Third in a series of short rationality prompts.

My opening rationality move is often "What's my goal?".

It is closely followed by: "Why is this hard? And, what can I do about that?".

If you're busting out deliberate "rationality" tools (instead of running on intuition or copying your neighbors), something about your situation is probably difficult.

It's often useful to explicitly enumerate "What's hard about this?", and list the difficulties accurately, and comprehensively^[1], such that if you were to successfully deal with each hard thing, it'd be easy.

Then, you have new subgoals of "figure out how to deal with each of those hard-things." And you can brainstorm solutions^[2].

Sometimes, those subgoals will also be hard. Then, the thing to do is ask "okay, what's hard about this subgoal, and how to do I deal with that?"

Examples

I'll do one example that's sort of "simple" (most of what I need to do is "try at all"), and one that's more complex (I'll need to do some fairly creative thinking to make progress).

Example 1: Trying to read an equation

I'm reading a LessWrong post that has an equation in it. I'm not really a math guy. Normally, I just bounce off posts with equations in it. This time, the post has exactly one equation, it's otherwise an interesting post.

I could skip over the equation, but then the next paragraph is immediately referring to it and it seems kinda loadbearing.

Okay, uh, what if I actually tried reading the equation?

I try. It's hard. My eyes glaze over. A few minutes later I'm suddenly on Facebook.

What's hard about this?

Well:

It's like 7 terms in the equation, and it's hard to even parse how they all fit together.
I don't know what any term in the equation means.

Let's take the first one. Seven terms. I have ~four working memory slots and I need some of them for reasoning about the equation. Do I have some way of dealing with that?

Let's brainstorm some options:

Option 1: look at only a small part of the equation at a time.

...oh, okay, that just works. Okay, I focus on just the left side of the equation. There's an f(x) there.

What's f?

What's x?

Now we're on Hard Thing #2: I don't know what any term in the equation means. How do I deal with that? Some options:

Option A: reread the previous paragraph

...oh, that also immediately pays off. It turns out I had skimmed the previous paragraph because I knew it was ...

Step by Step Metacognition