keltan's Shortform

keltan

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In my Obsidian.md vault I use the note aliases to point out to myself when I've said something that indicates that I Am Confused. I've progressively added and pruned this over a year. Here are the "Confusion Phrases" that I currently use.

aliases: I am confused, I don't understand, This is confusing, This is very confusing, I am quite confused, Wait what, I don't know where I fucked up, I Feel Confused, I notice I am Confused, I'm confused, I don't get it, I just don't get it, How am I meant to, How do I understand this, That's surprising, I'm not sure I understand, I'm completely lost, I'm lost, you lost me, I have no idea what's going on, what are they even trying to say, what are they trying to say, what is she trying to say, what is he trying to say, I'm lost for words, I can't wrap my head around this, I can't get my head around, I'm struggling to make sense of, I guess I just forgot about, IDK, I don't get,

Kinda related: I was inspired by the Fooming Shoggoths to make a song based on the original Your Strength as a Rationalist post a while ago. Here's that song.

Upvoted for the song.

2CstineSublime2y

25% of the time it being helpful sounds pretty good to me. Just to be clear, when you say "undirected thinking" do you mean thinking that is not pertinent to your intention or goal with a writing session or a piece of writing; or is it knowing that you want to write something but wandering aimlessly because you're not sure what that thing is? Or am I well off the mark on both?

1keltan2y

Closer to the first one. I find when writing to think my mind has two modes. Very system 1 and system 2. If I’ve been going for a while on a side branch system 1 takes over. The writing becomes less about thinking and more about the act of writing. This leads to me making a hypothesis and saying “idk why that is”. That triggers the alias, which points out to me that I’m not really ‘thinking’. I then switch to “How could I test if this is true?” I appreciate the 25% reframing. That’s something I wish I’d thought faster. Trigger: I see a %# Action: Switch it in my head