found more than once that when i find smth that might really help (oh this paper is precisely about the problem i've been having!) i postpone engaging with it... almsot as if had grown accustomed to the mode of 'there being a problem' and face resistance to moving on from it...
Conversation
the old CFARians used to say "it's okay for your problems to be solvable"
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in the early days CFAR was like "oh we will just come up with and iterate on techniques and then give the best techniques to people this is going to be great"
and then we ran into load-bearing problems and meta-problems and feelings about problems and feelings about techniques
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can you elaborate on what some of these problems were? i am very curious
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i don't remember detailed examples off the top of my head but the structure that made them hard to deal with was pretty similar across examples: problems that felt bad to think about so you never thought about them, techniques that felt bad to use so you never used them
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like okay a random and not particularly good personal example: at one point i was trying to get myself to go to the gym. the CFAR-approved technique for this at the time was called aversion factoring, where you basically list all the reasons it seems bad to go to the gym
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the problem is that i had an aversion *to aversion factoring* - which i still don't understand but i think it was something like i needed my reasons to "make sense" or something - and i didn't have a technique for dealing with *that*, so i couldn't really make progress
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i think a deeper issue is that the whole CFAR paradigm of "techniquification" was busted, and this was something we discussed internally too. the techniques were brittle and insufficiently responsive to different circumstances / mindshapes, i think
we talked a lot about how to convey to people "the generators" of what we were doing rather than the techniques themselves per se, and had a whole spiel about how the point wasn't the techniques, but i don't think we did so hot with the generators either
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