“Should I work around X, or should I actively try to defeat X?”
I find that if I don't see the path to victory, I can often hem and haw like that. A solution is "baby steps".
Just start down one path, and see what you find. You don't have to have to see the full path before taking a step. If you went down a bad path, you can backtrack and go down the other.
I'm guessing that I'm not the only one here biased towards thinking over doing. Think, Choose, Do. More action, less contemplation.
This important divide is the question of optimizing around, or powering through.
The dangerous word there is "optimize". Because everything can always be better. So I try to think of a goal, and then do worse. What's the quickest, most half assed job I could do? How much of the problem would that solve? Get some solution as quick as you can, and then improve if you feel the need to. Often you won't.
Generating quick solutions that at least do part of the job of solving things is something novel I have not considered before. Thinking about it now, it seems obvious most of my patches won't be full counters to my problems inmost cases, anyway, so I might not lose as much potential efficiency as I think I am when finding quick solutions. Thanks!
Noticing something new doesn't mean that you have to add a new goal to your todo list. Simply noticing reality and being aware is often the best first reaction to noticing something new.
When it comes to actually adding new tasks to your todo list it makes sense to choose them in a way that helps with your overall long-term goals and vision for yourself.
This sounds valid.
I haven't been doing enough goal prioritization, it seems, as I'll often feel tornbetween starting lots of projects at the same time. Keeping in mind which ones are most important down the road sounds like an obvious skill to be practicing.
I think it depends on X. It may be something you have to evaluate on a case-by-case basis. I think if X was something that could have consequences for high-stakes or ethical decisions, I would prioritize working on it rather than working around it.
Pushing through it may not be the most effective strategy to deal with it in the long term. "Defeat X" may not be the most helpful metaphor. Defeat vs. work around could be a false dichotomy.
You may be looking for a general rule or rule-of-thumb for something where generalizations do not make sense. If you want a general rule, you may want to be more careful and specific about setting up the question. Right now, I have the impression that the question is too vague and the abstractions too mismatched to yield a useful answer.
That's true--I think I was thinking mainly of biases when I wrote this.
Thanks for bringing up that this really doesn't work too well for broader categories.
It is worth keeping in mind that how to defeat X is not well-defined. The usual method for circumventing the planning fallacy is to use whatever the final cost was last time. What about cases where there isn't a body of evidence for the costs? Rationality is just such a case; while we have many well-defined biases, we have few methods for overcoming them.
As a consequence, I determine whether to workaround or defeat X primarily based on how frequently I expect it to come up. The cost of X I find less relevant for two reasons: one, I have a preference against being mugged by Pascal's Wager into spending all my effort on low-likelihood events; two, high cost cases often have a well developed System 2 methodology to resolve them.
A benefit is that frequent cases benefit more easily from spaced repetition and habit forming. In this way, I hope to develop a body of past cases to refer to when trying to plan for how long defeating future X will take.
Examples of frequent cases: exercise, amazon purchases, reading articles. Examples of rare cases: job benefits, housing costs, vehicle purchases.
Lately, I’ve been musing on the nature of self-improvement in general. When I notice that something I’ve been doing-- be it mental or physical, the next immediate chain of thought is “Okay, how do I improve my life now, knowing this phenomena exists?” In doing so, I’ve recently realized that this is missing a crucial distinction that can lead to more confusion later down the road.
This important divide is the question of optimizing around, or powering through. So before figuring out what actions I should be taking, it seems important to ask myself, “What am I trying to optimize for?” If the negative biases and habits I manage to identify are rocks, then the question is whether or not the best plan of action is to plan around these rocks, or crush them entirely. This is far from a clear-cut division, however. It appears that breaking bad habits--powering through is going to be more costly in terms of resources spent. Additionally, a successful plan for overcoming these errors will probably have a mix of these, especially if ridding oneself of the tendency entirely is the goal.
For an example of how these two are often blurred, take the planning fallacy:
One strategy may be to overestimate times when planning, pushing through the “it feels wrong” feeling to develop a better sense of how long things take. To augment this, there are also planning techniques, like Murphyjitsu designed to get you considering “hidden factors”. It’s far from clear how much actions that compensate for biases by countering their effects actually reduce the bias entirely, especially if the helpful action also becomes second nature.
But overall, I think this is an important distinction to keep in mind, because I’ll often be stuck asking myself “Should I work around X, or should I actively try to defeat X?”
Does anyone have experience trying to go specifically in one way or the other to counter their biases?