[HN Gopher] Why thinking too much can be bad for you
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Why thinking too much can be bad for you
Author : smk_
Score : 76 points
Date : 2021-02-09 20:10 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.economist.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.economist.com)
| jdkee wrote:
| It would be nice if the submitter posted a non-pay walled link.
| kreeben wrote:
| Yes, this article seems to have it all. Djokovic, Federer, a
| cute baby, and with promises of great philosophical thoughts. I
| would love to read it but unfortunately I actually can't afford
| it. Oh well. Looking forward to the comments.
| GZJOHN wrote:
| https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome
| naebother wrote:
| I'm not hitting the paywall for some reason. Maybe because I
| have JavaScript blocked.
| jshevek wrote:
| Yes. If it helps, the script blocking toggle in Brave allows me
| to read it.
| smk_ wrote:
| Some interesting bits from the article:
|
| "In less dramatic ways the same principle applies to all of us.
| A fundamental paradox of human psychology is that thinking can
| be bad for us. When we follow our own thoughts too closely, we
| can lose our bearings, as our inner chatter drowns out common
| sense."
|
| "To make good decisions in a complex world, Gigerenzer says,
| you have to be skilled at ignoring information. He found that a
| portfolio of stocks picked by people he interviewed in the
| street did better than those chosen by experts. The pedestrians
| were using the "recognition heuristic": they picked companies
| they'd heard of, which was a better guide to future success
| than any analysis of price-earning ratios."
|
| "How do you learn to unthink? Dylan believes the creative
| impulse needs protecting from self-analysis: "As you get older,
| you get smarter, and that can hinder you...You've got to
| programme your brain not to think too much." Flann O'Brien said
| we should be "calculatedly stupid" in order to write. The only
| reliable cure for overthinking seems to be enjoyment, something
| that both success and analysis can dull. Experienced athletes
| and artists often complain that they have lost touch with what
| made them love what they do in the first place. Thinking about
| it is a poor substitute."
| ChipSkylark wrote:
| Being already known by my friends and family to be an
| "overthinker" and prone to "analysis paralysis", I sometimes
| wonder why I'm still a SWE. I've slowly started to realize over
| time that my profession is filled with overthinking and over-
| engineering, and that our interview process can even select for
| it. IMO its hard to be the person that aces the technical
| interview gauntlet then walks out of the building and turns the
| analytical skills off.
|
| Many interview processes seem to favor how well a candidate can
| enumerate edge cases and problem spaces over effective risk
| assessment and cost management. They're both important to
| evaluate but often in practice the dumb solution is what my team
| ends up using because can be more maintainable, cheaper to build,
| easier to reason about, etc. Today my aim is to get my
| requirements, write as few lines of quality code in as short of a
| time as possible, test it, ship it and be done.
|
| Narrow focus and the ability to scope things down to what exactly
| what matters helps a lot. I defeat over-analysis by meditation,
| intentional dumbness/willful ignorance, and flow state.
| amatecha wrote:
| As someone who's been programming for years, one of my biggest
| complaints in software is over-engineering. It's so universally
| prevalent, I literally expect to get downvoted for even making
| this comment. I strongly advocate for simplicity in software
| implementation, allowing for maintainability and flexibility...
| the cleanest solution that reaches the goal and doesn't lock us
| too far into a narrow approach that may be difficult to deviate
| from. Sometimes that's not realistic, but it's actually
| feasible a lot more than people seem to believe.
| qnt wrote:
| Wholeheartedly agree. The best system is no system at all -
| problem is it doesn't really satisfy any requirements.
| Anything added beyond that is extra room where fragility
| creeps in & the tradeoff shouldn't ever be taken lightly.
