Thinking about "game tape" for thinking, inspired by , , past Twitch streams. I notice that thinking has limited legibility—tape captures only a fraction of what's going on. Which useful categories of feedback are possible? Which blocked by illegibility?
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Some useful feedback I've gotten:
- are you being captured by the formal structure you created here, rather than by some real purpose?
- are you spending so much time reviewing those references because the main problem seems to hard, and you're avoiding it?
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But I mostly haven't gotten useful feedback. Makes me wonder about the "span" of this format, at least interpersonally.
One barrier is that so much of effective thinking is instinctual: I often can't "justify" why I'm thinking about X; trying to do so too early will cause harm.
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But a more surmountable barrier is context. For most useful kinds of feedback, you probably need an enormous amount of deep context about someone's intellectual projects. The right metric is not "get more video views" but "get the one right colleague to view".
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It's also true that one can shape the env to make the game tape more legible. Video of me writing/thinking at a computer will be much more legible, at least in some ways, than video of me at a whiteboard, or thinking while walking. (And it matters what sw I use on the computer!)
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I can't shake the feeling, though, that some types of feedback are broadly applicable and require little context. I'm not great at reading papers compared to people who do that regularly; I bet a skilled reader could watch a video of me with no context and point 10 things out.
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Here the problem is more about compression. A skilled reader probably doesn't want to spend ninety minutes watching me dig through the paper. How to focus their attention on the part most amenable to feedback?
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Or maybe the better approach is for *me* to just watch *their* game tape and infer the diff. Hashtag-destroy-all-tacit-knowledge etc…
But I bet lots of details aren't accessible that way—particularly internal mental phenomena which may not be explicit even to the thinker!
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That last sentence reminds me of one of my favorite blog posts.
"Thought as a technology"
cognitivemedium.com/tat/
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Indeed—I was thinking of that section as I wrote this! :D
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very curious if there are meaningful parallels to the playing of games. Chess has a dynamic relationship between its explicit/post-hoc strategizing, its tacit gut pattern recognition, and its deceptively legible state representation
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otoh game-life comparisons have always been tenuous.. cf Hesse’s Glass Bead Game
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How much is this helped by (some) narration + questions?
There’s a lot of cool stuff at the level of “aware of, not saying by default” and “only aware of when asked,” that I’m almost like, “let’s deal with ‘not aware of at all’ afterwards 😎”