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Comment by xyzelement | Hacker News Reader

I didn't read the article yet but since you're offering... how do you "think through" problems?

Example, this was a dialogue I had in my head this morning:

"Avenue X has a lot of stop signs which is annoying. But Avenue Y is narrow and it's garbage-pickup time, so I can get unlucky and really stuck behind a garbage truck. That's not worth the risk, I'd rather deal with the stop signs so I am taking avenue X"

What is your equivalent of that? Basically, how do you evaluate two alternatives? And how do you know how you made your choice? EG in my case, I know I picked Avenue X because I prefer the annoyance of stop signs to the risk of getting stuck, because that was part of my conversation. How is it for you?

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I think in terms of pictures or concepts. Your example becomes me picturing being stuck behind a dump truck, then me stopping at numerous stop signs, then I’d decide based on which one feels like it would be more painful.

Do people actually think in terms of complete sentences like you describe in this passage, or is there some nuance to the experience I’m not understanding? Thinking for me feels more like watching thoughts flow between black boxes representing some known factor than talking to a friend.

> Do people actually think in terms of complete sentences like you describe in this passage, or is there some nuance to the experience I’m not understanding?

I do full sentences when I’m thinking about how to handle a conversation.

> Thinking for me feels more like watching thoughts flow between black boxes representing some known factor than talking to a friend.

I also do that. It’s situational, I guess. [I’m learning more about myself by questions like yours, so please keep asking :)]

If you've played a sport or video games you've probably made all sorts of actions / judgement calls without having time to fully verbalize them, but with the thought still conscious enough that you could explain what you were trying to do afterward. At least for me I'd describe it as something like that, just slower and without the time pressure.

Not OP, but: if you're thirsty and there's a cup of water nearby, presumably you don't need to verbalize the full set of motor commands necessary to move your arm, grasp the cup, and so on. It's a pretty complicated motion involving quite a few decisions, but they're decisions that don't involve verbal ability. (Or at least I assume that's the case.)

For me, at least, most thinking feels like a version of that, but generalized. That doesn't mean it's necessarily easy- I can't come up with a fancy new algorithm by just desiring it momentarily- but most things just don't need words to be thought.

If I want to figure out if, say, some geometric modification obeys some property, the content of the thoughts is the spatial reasoning directly. I can go back and explain the thoughts verbally, but the words are just labels for the more 'native' reasoning.

In my case, I can still think things verbally, though it does seem closer to subvocalization than full inner voice as described. No aphantasia for me either.

I run the timelines with conceptual blocks and then do a final pass to put them back into words to reply. It only takes a fraction of a second to solve the puzzle but it’s a pain to figure out wording each direction. Logical-NOT traps in standardized testing are hell on earth because they’re not language-appropriate uses of negation.

If I can afford five minutes of truck wait I’ll rock out in the car. If I cannot, stop signs earn precedence.

The upside of doing it this way is that I can solve the puzzle without needing the variables to be well-defined, because it’s easy to nail down where the crux points are and then leave the .. I don’t have a word here, the subunit of puzzle? .. unresolved until information exists.

I find difficult to believe that people articulate their thoughts. It sounds too slow to be practical for the every day tasks. I have the (surely wrong) impression that people rationalize their thoughts after the fact with words. I can e.g. read poetry in my head with a voice that captures the sounds and the meaning of the words, but if I'm solving a problem there's no way words can keep up. But I can hear me can say Q.E.D. when the problem is solved.

Yeah, same here. My first reaction to GPs question is that there would be no debate. I dislike being stuck behind garbage trucks more than I dislike having to stop at stop signs (aka I dislike variability in my commute, so I'll take a slower, but more consistent route every time) so the choice would always be the route without the risk of frustration.

I don't always use my inner voice.

I arrange all of the conditions in my head and then logically and rapidly resolve them. In your example, I wouldn't engage my inner voice for something that simple.

If it was planning much more steps than that, I would separate them into blocks and use my inner voice to mentally arrange the inner blocks.

Yeah I think that's fair. I probably wouldn't actually use explicit inner voice to chose between two avenues either (unless this was something I apriori considered a very important decision I sat down to consciously think about)

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