Noticing

See Agenty Duck's amazing agentyduck.blogspot.com/2014/09/what-its-like-to-notice-things.html and related agentyduck.blogspot.com/p/noticing.html

A commenter:

Noticing is absolutely the critical skill that allows all sorts of other interesting and vital abilities. For personal anecdotes, I got a huge gain in ability-to-maintain-eye-contact over a weekend where I noticed what it feels like to get distracted by an idea and lose focus on a conversational partner.

1. What is the thing you want to notice?
2. What does it feel like when this thing is approaching/happening? (E.g: does your body do anything, do your limbs jerk or reach for something, is there a weight in your lungs or a pit in your stomach, do you feel a restless drive or unbalancedness or have any other particular kind of emotion?)
3. Equip your tally counter. Imagine clearly to yourself what it'll feel like next time, so you're on the lookout. (Upon experiencing it, you'll likely detect aspects that you missed in step 2: learn from that, and repeat this step).
4. Repeat step 3 until you can reliably notice the thing. This may take a week.
5. Pick an action to do every time you notice. Stop using the tally counter and do the action instead. Congratulations!

In cognitive behavioral therapy, patients are often taught to monitor their thoughts for specific words or phrases that have emotional power; kids who struggle with ADHD are sometimes encouraged to note exactly what happened right before they got distracted, and the first thing that caught their attention once they looked away.

What happens when I try to reach for a new tab and visit Hacker News?

One time: nothing external caught my attention, but the first cue was an urge to sort of refocus on the thing I'm reading, give it some extra gas and continue reading – this then triggered a feeling of "meh I give up let's do something fun", and my hands move almost before I've noticed I made any decision.

After trying to watch for it for a few minutes, I missed it. This may be extremely difficult… it's rewarding enough for now to just notice when I make the move to open a new tab or switch workspace for no reason. Maybe later I watch for this mental cue.

A "knitting counter" or "tally counter" is a simple hardware device where you just press a button or lever to increment a number. As a game, you can press it every time you notice the thing you're trying to notice, and in so doing you train yourself to notice it.

Think twice about which model to buy. Which knitting counter?

You could think of the distance between the dotted and solid lines as a measure of the total effort required to make it back to the better timeline. The quicker you notice that you’ve changed course, the shorter the distance back to the better path. The less time that you’ve spent accelerating in the wrong direction, the less inertia you have to overcome.

Which leads to one of the key actionable insights of the TAPs perspective: there are times when the total effort to switch from 🙁 to 🙂 is zero, or close enough—e.g. simply catching the moment when you would have made the unfortunate switch […]

www.greaterwrong.com/posts/W5HcGywyPoDDdJtbz/trigger-action-planning

• Self-training
• Cognitive science

• Moments of introspective awareness
• Rationality techniques
• Teaching as learning
• You don't need to know about biases to debias
• Which knitting counter?
• Nonstandard ways to cope with ADHD
• Self-training