Big tired after an intense day, and I haven't really sat down and digested the article, but it seems close enough that I think my - admittedly primitive - tip can be of relevance.
If you get stuck, you tell yourself in whatever way you want, and honestly, some version of the following: "I don't understand this thing that is happening, but I know there is a cause. It does not happen without cause."
Honestly, it's a bit odd, and I don't know if that's the best way to express it in English. Nevertheless, several people have some back to me and told me that it has helped them.
My initial inspiration, and hypothesis is that the simple acknowledgement that I don't understand the problem, and that the problem still - despite my lack of understanding - still follow the laws of cause and effect, somehow temporarily halts our brains tendency to protect our ego at almost any cost, logic be damned.
I started trying this out after puzzling about why it's unreasonably common to figure out the answer to something only moments after you get up from your desk to go ask someone else for help, even when you might have worked with it for hours. It had to have a reason, although I don't know exactly what it is!
> I started trying this out after puzzling about why it's unreasonably common to figure out the answer to something only moments after you get up from your desk to go ask someone else for help, even when you might have worked with it for hours. It had to have a reason, although I don't know exactly what it is!
Well you've heard the advice on looking at a problem from a different point of view, right? Usually this is intended in the sense of changing the context or reframing the problem, and it works, but takes effort because we all have our default go-to mental models. But it turns out that changing the mode of your thinking (eg. visual vs. kinesthetic, etc.) is just as helpful, and the act of trying to phrase the problem verbally is usually just different enough from just thinking about it (I believe even if you are mostly a verbal thinker) to do the same trick.
Hence "rubber duck debugging" where you solve the problem by describing it to a rubber duck rather than another human.
> If you get stuck, you tell yourself in whatever way you want, and honestly, some version of the following: "I don't understand this thing that is happening, but I know there is a cause. It does not happen without cause."
Seconding this, a quote I have from a past computer science teacher of mine is: "Someone with a brain wrote this code, so you - as someone with a brain - can understand it". Definitely helps me when I'm really stuck on a problem.
If you get stuck, you tell yourself in whatever way you want, and honestly, some version of the following: "I don't understand this thing that is happening, but I know there is a cause. It does not happen without cause."
Honestly, it's a bit odd, and I don't know if that's the best way to express it in English. Nevertheless, several people have some back to me and told me that it has helped them.
My initial inspiration, and hypothesis is that the simple acknowledgement that I don't understand the problem, and that the problem still - despite my lack of understanding - still follow the laws of cause and effect, somehow temporarily halts our brains tendency to protect our ego at almost any cost, logic be damned.
I started trying this out after puzzling about why it's unreasonably common to figure out the answer to something only moments after you get up from your desk to go ask someone else for help, even when you might have worked with it for hours. It had to have a reason, although I don't know exactly what it is!