Conversation

The first time you learn a few thinking skills that can generate and sustain trains of thought indefinitely, it’s like learning to drive. Kinda exhilarating and you want to drive for the sake of driving. Then the thrill wanes and a fork in the road appears, with 4 options.
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Option 1: the race car driver option. You work to improve driving skill to get back the same highs. With thinking skills, this is the kind of person who becomes invested in optimizer theology. You end up on thinking equivalent of racetracks, trying to win points, praise, prizes.
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Option 2: The chore driver. You don’t particularly enjoy it, but you don’t gate it, and do it when you have to. You get good-enough mediocre at it, develop a few special tricks, but mostly drive for instrumental reasons. Not pleasure. This is most knowledge work.
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Option 3: You become a cab/uber driver. Probably enjoy it more than most, better than most from practice, and slowly develop a broad/deep way of seeing world from the driver seat. Not as high-skill/talent as race car drivers but broader vision. In thinking, this is leadership.
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Unlike option 2, this is not purely instrumental. You do so much of it, it better be more than a means to an end. Otherwise you’ll be miserable. But unlike option 1, it’s not enough in itself. You need wide-field view of real world to make the activity meaningful, not racetrack.
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Option 4: At some point you develop a visceral hatred of driving. Maybe a traumatic/scary accident. Maybe going overboard on green morality. You only walk or bike or take powered transit if you absolutely must. The thinking equivalent is thinking-rejecting pure empaths/feelers.
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My history is interesting, in high school I was tagged as Option 1 type because in that limited field I was incorrectly tagged a race-car driver type. In college, I got better calibrated and self-tagged a Option 3 type but having to do Option 2 chores for others to “pay my dues”
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Ie, I saw myself as the full-time uber driver equivalent of thinking work, who’d have to do driving chores for others for a while, and less driving (and less interesting driving) for others for a while. Good description of my life till I finished my PhD, ~ 2003, age 29.
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Postdoc on, I was basically in charge of my thinking life and could think as much as I liked about almost anything I liked, within very broad limits set by employers. That’s really what a PhD buys you — right to own your thinking because nobody else is competent to.
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If you do it right, you become intellectually ungovernable. There are other ways to get there but a PhD is the easiest, most lucrative way, if you can get on that path. It’s framed as a sort of orderly manumission, but it’s really more of a jailbreak with collusion from warders.
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Most people never realize that the default state of your brain/thinking skills is one of captivity/bondage. Like life without a drivers license in the US. Even if you don’t drive much, it’s nice to have the *option* to be contd. lunch break
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What about Option 4? It’s a kind of reactionary response to failure to make thinking a worthwhile part of your life. While there are days I’m tired of thinking and perhaps more in touch with the underdeveloped emotional or somatic side of my life, it will never be core for me.
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Curiously enough, with actual driving I’ve almost turned into an Option 4. But I think that’s bad so I make myself drive a bit every few weeks. Sometimes I enjoy it, other times it’s just a chore to maintain muscle memory. I no longer “see like a driver”
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But back to thinking, at some point merely being ungovernable in otherwise governed thought spaces peopled by types 1-4 and non-jail broken non-thinkers. I got attracted to unthought “wild thoughts” spaces. It’s been a theme on my blog for years now.
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Ok another break. Cliffhanger for later: can you hit the edge of a thought space? Not just off-road but have to exit car because your learned sustainable thought habits can’t go any further?
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Will continue this another day. Went for a walk and had lunch so a bit sleepy now and the next part, how to be an ungovernable thinker-feeler in unmapped territories requires two 2x2s I have to draw first.
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