(I got it from either kajsotala.fi/ or www.neelnanda.io/.)

What is track-backing?

A mental move that's not only for meditation, but let's start there for simplicity.

Suppose you're meditating, and you suddenly become aware that you've been distracted by a series of thoughts. You're not sure when that started, how long that's been going on.

Now here's an opportunity to practice an aspect of memory! Recall what you were thinking that led to the current thought – then recall what came before that, and then what came before that.

"I was thinking about trains just now; why was that? Ah, it was because I was thinking about how I have to catch the train later, and started thinking about trains in general. I don't remember what got me on that topic…"

That's "causal back-tracking", one of two forms of back-tracking. Abram Demski hypothesizes that it trains long-term memory.

The other form is "temporal back-tracking" or "by-the-clock back-tracking", and Demski hypothesizes it trains short-term memory. Instead of walking backwards in a chain of logical connections as above, you jump back many minutes to a point when you weren't distracted, and then walk forwards from there, reconstruct history.

Possible benefits

If you're like me, once you try this you'll find it pretty fun, and it quickly comes to be natural procedure for all situations where you wonder how you got distracted or "how did I get here?"

It's a skill I'm happy to level up because of the direct impact:

1. Imagine if you could quickly trace a distraction back to the root cause, go "aha! that's what catches my attention today!", maybe even figure out a bugfix.
2. Not sure, but it seems to slightly expand my mental workspace when I have used the skill in recent days.
3. Last but not least! I hate forgetting that one great idea I had just a minute ago but what the hell was it, it's right on the tip of my tongue… Happy to reduce the frequency of that problem.
   • I'm also motivated to improve conversational memory, and that is essentially track-backing, so it should transfer.

What links here

• 2024-11-25

In Ancient Rome, some people had a fun way to handle dilemmas:

1. open a book by the poet Virgil
2. flip to a random page
3. read the page, and take it as guidance for your situation

That's it: sortes vergilianae, or "Virgilian Lots".

It's like throwing dice, reading a horoscope or praying for an omen. You "let Virgil choose", and functionally it's a way to introduce some randomness, offload some responsibility, and see what Lady Luck brings this time.

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In dilemmas that aren't worth solving, this is a smart move!

Think about it: if you can't choose between two options—if it seems impossible to say what is best—they must be around equally good on net.

Right? Take a moment to consider if that makes sense.

Indecision is down to either a lack of sleep, or that your options come with different pros/cons. "Oh if I do this, person A will be mad, but if I do that, person B will be sad, and and and…" and there is no path that won't hurt, and at least if you postpone the decision, it's harder for others to blame you.

Hesitation is always easy, rarely useful.

—Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality chapter 66

So what do you do? Spin your wheels figuring out which pros/cons matter more, going around and around.

But why live like that? There's a difference between:

1. That the choice is IMPORTANT (has a lot of impact)
2. That the harder it is to pick a winner, the LESS important it is which option wins

It is possible for #1 to be true, and yet settle the choice with some dice.

It may feel… illegal, like you snubbed the IMPORTANT CHOICE, abandoned responsibility for it. Throwing dice or flipping a coin, these look like the actions of someone who doesn't care.

But throwing dice is owning up to the reality that you haven't found the information that would cast the choice in sharp relief, cladding one option above all in a golden halo. Owning up that you can't bend every choice so it comes out easy; not unless you bend your personality by all that rumination.

You're adulting successfully, because there's a cost in digging for a stroke of genius that settles the matter. You're mining where there's no ore, so it will take weeks to find iron.

The dice picked one set of pros/cons for you, now you eat those cons. Reward? Those pros.

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I mentioned dilemmas that are "not worth solving". So which are?

Actually, none are worth solving!

It's in the name "dilemma": a choice where none of the options stick out, i.e. you see no obvious, automatic, default option.

Weirdly, the easier a choice, the more important it is to choose correctly. But you're going to! It hits you over the head. "Well, duh. Anything else would be stupid. Case closed."

Weirdly, the harder the choice, the less important it is to choose at all. Let the dice do it. Defer to Virgil.

What links here

• Worth solving

We can struggle with a decision and call it "very hard" for two very different reasons:

1. It seems impossible. I.e. your initial reflexive judgment induced so much panic that you gave up before you could start trying.
   • Use Take-5.
2. It doesn't matter. I.e. it your choices are equally good on net, with different pros/cons – no choice sticks up as obvious. You have been reconsidering and reconsidering, possibly for weeks.
   • Use sortes vergilianae.

What links here

• Sortes vergilianae

• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_to_materials
• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repairability

I'm thinking of a principle in #tech, when e.g. you don't minify JS or don't compress or base64-encode a string, so that people can inspect what's going on. Above terms don't quite fit. Inspectability? Exposed wiring?

A whole palette of words: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_system_quality_attributes