How/why to get good at debugging your mind

Having a detailed understanding of how your mind works will tremendously help you improve your life and the lives of people around you. You’ll make your mind a much better place to live, and you’ll be able to help others do the same.

Summary

Basically, if you practice being a mechanic for your own mind, you’ll get better at it.

I’ve focused very heavily on overcoming flaws in my mind for the past ~11 years. Initially it was because I had to overcome huge problems that significantly reduced my quality of life. But years after I overcame them, I still continue to ‘debug’ my own mind because I like the growth and quality of life I get out of it. And also because it’s just interesting.

“Why does x happen?” “Why does y happen whenever I think about z?”

It feels great to think about these sorts of questions deeply and eventually find an answer that gives you better insight into how your mind works. It can take a long time and a lot of effort to figure out answers, but it’s always worth it.

This process usually leads to both answers and new questions. You often end up going down an interesting rabbit hole as you recursively crack open your mental blackboxes.

Once you get really good at this, your mind will be a much more fun place to live, and you’ll notice tons of ways to help other people improve their minds, especially if they face similar issues to ones you’ve encountered.

And it tends to spread. You’ll teach someone to think in a way that fixes a problem of theirs, and they’ll go on to teach it to someone else, etc, and then several people will have their lives improved because of you.

The following ideas have been the most helpful for making my mind a better place to live:
1) never deceive or blind yourself
2a) develop good mental debugging tools/skills (through practice answering questions/solving problems, mostly)

2b) develop a strong, detailed understanding of your own mind

This article focuses on 2a and 2b. I describe their benefits, why they work well, and how to practice/improve them.

It’s a long article (which is why I am summarizing most of it in this section) but it’s probably the most important article I’ve written on here since it’s where a lot of the other articles come from. When you can analyze your mind in greater detail, you can analyze your learning processes in greater detail, which lets you more easily find improvements and inefficiencies to fix.

The Benefits

Getting better at noticing your own thoughts and strengthening your model of your own mind (in my experience) will allow you to:
– Understand why you do what you do, debug your own problems, and then solve them
– Come up with more accurate reasons for why people do what they do
– Debug other peoples’ minds better and help them solve their problems

• In my experience, this works mostly just for phenomena you’ve debugged in your own mind
• You come up with more useful questions to ask them that give you useful information about the way their mind works

In my experience, problem solving is mostly about debugging, and debugging is mostly about understanding

I think you’ll come to the same conclusion I have: practicing understanding your own mind in detail leads to extremely useful skills.

• You can solve your problems way faster
• You can solve much deeper rooted problems (lower-level)
• You can find hard-to-notice inefficiencies in the way you operate that lead to huge improvements when fixed
• And you can help other people do all of the above

Never blind yourself?

I won’t elaborate much on the “don’t deceive or blind yourself” principle, other than this short section:

Tricking/blinding your own mind reduces your ability to error-correct (including self improvement and more), and in the long run will reduce your quality of life and (very likely) the QoL of people around you. It may prevent the world from making sense to you. A symptom of it (I think) seems to be confusion.

I’ve met people who are extremely confused about everything in the world, and people who, although they don’t know everything, feel nearly 0 confusion, and they were both surprised that the other type existed

Two Powerful Skills

Debugging and understanding go hand in hand.

In my ~13 years of experience as a programmer, Ive come to the conclusion that 1) debugging programs and 2) understanding programs are two of the most important programming skills.

They also go hand in hand. As you practice debugging, you’ll get better at understanding programs, and the more you understand programs the better you’ll be at debugging. Most of debugging is about understanding, anyways, which probably explains why this happens.

The better you can see the terrain, the better you can navigate through it. When you’re trying random solutions to solve a bug, and nothing is working, pivot from trying things to understanding the system. There are some situations where random space search will almost never work. Understanding the system well will often cause the answer to pop into your head out of nowhere. This is similar to how, in data analysis, visualizing your data will often give you immediate new insights.

The better you get at understanding programs, the more easily you can find inefficiencies in them, which is how you find opportunities for improvement. Having a strong model of a program also lets you find sources of problems quickly, which makes you a significantly better debugger, allowing you to also solve problems quickly.

So, understanding a system (computer program, your own mind, etc) is what gives you the ability to improve/debug it. Your goal then should be to understand your own mind.

Your Mind Is a Fundamental of Your Existence

The more fundamental something is to a system, the more the system tends to improve when you improve that thing. So, generally, targeting fundamentals gets you the largest improvements.

The best way I know of to improve fundamentals is to understand them* until you find inefficiencies, and then improve the inefficiencies.

*understand them at an incredibly low level – if you think you’re at a dead end, you’re probably not, and can almost always zoom in more

Break open blackboxes to understand them deeper

Just like systems have levels of abstraction, so do mental phenomena.

To become an effective debugger of mental phenomena, practice going extremely low-level in your understanding.

Assume you notice a mental phenomenon like “I play greedy moves in chess because it feels good, even though I know its bad.”

Rather than stopping at that level of understanding, which is not that useful, go lower level:

“I make greedy moves in chess because I don’t visualize the long term consequences properly, and I clearly see the short term benefits. So my brain’s calculus always weighs the short term benefits more strongly”

==> “so, the problem is caused by having a weaker visualization of the long term than the short term.”

==> “therefore, if I spend time strengthening my visualization of what happens further down the road (by practicing putting mental effort into visualizing it in more detail), my brain will have a more accurate visualization of the valence of greedy moves and correct moves, and will naturally come to the better decision”

As you practice breaking open blackboxes to see what’s going on inside, you’ll get better at it. This is useful for working with both computer programs and mental phenomena.

