Overthinking and Perfectionism

[Elliot]

Sometimes people get stuck overthinking things when writing or making decisions. This can be caused by perfectionism. People may keep trying to make their writing or plan more and more perfect.

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This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://criticalfallibilism.com/overthinking-and-perfectionism/

[Fire]

GOAL: React to acticle and free write.

Perfectionism can be avoided by coming up with binary goals. You need to define what outcome you’re aiming for so that you can clearly see whether you have achieved success. Overthinking is like optimizing non-bottleneck issues. You don’t want to overthink things because that can often mean you’re trying to polish something that’s going to have tons of errors anyway.

Avoiding perfectionism means not putting too much effort into things that won’t make decisive difference. It’s better to put effort into finding out your patterns of errors than trying to patch up every apparent mistake along the way. Once you find a pattern of error, you can put effort into identifying and correcting the root cause. That can mean going back to basics.

Basic skills have to be mastered to extremely high accuracy because they are the foundation of the metaphorical knowledge skyscraper. A small error in the base of knowledge propogates out into larger patterns of error in more advanced areas. So, I guess that you want to try to do lots of stuff to improve those foundational skills without worrying too much about how well they translate to super advanced ideas. When you lack foundations, you’re not in a good position to judge how much those foundations matter to advance stuff. You just want to continually test your knowledge to see if the layers below are good enough to build upon. You’re looking for areas of weakness so that you can dip back down to root issues and work on them some more.

[Eternity]

@Elliot

CF and Theory of Constraints (TOC) ideas about goals, variance, limiting factors and excess capacity can help with perfectionism. If you focus your optimization only on bottlenecks, and you believe that optimizing a non-bottleneck is pointless, that can reduce problems with perfectionism. Similarly, trying to get “good enough” outcomes – which are a margin of error past a breakpoint and avoid failing at any secondary issues – could avoid perfectionism. You can read about TOC in Eli Goldratt’s books like The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement.

Hmm. That makes sense. Now that I think about it a “good enough” mindset seems very against a perfectionist mindset. A perfectionist wants things to be perfect of sorts. Even though things are fine, they want it to be better.

@Elliot

Perfectionism can be related to non-decisive thinking. In CF, we come up with criteria for success and failure, then try to succeed rather than fail. In mainstream thinking, people evaluate how good ideas and outcomes are, or how much something succeeds, so it’s basically always possible to make things slightly better, which encourages perfectionism.

Hmm. Something like: you want to graduate from school with a 3.5 GPA. You can either do this or not. However, the mainstream would still care about every point after hitting 3.5 even though it may not be necessary for someones goals.

[Dface]

@Elliot

If you focus your optimization only on bottlenecks, and you believe that optimizing a non-bottleneck is pointless, that can reduce problems with perfectionism.

Thats cool how that works. Like trying to optimize everything including non-bottleknecks sounds tiring and like why?

@Elliot

Similarly, trying to get “good enough” outcomes – which are a margin of error past a breakpoint and avoid failing at any secondary issues – could avoid perfectionism.

I swear nobody is ever told how to think or how to be rational. Cuz of that perfectionism just seems like the way to go.

@Elliot

In CF, we come up with criteria for success and failure, then try to succeed rather than fail.

I like that. The part of me that wants to get things right gets a chance to practice it thru pass or fail judgements

@Elliot

In CF, most factors are recognized as already being more than good enough to achieve your goals, so improving them a little more is pointless, not a way to get closer to perfection.

I wish we this was the mainstream view that way everyone gets practice with it.

@Elliot

Mainstream epistemology separates the evaluation of ideas from success at any specific goal, so there’s no finish line.

Oh definitely before CF i thought goals were a separate thing and a nice to have thing separate from truth. I thought goals were only for the really smart people that learned a use out of them.