Kinda surprised you didn't mention purpose-tracking, for while you're trying to do a thing--any thing. Arguably the most important skill I acquired from the Sequences, and that's a high bar.

"Your sword has no blade. It has only your intention. When that goes astray you have no weapon."

There is an interview technique called Experiential Array which is designed to pull out this sort of information (and some other stuff too). Matt Goldenberg conducted this type of interview on me on the topic of designing and running events. This experience gave me the ability to communicate the invisible parts of event design.

Read here for more details 

While writing, track an estimate of the mental state of a future reader - confusion, excitement, eyes glossing over, etc.

This may be true if you write a scientific paper, an essay or a non-fiction book. As a professional writer, when I write a novel, I usually don't think about the reader at all (maybe because, in a way, I am the reader). Instead, I track a mental state of the character I'm writing about. This leads to interesting situations when a character "decides" to do something completely different from what I intended her to do, as if she had her own will. I have heard other writers describe the same thing, so it seems to be a common phenomenon. In this situation, I have two options: I can follow the lead of the character (my tracking of her mental state) and change my outline or even ditch it completely, or I can force her to do what the outline says she's supposed to do. The second choice inevitably leads to a bad story, so tracking the mental state of your characters indeed seems to be essential to writing good fiction. 

I assume that readers do a similar thing, so if a character in a book does something that doesn't fit the mental model they have in mind, they often find it "unbelievable" or "unrealistic", which is one of the reasons while "listen to your characters" seems to be good advice while writing.

In Advanced Driving courses a key component was (and may still be -it’s been awhile) commentary driving. You sit next to an instructor and listen to them give a commentary on everything they are tracking, for instance other road users, pedestrians, road signs,  bends, obstacles, occluders of vision etc; and how these observations affect their decision making, as they drive.  Then you practice doing the same, out loud, and, ideally, develop the discipline to continue practising this after the course. I found this was a very effective way of learning from an expert, and I’m sure my driving became the safer because of it.

Tracking an estimate of how warm food is while being cooked and how its consistency changes (ex. what the bottom of a slice of eggplant looks like without flipping it over).

Precisely estimating the note I will sing before singing it. I'm never totally accurate, but I find it extremely helpful in order to become more accurate.

Tracking an estimate of how my/another's body will feel after I massage it in an area/move it in a way.

Tracking an estimate of the risk of germs on my hands.

Tracking an estimate of the line that is at the center of my body's mass and r... (read more)

I have a couple frameworks that seem to fit into this:

One is the Greek word "kairos," which means... something kinda like "right now," but in the context of rhetoric means something more like "the present environment and mood." A public speaker, when giving a speech, should consider the kairos and tailor their speech accordingly. This cashes out in stuff like bands yelling out, "How are you tonight, Houston?!" or a comedian riffing off of a heckler. It's the thing that makes a good public speaker feel like they're not just delivering a canned speech they'v... (read more)

Curated. I think figuring out how to transfer hidden/illegible skills is a major bottleneck and like this post for digging into that. 

I do agree with Algon's comment that simply asking an expert what they're tracking may not be good enough – some expert's brains seem nicely legible and accessible to themselves, sometimes they're tracking so much stuff it's  hard to articulate.

Great post. Would add as an example: "While thinking about something and trying to figure out your viewpoint on it, track internal feelings of cognitive dissonance and confusion"

While in a conversation tracking how the other person is trying to interpret the motives behind what I'm saying and trying to control that by what I say.  This can get multiple levels of complex fast.  I recently had a really important conversation and I ended up saying things like "I mean exactly what I'm saying" and "I'm not anxious, I just can't afford to let you misunderstand me".  Unfortunately this made it seem like I was definitely anxious, and meant something other than I was saying.

The world is full of scale-free regularities that pop up across topics not unlike 2+2=4 does. Ever since I learned how common and useful this is, I've been in the habit of tracking cross-domain generalizations. That bit you read about biology, or psychology, or economics, just to name a few, is likely to apply to the others in some fashion.

ETA: I think I'm also tracking the meta of which domains seem to cross-generalize well. Translation is not always obvious but it's a learnable skill.

As a complement or intro to this technique, I find it helpful to create checklists. This helps me identify the most important items to track. I can either do it in my head, or externally via the checklist. It's often easy to come up with a reasonable checklist if you can define the topic specifically enough. Once I've created a checklist, and worked with it enough to commit it to memory, I find that new relevant information is easy to synthesize. If I encounter new information with no checklist, on the other hand, it's very hard for me to remember or make sense of it.

Oh wait there's a huge one: Sterility!

Almost the whole of modern medical practice leans on this concept at the core of Sterile Technique, where the practitioner is always tracking, for each object, a binary `is_sterile` flag. They're also tracking every time an object touches another, and when an object touches a non-sterile object, it becomes non-sterile. They explicitly train you to mentally track this.

Hmm, I don't think this kind of tacit knowledge and skills is at all obvious to the holder. In most cases it's like asking a centipede how exactly it walks. Feynman was unusually introspective about this, not an easy example to follow for mere mortals. 

A lot of items in your list are about modeling other agents and yourself. In an embedded agency abstraction hierarchy it would be close to the top (model the general environment, model other agents, model self), so probably a recent evolutionary development, not very well entrenched into the genome, that's why we have trouble "just doing it" and need to introspect to make it make sense.

I'm a pretty good poet. I usually don't share my poetry except with close friends, but take my word for it, my poetry is good enough that I think the majority of people who heard it would like it. What am I tracking when I write a poem?

