This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://curi.us/2560-subconscious-reading-conscious-learning-getting-advanced-skills
Quote from the article:
If you have a habit of “solving” problems just enough that you no longer see the problem, then you’re hiding all the evidence of your other less visible problems and entrenching them, and you’ll have chronic problems in your life without any idea about the causes because you got rid of all the visible clues that you could.
Broken off from the quote above:
If you have a habit of “solving” problems just enough that you no longer see the problem,
I think I have this where I think I solved a problem and I move on and don’t think about it much.
I do revisit them tho sometimes and find a related problem and build on a solution. I don’t think the quote’s description fits me entirely.
broken off from the main quote:
and you’ll have chronic problems in your life without any idea about the causes because you got rid of all the visible clues that you could.
What I first thought when I read the quote
Won’t there be visible clues anyways? I know they might not be the same as the original clues, but I think if someone learns and tries to problem solve they’ll probably find a visible problem. Like, they’ll question their own wording; they’ll see a contradiction in it.
I think my writing is based on a big “if” like if the person has problem solving skills.
I was thinking about the main quote more and I thought that the visible clues are for the chronic problem and the more the person gets rid of those clues the less they’ll see of the chronic problem. I think after that another bigger problem will envelop the chronic problem with its own visible clues. Idk for sure
If you try to learn something in a conscious-effort-only way, you’re unlikely to get around to ever using it, because your conscious attention is already overloaded. It’s already a bottleneck.
Oh, I was thinking the subconscious was the bottleneck cuz it was the thing that needed to be improved. I think i need to look up bottleneck or automatize its meaning more.
But if you learn something subconsciously, then you can use it without cutting anything out. Your subconscious has excess capacity.
Oh and I thought consciousness had excess capacity cuz you didn’t need to improve it. I thought that cuz not needing to improve it means it’s working to its full potential like it’s enough. I thought that cuz I thought excess capacity and bottlenecks were about improving things and not about their capacity to do things and if they’re at max capacity.
I was trying to read this article cuz I know it talked about how to get better at reading. Was gonna use it for the new self books im gonna read
Suppose your factory has workstations A and B. A is the bottleneck; B has excess capacity. Now you’re creating a new, second product. Would it be better if the product was produced using A or B?
It would be better if B was used to make the product cuz it literally has excess capacity. It can take on more of a load.
Also, I think the answer can depend cuz you can increase the capacity on A and maybe make that not the bottleneck anymore.
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Second, if people practiced hard reading once a day (or once per reading session) regardless of how many hard parts they ran into, they would make progress. That would be good enough in some sense even though they ignored a bunch of problems. But why would you want to do that?
Yeah, I think a lot of us go through life like this, and things could so much better than that.
Literally, the only reason I would want to ignore a bunch of problems is to just get the work done and be good at it in the present. But I don’t think “being good in the present” would work. I think you would have to have a lot of skills and ways of learning already automatized to make it work.
By “that”(in the quoted question mark) do you mean facing a bunch of problems? or facing the problems and it being good enough in some sense? Or something else? Just thinking about it.
Question that comes right after the quote above:
What is the motivation there?
By “there” do you mean do you mean the motivation behind why someone would want to ignore a bunch of problems? Im thinking “there” could mean certain things. I had to look up the def of motivation to get some idea of the meaning in the sentence
What part of you wants to ignore a problem, keep going, and never analyze it?
The part that wants to get things done, like for a school project. However, I think my “get things done” motivation is gonna struggle a lot and not have a lot of success. Maybe if it’s an easy project then it’s fine.
I don’t like ignoring a problem cuz there could be something good to learn there. However, thinking about a problem can be difficult sometimes, and it’s hard to get anywhere with one sometimes. Sometimes I just accept that I won’t get to break it down and should just focus on the stuff that could be broken down.