Comment by jacobr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacobr | Hacker News Reader

This advice seems to contradict the advice given about increasing your intelligence in a recent post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2562632

Compare this:

  Efficiency is not your friend when it comes to cognitive growth. In order to keep your brain making new connections and keeping them active, you need to keep moving on to another challenging activity as soon as you reach the point of mastery in the one you are engaging in. You want to be in a constant state of slight discomfort, struggling to barely achieve whatever it is you are trying to do, as Einstein alluded to in his quote. This keeps your brain on its toes, so to speak.

With:

  The proper role for your pre-frontal cortex is to decide what behavior you want to change, design the ritual you'll undertake, and then get out of the way. "It is a profoundly erroneous truism that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing," the philosopher A.N. Whitehead explained back in 1911. "The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking about them."

Is there a real contradiction? If yes, is there any point to intelligence if you get less important things done?

There is a time for growth and a time for getting things done. A time for learning and a time for executing. A time for training and a time for competing. A time for sharpening tools and a time for using them.

Different strategies for different goals.

Exactly. Using a GPS to go everywhere will make your sense of direction worse. But that may be worth the easing of the cognitive load for you.

Also, many of the things to automate-such as sorting email or paying bills-don't really improve your brain anyway. The getting smarter article points out that once you get good at something, doing more of it doesn't make you any smarter.

They are different things. There is lots of research in self regulation and it boils down to (unsurprisingly): the most efficient and elegant way to self-regulate is to avoid continuous self-regulation, i.e. create habits. There is also lots of research on how to create habits :)

A good summary of current state of research is "A handbook of self-regulation", edited by Roy Baumeister, but it's definitely not an easy read. It's amazing though to find out exactly how far we've come in understanding these things - and it's also pretty exciting how recent most of it is.

There are more practical books out there, drawing from the same research. "The Procrastination Equation" by Piers Steel is the best I've found so far.

It seems like both the ideas could be true. The apparent contradiction is clearly due to the fact that the two are optimizing different aspects. One intelligence, and second, getting things done.

The conflation of the two leads to the state where you get things done with rituals so it frees up your mind to take up challenges that keeps your brain on it's toes.

I can see three ways of getting these in line. The obvious one is that if you do what you have to do in less time and with less expenditure of willpower, there is more time and energy left to challenge yourself.

The second one is what I do: Schedule challenges as a ritual. What I do is solve a projecteuler.net project every morning. Helps me stay sharp all day.

The third one is a bit meta: You can have a constant thought process going that examines your rituals and injects as much challenge as you can handle in the form of optimizations. This way you can keep improving your rituals, keep things interesting, and gradually free up more time for productivity. This is what I aspire to.

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