Well, it happens almost automatically - if I have inspiration, the poem just comes out; if I don't have inspiration, I can sort of try to write something but it doesn't work. So it's a partly subconscious process already and not necessarily something that can be analyzed like this; but I know at the very least I am tracking ... (read more)

I think this concept is important. It feels sort of... incomplete. Like, it seems like there are some major follow threads, which are:

• How to teach others what useful skills you have.
• How to notice when an expert has a skill, and 
  • how to ask them questions that help them tease out the details.

This feels like a helpful concept to re-familiarize myself with as I explore the art of deliberate practice, since "actually get expert advice on what/how to practice" is one of the most centrally recommended facets.

I  started writing down things I am tracking.

I actually never realized I am tracking so many things.

The problem and issue is, I rarely remember or know what to do with the tracked information.

Lets say I am trying to be engaging and have a discussion.

There could be a number of things to track, from motives, meanings, or specific reasons something is said.

Other thing to track is filling in the gaps. Lets say someone says something incomplete, one should when engaged fill in the gaps and ask question or find a way to follow up.

Another thing is to know yo... (read more)

I track my confidence in a given step of a hypothesised chain of mathematical reasoning via a heuristic along the lines of “number of failed attempts at coming up with a counterexample”.

This post reminded me of the exercises in Calibrating with Cards, a post which very nicely advises what to pay attention to during magic practice.

Finally, the obvious question: what extra information do you mentally track, which is crucial to performing some task well?

I track the age of data.

Here are a couple examples of how this is helpful:

1. Wikipedia has case counts by country for the 2022 monkeypox outbreak. Portugal was one of the leading countries for a while in number of confirmed cases, but it has since been surpassed by others. However, on closer inspection, the numbers for Portugal haven't been updated since the 7th of July, 5 days ago. In the context of exponential growth, that matters a lot

One answer to the question for me:

While writing, something close to "how does this 'sound' in my head naturally, when read, in an aesthetic sense?"

I've thought for a while that "writing quality" largely boils down to whether the writer has an intuitively salient and accurate intuition about how the words they're writing come across when read. 

Now that I read this, I notice that I automatically do this when i'm in school, and that it's much more automatic and frequent in subjects I find easy (I wonder whether it's the tracking that makes it easy, or whether less effort frees up brain space to track?).

In history class, I always keep a mental map of when something happened, why it happened, and what resulted from it. I was very surprised when I found out none of my friends do anything similar, because it's such an obvious tool for seeing the bigger picture and remembering how things fit together f... (read more)

Another immediate question is "for what tasks you don't have to do that?", partly because then one can ask the following question of why. For example, I think now that one doesn't have to track extra information when feeding livestock. (A not-too-variable time-consuming routine.) But I haven't yet really tracked what I do when I do that.

Two thoughts:

Many with unusually high "g"appear to have a tendency toward social blindness and trouble with "theory of mind" and tracking others internal states. I wonder if many have reminded themselves to consciously track any cues to other's internal states. Example: hmm that person is exhibiting signs of boredom and body language indicating a desire to flee when I discuss the coding problem I've been struggling with.

As someone prone to impulsivity in youth I've come to appreciate a tendency toward intrusive terrible images or "intrusive thoughts". They... (read more)

There’s something really odd about that: it made me notice that I have either trouble tracking many things like that, or trouble bothering to track these things (since it wasn’t so much of an issue a few years ago, maybe the latter is more likely). Can anyone relate or am I weird? How do I learn to track more?

Also, the advice of asking mentors what they track seems really good!

When outside, I'm usually tracking location and direction on a mental map. This doesn't seem like a big deal to me but in my experience few people do it. On some occasions I am able to tell which way we need to go while others are confused.

This reminds me of dual N-back training. Under this frame, dual N-back would improve your ability to track extra things. It's still unclear to me whether training it actually improves mental skills in other domains.

When thinking about a physics problem or physical process or device, I track which constraints are most important at each step. This includes generic constraints taught in physics classes like conservation laws, as well as things like "the heat has to go somewhere" or "the thing isn't falling over, so the net torque on it must be small".

Another thing I track is what everything means in real, physical terms. If there's a magnetic field, that usually means there's an electric current or permanent magnet somewhere. If there's a huge magnetic field, that usual... (read more)

The extent to which you can benefit from asking what someone is tracking in their head, and the degree to which they can usefully explain it to you, will depend critically on how much information, basic to the topic at hand, you two of you already share.

You can learn more from a master, using this technique, the more you already knew.

If “cognitive capacity” is the amount of information useful to some specific domain of problem solving one has in one’s head, then everyone on Earth has more or less the same cognitive capacity (excepting only people with some... (read more)

When programming, I track a mixed bag of things, top of which is readability: Will me-6-months-from-now be able to efficiently reconstruct the intention of this code, track down the inevitable bugs, etc.?

In the main, isn’t this post mostly representing the idea of tacit knowledge, albeit under a different name?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_knowledge

This sounds a lot like mindfulness.  :-)

The example that immediately popped into my head was the difficulty I had training lawyers to conduct a jury trial.

You spend so much time building up a persuasive story to tell, but at trial most of your mental effort is elsewhere.

You have the jury, individual jurors, the judge, the witnesses, and opposing counsel, your story, the opposing story, and rules of evidence and procedure. All of these things are moving and changing at the same time.

It felt unteachable. I've said things like "it takes extreme observation".

I’d be interested to see a cognitive consciousness model built around

• considerations, the state space of consciousness. These are zallerian style associations of words and phrases that are either positive or negative
• tracking. This is the active-conscious activity which is triggered an input
• input. This of course is an element of the input space, either language or the union of language visual

Cool post :)