| [deleted]
| unix_fan wrote:
| My writing skills only improved after I stopped thinking about
| it. I'm still trying to figure out how to tap into this with
| other skills.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| Practice, relaxation and the relief of (self-induced and
| exaggerated) pressure. By practicing your writing and getting
| feedback (from self-critique or others) you have an opportunity
| to properly internalize things you'd been consciously thinking
| of before. Maybe it's your style, your choice of terms,
| whatever. Practice permits the internalization. Relaxation and
| relief of pressure permit you to actually practice without fear
| of failure. Failure is often a better teacher than success, you
| can succeed all your life by dumb luck and never learn a thing
| or misattribute the success to the wrong elements.
|
| In other skills, physical or mental, removing pressure and
| practicing more permits the same kind of growth and
| development.
| pwinnski wrote:
| https://outline.com/u9cduE
|
| It's from (2012)
| tartoran wrote:
| Eternally valid advice it is
| Barrin92 wrote:
| In chess there's an idiom for this. "Long think, wrong think"
| because it's a quite common phenomenon that very good players
| will ruin positions by rather than playing with their good
| instinct, over-analyzing a position, there's a related situation
| of the hardest games to win being already won positions because
| there's so many ways to win that people will on occasion start
| doing something really stupid akin to the example of having too
| much choice in the article.
|
| I think a nice collective analogue to this is Alfred Whitehead's
| observation that _' civilisation advances by extending the number
| of important operations which we can perform without thinking of
| them'_. Progress is being made by holistically integrating
| knowledge in a way that makes it sort of ambient.
|
| It also reminds me of a slightly snarky article why all the
| people in the rationalist cult never seem to actually be
| successful at anything other than rationalism. It's precisely
| because consciously thinking is easy, it's the integration of
| knowledge into the whole that is difficult but actually
| necessary.
| pwinnski wrote:
| Reading this article, I kept thinking of a song lyric: "Your
| brain gets smart but your head gets dumb."
| throwawaysea wrote:
| https://youtu.be/L_jWHffIx5E
| soneca wrote:
| Well, I stopped reading when it said that Federer _"has been
| choking"_ , losing due to a _"mental frailty"_. It told me
| everything I need to know that there is nothing serious to be
| read and learned in this article.
| superbcarrot wrote:
| When the article was written Federer had lost to Djokovic after
| having 2 match points on two seperate occsasions (US Open 2010
| and 2011) and since then this has happened again at Wimbledon
| 2019. In that last two matches Federer was serving as well.
| It's hard to make the argument that this isn't psychological.
| throwaway2245 wrote:
| If we model tennis points as random (let's say, accounting
| only for service), would we not expect people to occasionally
| lose when they had a match point? We'd expect this to happen
| more often when playing an opponent of comparable skill.
|
| It's not obvious to me that it's psychological at all, and it
| seems to me that it's only reported as such because it makes
| a good news story.
| superbcarrot wrote:
| Yes, of course it's going to happen. The point is that it
| there is a significant difference between the players.
|
| Here are some stats on this (collected by other people):
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/tennis/comments/habvu8/big_3_match
| e...
|
| https://www.quora.com/How-often-has-Nadal-lost-after-
| holding...
|
| https://tt.tennis-warehouse.com/index.php?threads%2Fmatch-
| po...
|
| According the most recent of these threads Federer's lose-
| after-match-point percentage is 1.4%. Djokovic's is 0.2%.
| Djokovic also has a much higher win-after-facing-match-
| point percentage. It's hard to claim that this is purely
| due to randomness.
| throwaway2245 wrote:
| I don't find this super convincing.
|
| If you want to convince yourself that choking is a thing,
| then this is a stat you might look at.
|
| But, this stat is just as likely to be more influenced by
| how close your opponent's skill was on that day (how
| often you play opponents at a similar skill level), your
| and your opponent's relative stamina, and perhaps even
| pure luck - out of thousands of tour players, some are
| going to have incredible luck.
| ssivark wrote:
| To elaborate beyond what @soneca said, how do we know that
| Federer lost those points because he thought too much? _What
| if, instead, Federer didn't think enough, and Djokovic just
| outthought him?_ That's why the conclusion is unfalsifiable.
