753 karma · joined February 24, 2019
> Ocham's razor(...) is the problem-solving principle that recommends searching for explanations constructed with the smallest possible set of elements.
> Popularly, the principle is sometimes paraphrased as "of two competing theories, the simpler explanation of an entity is to be preferred".
What would that mean in this context?
Having said that, I just subscribed to ChatGPT yesterday, as I've become impatient with Claude for a text-dense project I'm working on.
It's named "yours" at the time of payment, but actually only a license to use under certain conditions.
ChatGPT is very long-winded, sometimes producing multiple bullet point lists for a simple answer. Claude is full of mannerisms: 'not merely x, but y', 'Here's where it gets interesting', 'the real question is', etc.
Im not anti-social, but I'm an introvert with some very extrovert friends. I find interesting that we, introverts, "get" extroverts; I have no problem understanding people who like begin around other people all day long, I'm just not that guy.
But extroverts don't get introverts at all! A sentence like "yeah, I enjoy being alone by myself" feels like alien talk to them.
The approach that finally worked for me (and one I still use today, years later) I learned from a book by Adrian Wells called Metacognitive Therapy. It's not self-help, actually; it's a clinical manual for therapists, but I read it anyway. The idea, in my own words, is not to engage with the thought but simply to recognize it, almost like greeting it and saying goodbye in the same breath. A thought comes, and you say, "Hmm, okay, I just thought that. That was a thought. That's fine." And you move on.
Of course, the book goes much deeper than that, but this simple approach helped me enormously with rumination and anxiety around intrusive thoughts.
To be clear, this isn't about azulejos specifically. I'm just talking about the pattern in general, whatever the topic.