Wednesday, October 19, 2016

Brain making poor analogies

This is the longest I have gone between blog posts in the past 12 years.  I still jot down thoughts, six to twelve times every day, but in private.

I realized recently that I pattern-match current situations to ones I have seen before, to predict how things might turn out. But the bad thing is that my brain will pattern match to situations that are very superficially similar, and also to fictional accounts like tv shows.

E.g. I will catch myself thinking things like "I have been working on this for 2 years. Last time I worked on a product for 2 years, the team faced challenge Y.  So I need to stay alert for Y."  But length of time is a meaningless signal!  There are much more direct signals like user feedback.

Or I will think "I am really happy with Aff.  On Sex and the City, how long was Samantha happy with Smith before problems arose?  If we've been happy for longer than that, I can feel reassured."  These are fictional characters!  

I welcome any tips for stopping these inaccurate comparisons.


5 comments:

cptObv said...

One suggestion is to avoid thinking like a computer and learn to make sense of events from a corporeal perspective. Sometimes if you smell something, it takes you back to some point in your past. Use these parasympathetic niceties to corral your brain into making decisions based on how you feel while gently introducing fact based narratives into your purposeful thought stream. Following this advice may lead to better prediction outcomes, idk.

Anonymous said...

The problem is you watched Sex and the City. Stop watching Sex and the City. Go watch Game of thrones instead. nuff said.

Anonymous said...

I wish I had better advice. The mind is like some awful associative array in Perl with global scope, gleefully mapping everything to everything else in O(n^2). As you age, it eventually becomes a giant, calcified sphere of unsearchable data; your only workable option is to dump the whole thing into the ocean and start over. It's not so bad, really, knowing nothing later on in life. The most enduring truths are often simple. If you ever manage to invent lexical scoping for the mind, I'll be among the first to roll up my sleeve...

"You shall set the truth free..." --Teach, LLC

Anonymous said...

What is an Aff?

Anonymous said...

After and only after...?