Speculative Ideas

Thought-o-meter

A pedometer/step-counter "is a device, usually portable and electronic or electromechanical, that counts each step a person takes by detecting the motion of the person's hands or hips".

A pedometer might be useful for people who actually care (and have a reason to actually care) about moving a sufficient amount every day.

On the other hand, it might be harmful if somebody gets addicted to it, allows their [not breaking of the streak] — itself a proxy for a sufficient amount of a good kind of mild physical activity — to take priority over other important stuff, like eating or sleep or time with other people or whatever. (See also: C. Thi Nguyen on Value Capture.)

So that's pedometer. That's one way to quantify some aspect of oneself to either gain insight into it just for the sake of getting insight or to use that new sensor to optimize that aspect of oneself. The benefits and perils are not unique to pedometers. I myself was at some point somewhat obsessed about counting my macros etc in Cronometer.¹

OK. Some people would like to optimize their cognition. You know, be more intellectually active, more creative, have more ideas in general, and a higher frequency of good ideas.

One might conjecture (i.e. I'm willing to conjecture) that a significant portion of the variance in the quality of people's intellectual outputs is about how much they are willing to think and the variance in that, in turn, is rooted in how much endogeneous positive reinforcement they are getting from thinking about some particular things. (To some extent it obviously works like: people are rewarding you for more of some kinds of thoughts and therefore you are going to be producing more thoughts like that and you're not getting much tired by continuing to produce thoughts like that.) This is partly from my diagnosis of my current bottlenecks: friction/high-activation-energy when I'm assessing actions like completing a mathematical proof, biting into some material to actually understand some subject, writing a post, getting around to edit an old document.

Would a thought-o-meter be helpful for that?

Sure, it would come with its own risks, including very close parallels of perils of pedometers: e.g. goodharting thinking to hit the minimum 1,000 "thoughts" per day instead of thinking for real, good, or fun.

But still, would a thought-o-meter be helpful for people who want to think more?

We obviously need to overcome some hurdles first:

My first thought was some kind of brain computer interface that would be able to read out the amount of novelty your mind produced based on the brainwaves or similar signal.

However, there's a simpler alternative idea: just have some file where you write down your ideas in a bullet point list and count the amount of new ideas you've head each day. Or you can have a CSV file with columns date (or datetime), name, description, context (e.g. in what situation you came up with this idea, what might have been the cause, whether you took some drug that you usually don't take etc).

The activity of thinking is not as straightforward as walking or doing some other kind of physical exercise.

The simplest way would be to just think in the direction you feel like thinking, like whatever's been recently on your mind: Proto-Indo-European mythology, your local Rasputin, or statistical modeling of juggling with Weibul distributions.

External links

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