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"Buckle up bucko, and get ready for multiple hard cognitive steps." — LessWrong

lesswrong.com · 4,971 words · saved by 1 readers

Often, if I'm bouncing off a problem, one issue is that I intuitively expect the problem to be easy. My brain loops through my available action space, looking for an action that'll solve the problem. Each action that I can easily see, won't work. I circle around and around the same set of thoughts, not making any progress. I eventually say to myself "Okay, I seem to be in a hard problem. Time to do some rationality?" And then, I realize, there's not going to be a single action that solves the problem. It is time to: a) make a plan, with multiple steps b) deal with the fact that many of those steps will be annoying and c) notice that I'm not even sure the plan will work, so after completing the next 2-3 steps I will probably have to generate more steps (itself an annoying step), and do those ones too, over and over, until it is done. There's a lot of messy details inside the process of "figure out that plan, and continue to adjust it on the fly." But, I find the specific move of "accept

x "Buckle up bucko, and get ready for multiple hard cognitive steps." — LessWrong Step by Step Metacognition Practical Rationality Frontpage 2025 Top Fifty: 18 % 154 "Buckle up bucko, and get ready for multiple hard cognitive steps." by Raemon 5th Jul 2025 4 min read 26 154 The second in a series of bite-sized rationality prompts [1] . Often, if I'm bouncing off a problem, one issue is that I intuitively expect the problem to be easy. My brain loops through my available action space, looking for an action that'll solve the problem. Each action that I can easily see, won't work. I circle around

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