Here's some good advice from Eliezer:

TAP: "How could I have thought that faster?"

• WHEN[1] you complete a chain-of-thought
• THEN ask yourself, "how could I have thought that faster?"

I really like this heuristic, and it's already paid its rent several times over for me. Most recently today, and the (slightly edited) cognitive trace of it serves as a good example:

Example: To find the inverse of something, trace the chain forward a few times first

1. I was in the context of having just asked myself "what's the set of functions which have this function as its derivative?"
2. This is of course its integral, but I didn't want to use cached abstractions, and instead sought to get a generalized view of the landscape from first-principles.
3. For about ~10 seconds, I tried to hold the function _f_ in my mind while trying to directly generate the integral landscape from it. 
4. This [...]

---

Outline:

(00:07) TAP: How could I have thought that faster?

(00:30) Example: To find the inverse of something, trace the chain forward a few times first

(01:54) TAP: Which chains-of-thought was that faster than?

(02:41) Example: Sketching out my thoughts with pen-and-paper

(04:30) Why is it better?

(05:41) TAP: Whats the appropriate scope?

(07:49) TAP: How can I make this advice better?

The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

---

First published:

Source:

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.