Wednesday, 29 May 2024 ------------------------ Hello. All is well. Continuing with chapter seven, we learn about problem solving. Its the process of solving a problem. Yup. We identify a problem, and then we find a solution to solve the problem. How do we solve a problem? The book mentions three main ways: trial-and-error, algorithms, and heuristics. Trial-and-error is basically brute-forcing your way to a solution. I imagine this method is useful if either the problem is not too complex or you're completely lost on how to solve it. The algorithm method uses a step-by-step solution to solve a problem. I guess this requires some understanding of the context. It requires boundaries. Unless it's a magical algorithm to solve everything? The heuristic approach is taking shortcuts. You work backwards. This is efficient but not resilient if the problem context can change unexpectedly or adapt to your heuristic solution, I think. Our brain uses heuristics to be efficient. We use biases. The book mentions four biases: anchoring bias, confirmation bias, representative bias, and hindsight bias. Anchoring bias is when you're overly focused on one constraint or factor, usually the first one you notice, of a problem. Confirmation bias is when you perceive and make sense of the world conformed to your previous experience. This is what I was looking for when I wrote that after adopting the theory of constructed emotions, would my brain now be biased to perceive and make sense of everything through that lens? Scary. I went through more than half of my life utterly deluded. What delusions do I have right now? Ahhh. Representative bias is like the schemas we talked about yesterday. We make assumptions to make better predictions, prioritizing time and energy constraints over accuracy. The book mentions 'mental set', or what I call a broken disc. I'm not sure if that's even how you say it. What am I even saying? Oh. You say broken record. Right. In this context, it's trying to solve a problem in the same way, not changing your way, ignoring repeated failure. This was basically me before stimulant medication. At least, I resonate with it a lot, as I write in the first entry. My mind was set on one way of socializing. Well. I don't think I really knew what I wanted from it. I did try a few things, and I guess I was so lost on what I was actually trying to achieve I went back to the drawing board, or should I say the writing board. I am still trying to figure out what I want. Can anything even satisfy me? Scary to think about. Maybe I figured that out, which is why I find meaning in the journey. Hmm. Who knows? Right now, I'm thinking either a sailboat across the atlantic ocean, or taking stimulants and learning stuff. I suppose the latter option is more reasonable, and I did commit to writing one thousand entries before doing anything silly. Hopefully, they're not out of stock today. I'm somewhat joking. I'm not crazy. Hindsight bias is when you look back and believe what has happened was predictable. Your brain is trying to make a cohesive and coherent story to make sense. Imagine how insane you'd become without this? I know my story of rejection and searching for acceptance is most likely completely wrong or too simplified. I think we slightly change our story to match outcomes, perhaps? Either way, anyone who says they're self made or in control of their destiny needs a bonk in the head. Self-confidence gives me the ick. People can discover your formula or juice. I guess when I say confidence, I mean your underlying social motivations from which you derive confidence. I think we usually have some basic social motivations. I got agency or leverage in life from purely using social reality? I sold a story, a sense of belonging and status out of nothing. This is why I'm scared of information technology, and the use of social value as part of our value proposition. Are we really creating value or just exploiting our social desires? Is this the endgame? Is this what we want? Minimization of value creation and maximization of value capturing? What are we really capturing? Value creation or value destruction? I don't know. Imagine a world where we only monetized and commercialized physical reality? What do I even mean by that? I'm not sure, but social reality is something that must be built with respect to qualitative metrics. We try to quantify it to capture value and monetize it. The idea of intrinsic value is nonsensical if you step out of human cognition. Uh. Maybe I'm talking nonsense. Where's the line between physical reality and social reality? That's probably hard to get right. It's also a lot more complicated than this, as social reality shapes physical reality. More questions and issues arise in me, so I'll just leave it for now. I just think we're making a huge mistake by forgetting that we're humans and how humans make sense and attach value to sense. I'm socially retarded but somehow got social leverage by creating social value out of thin air. Am I just being silly right now, or am I cooking something here? Why can't entertainment be a more philanthropic or human-spirited endeavor? I'm not saying we can't have sports, stories, meeting places, art, books, films, video games, and whatnot. But just without monetization. Couldn't it be cool if we kept commercialization closer to physical reality and built social reality with qualitative incentives instead of quantitive incentives? Am I just creating a new problem with this? Maybe. I haven't really thought any of this through. I think the major flaw, which goes back to the system book, is that we love numbers a bit too much. GDP + IT = Brainrot?