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Thinking too much can be bad for you (2012)

economist.com

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Re: Thinking too much can be bad for you (2012)

#51

Post by tracyhenry »

plumsempy wrote: post #32
tracyhenry wrote: post #27

> The only reliable cure for overthinking seems to be enjoyment However, enjoyment in a high-stake situation is too hard to achieve. For people like actors, athletes and musicians, confidence generated through enough practice seems to be the cure. Enjoyment is an aftereffect. For situations for which you have no way to practice, enjoyment just seems hard.

I'm not sure I entirely agree: curiosity and discovery can be very enjoyable; which means it is more about openness -- personally I over analyze when I am contracted and anxious, which figures.

The question is still there: how do you maintain openness in a high-stake situation? When you play an instrument in front of a large audience, without enough practice it's hard to be open because all your attention will be directed to get things correct. With enough practice, your muscle memory will handle the basics, upon which openness/enjoyment can be built.

Re: Thinking too much can be bad for you (2012)

#52

Post by EugeneOZ »

> To make good decisions in a complex world, Gigerenzer says, you have to be skilled at ignoring information.

It's total bullshit. It might work with some crap like a lottery or bets on “American Idol” winners, but to solve complex tasks you need more information and more experience. All the examples in this article are to impress not-so-well-educated people, level of TV-show, not higher.

When we make quick decisions in areas out of our expertise, we use the same logic as when we make decisions based on emotions, empathy, “intuition”. It's nothing more than a lottery.

Their first example is just about a mentally burnt out person, that's all. Yes, we should give a rest to our brains, but the advice “just don't think too much” is an idiotic oversimplification.

Re: Thinking too much can be bad for you (2012)

#53

Post by Jtsummers »

colechristensen wrote: post #49
bumbada wrote: post #35

It is not really "not thinking", but not using your conscious mind, which can only focus on a single thing. You think with your subconscious mind too. But this can do multiple things at the same time, way faster than the logical mind. The harder you focus on a single thing, the more you ignore the entire system and the slower you perform. It is not just instinct as the article say, a tennis player does not play by in…

There is a word that is missing from the language or at least common usage, and that is differentiating something done with conscious effort of every little detail, and something you just do without thinking about it. (there are probably lots of words which somewhat fit the bill) The hardest way to do something is complete conscious control of every step, the easiest way is something you can do perfectly on autopilot…

Intuition versus instinct. Instinct is innate, intuition is developed. "The more you know", if you have a better breadth and depth of knowledge and experience to draw from you can "intuit" the (or a) proper course of action without the need for deliberate and thorough reasoning. Many people use the term "instinct" when "intuition" may be the better term.

Re: Thinking too much can be bad for you (2012)

#54

Post by superbcarrot »

throwaway2245 wrote: post #46
superbcarrot wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When the article was written Federer had lost to Djokovic after having 2 match points on two seperate occsasions (US Open 2010 and 2011) and since then this has happened again at Wimbledon 2019. In that last two matches Federer was serving as well. It's hard to make the argument that this isn't psychological.

If we model tennis points as random (let's say, accounting only for service), would we not expect people to occasionally lose when they had a match point? We'd expect this to happen more often when playing an opponent of comparable skill. It's not obvious to me that it's psychological at all, and it seems to me that it's only reported as such because it makes a good news story.

Yes, of course it's going to happen. The point is that it there is a significant difference between the players.

Here are some stats on this (collected by other people):

https://www.reddit.com/r/tennis/comments/habvu8/big_3_matche...

https://www.quora.com/How-often-has-Nadal-lost-after-holding...

https://tt.tennis-warehouse.com/index.php?threads%2Fmatch-po...

According the most recent of these threads Federer's lose-after-match-point percentage is 1.4%. Djokovic's is 0.2%. Djokovic also has a much higher win-after-facing-match-point percentage. It's hard to claim that this is purely due to randomness.

Re: Thinking too much can be bad for you (2012)

#55

Post by ChipSkylark »

Being already known by my friends and family to be an "overthinker" and prone to "analysis paralysis", I sometimes wonder why I'm still a SWE. I've slowly started to realize over time that my profession is filled with overthinking and over-engineering, and that our interview process can even select for it. IMO its hard to be the person that aces the technical interview gauntlet then walks out of the building and turns the analytical skills off.

