We spend a fair amount of time at CFAR workshops tackling "bugs" in our daily lives. But does learning to solve small problems really make a big difference?
Recent CFAR alum and Oxford student, Ben Albert Pace, posted this thoughtful discussion of the "debugging" mindset on his personal blog. Excerpt below; read the whole thing here.
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One criticism of the utility of getting better at solving these, is that they are all small problems. This is an important criticism, that all of this ‘rationality’ is only marginally useful. The first counter-argument that might be offered, is that little problems build. Lots of little inefficiencies, from morning to night, can really add up over the course of a lifetime, losing you years of happiness and productivity. But I don’t think this is the strongest counter-argument. The fact is, dealing head on with the biggest problems in life requires the same skills as dealing with the small ones.
The mental move by which you try not to think about your dissatisfaction with the tidiness of your house, is the same mental move in which you try not to think about your dissatisfaction with the course that your career is taking. The dissatisfaction is of greater magnitude in the latter, but it is the same unhelpful skill of ‘not thinking about dissatisfaction’ that you are practicing. If you can’t do addition and multiplication, you can’t do research in pure mathematics, and if you can’t resolve the small problems in life, you will not be able to improve on the big, important ones. Bugs aren’t defined by the size of the problem, but by the cognitive algorithms that cause them to be problems.
So the concept of ‘bugs’ is really useful: once you’ve labelled something a bug, it is now in the category of ‘problems that I can practice solving to get better at life’. The staff helpfully emphasised this in classes, with talk about “Keep your eye on the ball” and “You are not here to learn the techniques, but to solve your problems, don’t forget that.”
Main take-away: If I have a problem in life, I think “Okay! Here is an opportunity for me to get better at life. Where’s my pen and paper?”
Ben's original post here.