Why your brain never runs out of problems to find | Hacker News Reader

Why your brain never runs out of problems to find

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145 pointsoblib17 comments

I have another explanation: the scope of things one considers a problem doesn't change. Rather, each person has a fixed amount of energy for reporting problems, and they will report the more serious problems in preference to less serious ones when they are energy-limited.

I see this with myself with code reviews. I tend to nitpick more on good reviews, not because the (minor) problems seem "relatively" bad, but because I have the energy to report them (and I assume the reviewee has the energy to fix them). Whereas on very bad reviews, I can let a lot slide, because I spend so much energy convincing the reviewee of the most egregious issues with their code.

Same deal with "neighborhood watch": the watchers probably have an idea of the "ideal" neighborhood in their mind. At first, they report only the egregious problems, because doing so takes energy both on their part and on the part of the police. Once those problems are "cleared away" they're free to focus on the more minor issues.

(Though I suspect that my explanation, and the explanation offered in the article, are actually two sides of the same coin.)

Yep, it could be that decision fatigue is strongly relevant here, see https://nytimes.com/2011/08/21/magazine/do-you-suffer-from-d... for a great write-up on this.

The article does mention that relative comparisons often use less energy than absolute measurements which is in line with your thinking.

When scope changes, relative comparisons yield absolutes.

Everything that is relative turns into background reasoning, base foundation, some comparisons strengthen, others weaken. The strongest thoughts survive through meticulous pruning. This yields the idea of absolutes, but that's also the problem from the onset. All that pruning is either relative to context or .. eventually yields self reference?

Absolutes in that regard, I would think, would use less energy, eventually. Or it's always the same thing. Comparing absolutes to relatives. What's absolute is relative, what's relative is absolute, hm, nonsense, maybe.

That doesn't address the fact that people's standards changed even when offered a cash reward to remain consistent.

I think there's an ego attachment to standards, in that regard. Preference (or awareness), possibly a map from personal experience, observation, to future prediction. One has to make the best decisions they can given the information they have accessible, but most real world systems are simply too chaotic, too dynamic to go uninfluenced via the most subtle perturbations. The untrained eye that does not see these changes, that doesn't mean they the changes are not present. In retrospect, we can perhaps examine them. But in each moment of the present, one simply can not know all there is to know, except in maybe, a dramatically generalized sense, and a very specific and precise sense, the observation of reality sans cognitive translation - whatever that means :).

The issue is, when everything becomes too predictable - this is another variant of insanity. Everyone sharing the same identical mind, there has to be some room for creativity, some room for the individual to be able to say "I exist independently". Consistency is blind to this, rigorous systems where everything behaves perfectly in accordance to some set of rules...

"Ordnung muss sein, sagte Hans, da brachten sie ihn in das Spinnhaus"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordnung_muss_sein

HN seems to like disruptive things, and I've had that phrase hanging around in my mind for the past few days. Where did it come from, and why does the thought stick around? Are there new thoughts, new observations, that cause me to let go of the thought, to move onto another?

Informational budget constraints and cost-reward calculus.

This dynamic seems to share elements in common with some auto-immune disorders. Starved of true threats, the immune system attacks elements of itself, either with perceived or imagined variance from some norm. Social, political, and, intelligence, doctrinal, and police systems seem to show similar patterns.

I think the dynamic is true of many (stable) non-linear systems which operate in a large range (i.e. frequency/bandwidth) of inputs. If there is large noise coming in, the output is bounded, but dominated by the large noise, yet if a small amount of noise is coming in, then this noise is amplified to be a large (again bounded, but still large) output.

One good example is why you begin to hear things or hallucinate after an extended absence of stimuli.[0]

Perhaps an overgeneralization which is not always nice and granted, but it is not uncommon behavior in the non-linear systems we usually analyze.

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[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensory_deprivation

Staring into analogue-television static for 10-30 minutes is an interesting experience. Things appear.

On many levels we're optimized to over-respond to threats. We grew up in a tough neighborhood.

That, though also to see patterns where none exist.

Karl Pilkington addressed this a decade or two ago with his "problem hole" theory:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdZHl0yqP6M

This psychological phenomenon seems to be prevalent in various political movements as well.

It explains a lot around how the terms "racist" and "sexist" are now applied to a much larger (and more subtle) range of behaviors and speech.

New information is always being obtained, and abstract frameworks are not always logically consistent.

Short summary: first world problems. But, that is how progress is made - shifting the baseline.

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