Many interview processes seem to favor how well a candidate can enumerate edge cases and problem spaces over effective risk assessment and cost management. They're both important to evaluate but often in practice the dumb solution is what my team ends up using because can be more maintainable, cheaper to build, easier to reason about, etc. Today my aim is to get my requirements, write as few lines of quality code in as short of a time as possible, test it, ship it and be done.

Narrow focus and the ability to scope things down to what exactly what matters helps a lot. I defeat over-analysis by meditation, intentional dumbness/willful ignorance, and flow state.

Re: Thinking too much can be bad for you (2012)

#56

Post by Jtsummers »

EugeneOZ wrote: post #52

> To make good decisions in a complex world, Gigerenzer says, you have to be skilled at ignoring information. It's total bullshit. It might work with some crap like a lottery or bets on “American Idol” winners, but to solve complex tasks you need more information and more experience. All the examples in this article are to impress not-so-well-educated people, level of TV-show, not higher. When we make quick decisions…

From the article:

> They found that those who placed high trust in their feelings made better predictions than those who didn't. The result only applied, however, when the participants had some prior knowledge.

Which is exactly what you're saying so I'm uncertain why you're calling the article "total bullshit" when you're restating this critical part of it in your own comment and own words.

Re: Thinking too much can be bad for you (2012)

#57

Post by eindiran »

Jtsummers wrote: post #50
eindiran wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hence the edit.

Which was made after my comment.

I think there was some page-refreshing asynchrony here, either on your end or mine. But I appreciate that you attempted to correct me, so thank you.

Re: Thinking too much can be bad for you (2012)

#58

Post by Barrin92 »

In chess there's an idiom for this. "Long think, wrong think" because it's a quite common phenomenon that very good players will ruin positions by rather than playing with their good instinct, over-analyzing a position, there's a related situation of the hardest games to win being already won positions because there's so many ways to win that people will on occasion start doing something really stupid akin to the example of having too much choice in the article.

I think a nice collective analogue to this is Alfred Whitehead's observation that 'civilisation advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them'. Progress is being made by holistically integrating knowledge in a way that makes it sort of ambient.

It also reminds me of a slightly snarky article why all the people in the rationalist cult never seem to actually be successful at anything other than rationalism. It's precisely because consciously thinking is easy, it's the integration of knowledge into the whole is what's difficult but actually necessary.

Re: Thinking too much can be bad for you (2012)

#59

Post by amatecha »

ChipSkylark wrote: post #55

Being already known by my friends and family to be an "overthinker" and prone to "analysis paralysis", I sometimes wonder why I'm still a SWE. I've slowly started to realize over time that my profession is filled with overthinking and over-engineering, and that our interview process can even select for it. IMO its hard to be the person that aces the technical interview gauntlet then walks out of the building and turn…

As someone who's been programming for years, one of my biggest complaints in software is over-engineering. It's so universally prevalent, I literally expect to get downvoted for even making this comment. I strongly advocate for simplicity in software implementation, allowing for maintainability and flexibility... the cleanest solution that reaches the goal and doesn't lock us too far into a narrow approach that may be difficult to deviate from. Sometimes that's not realistic, but it's actually feasible a lot more than people seem to believe.

Re: Thinking too much can be bad for you (2012)

#60

Post by EugeneOZ »

Jtsummers wrote: post #56
EugeneOZ wrote: post #52

> To make good decisions in a complex world, Gigerenzer says, you have to be skilled at ignoring information. It's total bullshit. It might work with some crap like a lottery or bets on “American Idol” winners, but to solve complex tasks you need more information and more experience. All the examples in this article are to impress not-so-well-educated people, level of TV-show, not higher. When we make quick decisions…

From the article: > They found that those who placed high trust in their feelings made better predictions than those who didn't. The result only applied, however, when the participants had some prior knowledge. Which is exactly what you're saying so I'm uncertain why you're calling the article "total bullshit" when you're restating this critical part of it in your own comment and own words.

Maybe you need to read the whole article, there is more than just that.

For example, they use as evidence the experiment (on a small group of people, without a control group, without attempts to repeat it - everything to be called anti-scientific), where they separate students, based on the color of their skin. Amazing start, right? And the whole article is filled with such fairy tales, not by scientific data.

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