my elaboration here can be thought of as exploring the details of that.
The other fundamental ability is related. It entails being able to store, retain, and extend successive aspects of a mental model, successive considerations in making a decision. The first ability is about being able to recognize — recognize when you're ruminating, recognize the cognitive consensus your thoughts are converging on — then make a definitive mental note to facilitate progressing thoughts and progressing actions. This second ability is less about recognizing a conclusion and more about building out a mental space — a diagram, if you would — of the matter under consideration or the system you're examining, for whatever purpose. You can think of it as a prerequisite to recognizing a conclusion, though on close examination I think we'll find there isn't so clear-cut a sequence. The key to it is restrained imagination. The imagination enables the visualization — or for the less visually-oriented — a math-sense or body-sense or sound representation of the topic. Keeping this imaginary world restrained is necessary to keep it from growing so big you start losing pieces of it, or losing track of what you were trying to accomplish to begin with. I can't plan properly if I keep forgetting a constraint. For some reason the example I'm coming up with right now is deciding to plan a bike trip while one of my arms is in a cast — probably not the greatest solution to the question of how I should spend my weekend. Maybe a couple days reading something engaging at home would be a better idea.
Imaginary worlds grow too big or unwieldy (unless you've really committed preexisting components to memory) when you start to contemplate tangents, or when you keep getting distracted by completely unrelated thoughts — invasive thoughts — but then keep trying to come back. I would argue that the latter places a lot of downward pressure on how big your imaginary world can manageably be. If your mental flow is punctuated by a fleeting but momentarily consuming thought about an issue at home, or what kind of music you want to listen to later, etc., then in the interim your mental world atrophies. You start losing pieces that would have stayed in place otherwise. When I tune into the introspective currents that are more or less constantly flowing through me over the course of my day, I can feel the looming threat of such distracting invasive thoughts. I can feel emergent impulse to break away from reflecting on a statement my colleague just made or a thought I just had about my code. I think a lot of it has to do with the habits and lifestyles that tend to come with having a smartphone. I've cultivated enough ongoing awareness — metacognition or mindfulness — that I'm able to continue directing my thoughts when something else threatens to take over, but I'd like to be better. I'd like fewer instances of something threatening a takeover at all. This is all just a long way of saying I want to improve my ability to focus, concentrate, and act. I think it starts with putting yourself on a sort of stimulation diet and seeing lines of thinking and action through without pivoting to something else, until you build up enough agency to handle a higher-stimulation environment with more moving parts.
I've been recently having the experience of working alongside people who are particularly competent in at least a couple specific areas. It has me realizing how much better I can be at certain things, and wondering what sort of fundamental phenomena underlie the performance I'm observing. Two very fundamental intelligences or abilities are emerging in the theory I've got so far. The first is decisiveness: a capacity to make quick, sufficiently effective decisions. I think the key here is avoiding paralysis analysis that's driven by anxiety. That's driven by such internal monologue as, "Did I forget something?" and leads you to keep doubling-back to the same areas of mental exploration, never coming to a solid mental clarity on the state of a particular aspect, and making progress difficult. In the process you also risk losing the bigger picture, since by spreading ad hoc mental analysis out in time you push the limits of short-term memory. It's rumination. It's obsessive and compulsive. Some people just don't do it but those who do need to be able to recognize it and intervene to keep it from gumming up their thought process. This is reminding me of an article I read long ago about the nature of genius, describing it as a quicker certainty of analysis than the vast majority of people exhibit, so my elaboration here can be thought of as exploring the details of that.
The other fundamental ability is related. It entails being able to store, retain, and extend successive aspects of a mental model, successive considerations in making a decision. The first ability is about being able to recognize — recognize when you're ruminating, recognize the cognitive consensus your thoughts are converging on — then make a definitive mental note to facilitate progressing thoughts and progressing actions. This second ability is less about recognizing a conclusion and more about building out a mental space — a diagram, if you would — of the matter under consideration or the system you're examining, for whatever purpose. You can think of it as a prerequisite to recognizing a conclusion, though on close examination I think we'll find there isn't so clear-cut a sequence. The key to it is restrained imagination. The imagination enables the visualization — or for the less visually-oriented — a math-sense or body-sense or sound representation of the topic. Keeping this imaginary world restrained is necessary to keep it from growing so big you start losing pieces of it, or losing track of what you were trying to accomplish to begin with. I can't plan properly if I keep forgetting a constraint. For some reason the example I'm coming up with right now is deciding to plan a bike trip while one of my arms is in a cast — probably not the greatest solution to the question of how I should spend my weekend. Maybe a couple days reading something engaging at home would be a better idea.
Imaginary worlds grow too big or unwieldy (unless you've really committed preexisting components to memory) when you start to contemplate tangents, or when you keep getting distracted by completely unrelated thoughts — invasive thoughts — but then keep trying to come back. I would argue that the latter places a lot of downward pressure on how big your imaginary world can manageably be. If your mental flow is punctuated by a fleeting but momentarily consuming thought about an issue at home, or what kind of music you want to listen to later, etc., then in the interim your mental world atrophies. You start losing pieces that would have stayed in place otherwise. When I tune into the introspective currents that are more or less constantly flowing through me over the course of my day, I can feel the looming threat of such distracting invasive thoughts. I can feel emergent impulse to break away from reflecting on a statement my colleague just made or a thought I just had about my code. I think a lot of it has to do with the habits and lifestyles that tend to come with having a smartphone. I've cultivated enough ongoing awareness — metacognition or mindfulness — that I'm able to continue directing my thoughts when something else threatens to take over, but I'd like to be better. I'd like fewer instances of something threatening a takeover at all. This is all just a long way of saying I want to improve my ability to focus, concentrate, and act. I think it starts with putting yourself on a sort of stimulation diet and seeing lines of thinking and action through without pivoting to something else, until you build up enough agency to handle a higher-stimulation environment with more moving parts.
