Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Thinking By The Clock, published by Screwtape on November 8, 2023 on LessWrong.

I.

I'm sure Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality taught me some of the obvious, overt things it set out to teach. Looking back on it a decade after I first read it however, what strikes me most strongly are often the brief, tossed off bits in the middle of the flow of a story.

Fred and George exchanged worried glances.

"I can't think of anything," said George.

"Neither can I," said Fred. "Sorry."

Harry stared at them.

And then Harry began to explain how you went about thinking of things.

It had been known to take longer than two seconds, said Harry.

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, Chapter 25.

This was the very first lesson of LessWrong-style Rationality I actually started trying to deliberately teach myself as a result of my contact with HPMoR and the sequences. This is the powerful technique of actually Thinking By The Clock.

I used to call it Thinking For Five Minutes, but that technique name is a misnomer. It's practically a lie-to-children really. Sometimes I think for much less time, about thirty seconds. Sometimes I think for much more time, like a couple of days. Still, in the way that when you first learn martial arts you might stand in an awkward, stiff stance without turning or stepping I first learned to think by the clock in increments of exactly five minutes.

II.

When I first went to a gym to lift weights, I did it with a friend. I didn't think it was going to work very well (I was a pretty skinny guy) but I wanted to humour them. I sat down on the bench they pointed me at, got a good grip on the heavy thing they wanted me to grab, and lifted it up and down for a while. When they said stop, I stopped. "That seemed kind of fast," I recall saying, "are we done?" Dear reader, we were not done.

This pattern repeated when I first started going jogging with a different friend. I somehow expected the whole running thing to last, you know, until we got bored, which happened pretty quickly.

(If I may say a word in defense of younger!me, he really wasn't as unfit as this sounds. Soccer was fun and interesting, and I ran around plenty playing that. Stacking haybales got me paid, and I was quite willing to be paid to lift heavy things as long as I was told.)

So it may not come as a surprise to you that when I first encountered a hard intellectual task that was neither entertaining nor immediately profitable, I kind of bounced off. Going by memory, that was probably Calculus. I hated Calculus. I'd sit down at the table to do my homework or study for a test, and find myself reading the problem a couple of times and then glancing at the clock or looking longingly at the Circuit Theory textbook. (My definition of "entertaining" surprised a lot of people.) When the TA asked however, I'd say that I studied Calculus for a few hours.

Just as sitting on a barn stool in the haybarn[1] will completely fail to get the bales stacked no matter how long you do it, sitting at the desk staring at the clock will completely fail to get the idea of derivatives into my head.

III.

But you know, that's not exactly the problem Fred and George had in the quote above, was it? They were presumably doing some thinking in those two seconds. So let me talk about a neat bit of cultural anthropology.

When two people are talking, there's a gap between when one person finishes and the other picks up. Since neither of them know in advance when they'll be finished talking and periods don't actually get pronounced, the listener has to wait a short while before starting to speak. If the listener doesn't wait long enough, they interrupt and talk over the other person. If the listener waits too long, you can get an awkward silence.

I used to be really bad at figuring out how long to wait. I'm told when I wa...