| superbcarrot wrote:
| Yes, I can agree with that. We don't really know enough
| about what's happening in their heads to make any
| conclusions.
| soneca wrote:
| For me is veeery easy to make the argument that this isn't
| psychological, but only to the expected variance of tennis
| match results. It was you that had to carefully cherry-pick
| data to support your conclusion.
|
| I would only have to choose among all the other match points
| he has won through the 20 grand slams he has won. Only
| considering Federer vs Djoko, Federer won 46% of the matches.
| There a lot of match points won there. Also, considering only
| Grand Slams, Federer won 6 out of 17. Not a great record, but
| still no negligible number of wins. And I would attribute
| that bad performance more to Djoko skills, and maybe also
| Djoko physical peak coinciding with Federer older age, than
| to any thing psychological.
| leetcrew wrote:
| djokovic was already an extremely strong (mentally,
| physically, and technically) player himself at that time. he
| finished the 2011 season no. 1 IIRC.
|
| the "mental toughness" argument cuts both ways. pulling out a
| win after two match points in a grand slam speaks as much to
| djokovic's own mental fortitude as it does to federer's lack
| thereof.
| jshevek wrote:
| I sometimes find word choice to be a reliable heuristic for
| evaluating the probable worth of some prose, but I don't see
| why, in this case, you feel this way. Would you mind
| elaborating? (Assuming your conclusion is indeed based on the
| phrasing chosen...)
| soneca wrote:
| I start from the assumption that Federer's career (even in
| 2012) is enough to prove that he has the mental strength and
| can perform at the highest level in stressful championship
| decisions.
|
| But the stronger reason to stop reading is that, in the most
| generous interpretation, the author started to argue the
| benefits of "not thinking too much" by using a unfalsifiable
| claim about a very subjective interpretation of a fact,
| attributing causality to an anedocte that is far too complex
| to be resumed into a simplistic reason based on the author's
| assumption. This seemed ridiculous to me.
|
| It was obvious to me that the author didn't have much of a
| science-informed take (my impression form the title) and was
| just doing unsubstantiated storytelling
| eindiran wrote:
| Perhaps OP meant that he had been dealing with a knee injury,
| and that doesn't have much to do with "mental frailty" at
| all: https://www.espn.com/tennis/story/_/id/30821027/roger-
| federe...
|
| EDIT: Actually the article is from 2012, so I assume its
| because many of Federer's best years were still ahead of him.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| The original article (from The Economist) is from 2012, so
| whatever the author was referring to was not the same as
| the injuries discussed in your 2021 article (from ESPN).
| eindiran wrote:
| Hence the edit.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| Which was made after my comment.
| eindiran wrote:
| I think there was some page-refreshing asynchrony here,
| either on your end or mine. But I appreciate that you
| attempted to correct me, so thank you.
| 11thEarlOfMar wrote:
| I finally understand my erratic bowling average.
| bumbada wrote:
| It is not really "not thinking", but not using your conscious
| mind, which can only focus on a single thing.
|
| You think with your subconscious mind too. But this can do
| multiple things at the same time, way faster than the logical
| mind.
|
| The harder you focus on a single thing, the more you ignore the
| entire system and the slower you perform.
|
| It is not just instinct as the article say, a tennis player does
| not play by instinct because nobody knows how to play tennis when
| he is born.
|
| It is by training that you develop intuition. If you train well
| you can perform well without thinking consciously. Training well
| is hard work and takes a lot of time too.
|
| If you follow your instincts you are predictable and an easy
| prey. I can hunt or fish animals because they follow their
| instincts too well.
| colechristensen wrote:
| There is a word that is missing from the language or at least
| common usage, and that is differentiating something done with
| conscious effort of every little detail, and something you just
| do without thinking about it. (there are probably lots of words
| which somewhat fit the bill)
|
| The hardest way to do something is complete conscious control
| of every step, the easiest way is something you can do
| perfectly on autopilot.
