Note: there is a shorter "Think it Faster" worksheet. I'm curious which one people find easier as an initial read.

Ultimately, I don’t want to solve complex problems via laborious, complex thinking, if I can help it. Ideally, I'd want to basically intuitively follow the right path to the answer quickly, with barely any effort at all.

For a few months I've been experimenting with the "How Could I have Thought That Thought Faster?" concept, originally described in a twitter thread by Eliezer:

Sarah Constantin: I really liked this example of an introspective process, in this case about the "life problem" of scheduling dates and later canceling them: malcolmocean.com/2021/08/int…
Eliezer Yudkowsky: See, if I'd noticed myself doing anything remotely like that, I'd go back, figure out which steps of thought were actually performing intrinsically necessary cognitive work, and then retrain myself to perform only those steps over the course of 30 seconds.
SC: if you have done anything REMOTELY like training yourself to do it in 30 seconds, then you are radically smarter/more able/etc than me and all the other people who do slower introspective practices.
SC: I don't know whether to be impressed or to roll to disbelieve.
EY: I mean I suspect that this actually requires something like a fast perceptual view of minds as engines and thoughts as doing work and like actually draws on my mind design knowledge, but, even so, I ask: Do you constantly look back and ask "How could I have thought that faster?"
SC: No, I've never asked that.
EY: Okay, well, every time I'm surprised by reality I look back and think "What about my model and my way of thinking could I change that would have predicted that better, without predicting a bunch of other things worse?"

I've been working to operationalize this as an exercise^[1] you can train repeatedly, rather than hoping to remember to do when reality hands you a surprise. You can do the exercise after any difficult cognitive task (either a toy puzzle exercise, or a day-job project that took a long while).

What would have been necessary for you to just look at the situation, and automagically find the right solution? (without overfitting, or generalizing in a way that would cause you to think unproductive thoughts in other sorts of situations?)

The goal of this exercise is to identify:

skills you can train
principles you can apply
actio

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