|
| "Flow" is about being able to do something very well with
| almost minimal conscious control. (I would expand _flow_ to
| being more than this, but it is at least a defining
| characteristic)
| taejavu wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Centipede%27s_Dilemma
| Jtsummers wrote:
| Intuition versus instinct. Instinct is innate, intuition is
| developed. "The more you know", if you have a better breadth
| and depth of knowledge and experience to draw from you can
| "intuit" the (or a) proper course of action without the need
| for deliberate and thorough reasoning. Many people use the
| term "instinct" when "intuition" may be the better term.
| chordalkeyboard wrote:
| You might learn to think for yourself and that would be bad for
| us.
| brundolf wrote:
| I thought this way for many years. Confronting the fact that
| thoughts carry a cost, and are therefore a tradeoff that has to
| be weighed against their usefulness in any given case, was the
| biggest turning point for the better my mental health has ever
| taken.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| If you read the article, that's not at all what it's about. In
| tech, the issue being discussed is closer to what's commonly
| termed "analysis paralysis". Sometimes you just have to act on
| your instincts (honed by experience, knowledge, and study) and
| act rather than looking for a larger pattern or perfect
| solution.
| chordalkeyboard wrote:
| I read the article and I don't like the headline's framing.
| Choking also can be the result of being overwhelmed because
| of a lack of mental preparation. Thanks for your reply.
| totalZero wrote:
| _" This last point is vital. Unthinking is not the same as
| ignorance; you can't unthink if you haven't already
| thought. Djokovic was able to pull off his wonder shot
| because he had played a thousand variations on it in
| previous matches and practice; Dylan's lyrical outpourings
| drew on his immersion in folk songs, French poetry and
| American legends. The unconscious minds of great artists
| and sportsmen are like dense rainforests, which send up
| spores of inspiration."_
| asimjalis wrote:
| I find it hard to disentangle the concepts of overthinking and
| Economist. Could this article lead to subscriber flight?
| orky56 wrote:
| "The only reliable cure for overthinking seems to be enjoyment,
| something that both success and analysis can dull." This point at
| the end seems a bit forced without any support beyond the
| author's assertion. The feeling I get is someone who has mastered
| this unthinking is "enlightened" of sorts with an ability to get
| to satisfaction with a humility that can be mistaken for
| smugness.
|
| From fiction, I might refer to the Wheel of Time series where
| Rand Al'Thor uses a trick to "find the void" in a way his father
| taught him. When you get overwhelmed from information and
| emotions, finding the void allows you to regain composure and
| think straight again.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| aka meditation
| smk_ wrote:
| This seems to be related to the concept of flow: finding that
| sweet spot between being too relaxed and too-stressed out. We
| need a moderate dose of stress to perform at our best. What's so
| interesting is that experiencing flow is also correlated with
| long-term fullfillment.
|
| I've recently theorized the single most important factor for
| happiness and performance is being able to control your stress
| levels and increase/decrease your stress levels at will. It is
| not novel, but it helps me if I see my primary task as
| identifying which mechanisms can help me lower or increase
| stress. So far, meditation seems to have the best effect.
| zwieback wrote:
| The examples are for a specific situation, though: using your
| knowledge and experience under pressure. I don't think this maxim
| applies broadly.
| _carbyau_ wrote:
| Yeah, the article kinda mentions it but I see it as:
|
| If you have already put the thought required in, then when time
| is short simply go with it rather than rethink it.
|
| If you haven't put that thought in, well then thinking "on the
| spot" is statistically unlikely to do any worse...
|
| The trick is recognising situations where you have that
| advantage when under that pressure.
| HugoDaniel wrote:
| thinking too much certainly does not help with sex
| EugeneOZ wrote:
| > To make good decisions in a complex world, Gigerenzer says, you
| have to be skilled at ignoring information.
|
| It's total bullshit. It might work with some crap like a lottery
| or bets on "American Idol" winners, but to solve complex tasks
| you need more information and more experience. All the examples
| in this article are to impress not-so-well-educated people, level
| of TV-show, not higher.
|
| When we make quick decisions in areas out of our expertise, we
| use the same logic as when we make decisions based on emotions,
| empathy, "intuition". It's nothing more than a lottery.
|
| Their first example is just about a mentally burnt out person,
| that's all. Yes, we should give a rest to our brains, but the
| advice "just don't think too much" is an idiotic
| oversimplification.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| From the article:
|
| > They found that those who placed high trust in their feelings
| made better predictions than those who didn't. The result only
| applied, however, when the participants had some prior
| knowledge.
|
| Which is exactly what you're saying so I'm uncertain why you're
| calling the article "total bullshit" when you're restating this
| critical part of it in your own comment and own words.
| EugeneOZ wrote:
| Maybe you need to read the whole article, there is more than
| just that.
|
| For example, they use as evidence the experiment (on a small
| group of people, without a control group, without attempts to
| repeat it - everything to be called anti-scientific), where
| they separate students, based on the color of their skin.
| Amazing start, right? And the whole article is filled with
| such fairy tales, not by scientific data.
| tracyhenry wrote:
| > The only reliable cure for overthinking seems to be enjoyment
|
| However, enjoyment in a high-stake situation is too hard to
| achieve. For people like actors, athletes and musicians,
| confidence generated through enough practice seems to be the
| cure. Enjoyment is an aftereffect. For situations for which you
| have no way to practice, enjoyment just seems hard.
| unix_fan wrote:
| If you're playing an instrument in front of an audience,
| performance anxiety will usually make things much worse than if
| you had practiced in private.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| YMMV; many musicians feed off an audience's energy and thus
| get more fully and deeply into the moment. Which is what all
| of this is about -- being 100% in the NOW and not in your
| conscious mind's memories (past) or anxieties (future).
| chrisweekly wrote:
| also elite athletes who play "out of their minds" when
| everything's on the line, eg star basketball players whose
| 4th quarter shooting % in playoff games is higher than at
| any practice
| tracyhenry wrote:
| Wonder how much is this related to meditation and
| mindfulness. Both Michael Jordan and Kobe Byrant meditate
| a lot:
|
| https://abcnews.go.com/Health/michael-jordan-kobe-
| bryants-me...
|
| https://www.linkedin.com/business/learning/blog/productiv
| ity...
| tdumitrescu wrote:
| Yes, and repeated practice at performing _in front of an
| audience_ will gradually reduce that anxiety for most people.
| Getting to that state where you can be up in front of a lot
| of people and just enjoying yourself making music is a
| wonderful feeling, and for most of us it takes a lot of hard
| work over many years.
|
| In my personal experience, both with musical performance and
| public speaking, the #1 thing that makes a difference in
| terms of how nervous I am during the performance is how well
| I know the material. The more I can "shut off my brain" and
| let rote memory handle the basics (correctness), the more
| room I have to take it further with nuance, dramatic arc,
| etc.
| tracyhenry wrote:
| Y that was my exact thought. You need enough practice
| (private or public) to achieve the state where you can let
| your muscle memories to handle the basics.
| plumsempy wrote:
| I'm not sure I entirely agree: curiosity and discovery can be
| very enjoyable; which means it is more about openness --
| personally I over analyze when I am contracted and anxious,
| which figures.
| tracyhenry wrote:
| The question is still there: how do you maintain openness in
| a high-stake situation? When you play an instrument in front
| of a large audience, without enough practice it's hard to be
| open because all your attention will be directed to get
| things correct. With enough practice, your muscle memory will
| handle the basics, upon which openness/enjoyment can be
| built.
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(page generated 2021-02-09 23:01 UTC)