Back to fundamentals

Your mind is a very fundamental and very critical component of your life. Your mind is where you live 100% of the time (I’m pretty sure..?)

It’s your interface to the world. Since it’s a fundamental of your existence, improving it will have a high ROI on your quality of life.

Understanding your mind better will make you better at debugging it, and practicing debugging it will give you a significantly better understanding of it. This will give you a tremendous improvement in your ability to improve your existence.

Practice identifying the cause of phenomena/problems/inefficiencies in your mind (debugging) to strengthen your ability to debug your mind and develop a stronger model for how it works.

This gives you better tools to improve yourself – you yourself then improve your quality of life by making changes to how you think and operate, by identifying phenomena you don’t like, figuring out their cause, and changing the cause.

After ~9 years of doing this it has tremendously improved my quality of life. It got me past many multi-year-long struggles and now repeatedly helps me get other people in my life past theirs.

It’s hard for me to give concrete examples that aren’t too personal, but one that stands out to me is overcoming procrastination and going from a poor student to a pretty great one. I struggled with procrastination for years, but once I understood my mind well enough to be able to precisely see its root cause, the solution to it instantly popped into my head.

It takes time to get quality-of-life improvements, since you need to build up the skill of debugging (through practice!) to the point where the changes you make significantly improve your mind. It’s kind of like how there’s a phase of studying programming and doing tutorials for a while, before you get to the point where you can make cool stuff on your own.

The human mind is a fundamental of a lot of other things, too

There’s also overlap between the fundamentals of the mind and the fundamentals of other things. For example, learning. Understanding your own mind improve your intuition about how machines learn, or how animals learn, such that you can make good decisions that lead to good results in those domains.

Analogies are a powerful way to solve problems, and the more you practice problem solving by analogizing, the better you get at it.

Understanding your mind can help you understand other peoples’ minds

Developing a strong model for your own mind will strengthen your model of the human mind in general. This will increase your ability to model other peoples’ minds, which will significantly help you debug their minds (especially when you can ask them questions)

Tangent: In practice, being able to model peoples’ minds is tremendously useful for communication.

“If I were in [other person]’s position, listening to me talk, I might misinterpret what I’m saying in x or y or z way, so let me clarify around those points”

“The way [other person] is rejecting my idea, [abc], makes me think they’re assuming it implies [xyz], when in reality it doesn’t. So if I explicitly tell them [abc] doesn’t imply [xyz], and that while I believe [abc] I don’t believe [xyz], it may remove an emotional barrier preventing them from considering [abc]”

Mentally emulating systems will let you play around with them in your head, so the better you can emulate a phenomenon that’s happening in someone else’s mind, the closer you can get to understanding it and its cause.

It’s like how having a better understanding of how a computer works leads to coming up with more accurate hypotheses for the sources of errors, leading to you searching in the right places. you’ll come up with better hypotheses for what is causing their problems, usually by emulating and then debugging the phenomenon in your own mind.

Being good at computers will help you make your own computer easier to use. but, it’ll also help you fix and improve other peoples’ computers.

This has been incredibly valuable for helping me solve problems of the people around me. In my experience, this is much more effective with phenomena similar to something I have experienced in my own mind. So if I haven’t experienced a problem/phenomena similar to one someone is struggling with (or a form of it), I usually have to ask them significantly more questions before I can give them something that might work.

Luckily (in a way?), you’ll find that many of the problems you debug in yourself are common problems that other people commonly have. At least, that’s been my experience.

EXAMPLE
Let’s say you’re practicing noticing phenomena in your own mind. Your roommate annoys you, and you resent them, which makes it harder for you to live with them. You don’t like this and want to fix it. One day, you notice that it becomes more painful to be around your roommate after you ruminate about how something they do annoys you. Eventually, you learn that when you practice saying out loud to yourself “[their action that annoys you] is not such a big deal, and I’m grateful for the good things they’ve done, such as [list examples]”, the resentment that has built up dissolves away over time, and now you can live with that person much more easily, and you’re less stressed. Mind understood, problem solved.

Now, a friend of yours is in a situation that seems similar when they explain it to you: the person they live with does small stuff that stresses your friend out, and eventually your friend gets so annoyed that it makes their roommate unbearable to live around.

You ask your friend some questions to better understand their problem, including ones like “do you often, repetitively, think of how annoying they are?” and your friend gives answers that indicate that they’ve grown to resent their roommate, and ruminate on their resentment constantly, similar to how you did in the past. Now that you feel you understand their problem well, you can then suggest that they do the solution that worked for you.

Tangent: as you get better at noticing how things effect your mind, you’ll notice something: the things you say will warp how you think about and perceive the world. Rumination is just one version of this. You can use this idea to heavily advantage OR disadvantage yourself, and it’s worth learning how to use.

Methods to get better at understanding your own mind

1. Practice metacognition

Practicing metacognition will increase your ability to notice and understand mental phenomena.

Metacognition is the act of thinking about your own thoughts or any other phenomena that your brain experiences

My ability to understand my own mind and solve my own problems really took off after I learned about metacognition and started applying it. My psychology teacher only briefly covered the concept, but it was an easy thing to start doing, and sounded interesting, so I started thinking about my own thoughts and kept it up for a long time.

Like practicing analyzing computer programs, I got noticeably better at debugging my mind I the more I practiced analyzing my thoughts. This included not just word-based thoughts but also how my mind felt in response to stimuli.

Basically, I practiced paying attention to every signal my brain was sending to my consciousness (i.e. every piece of information, words/images/feelings etc, that was available for me to notice/attend to/feel).

2. Practice putting phenomena into words

Practicing putting thoughts or complex feelings into words will increase your ability to attend to them (to pay attention to, to think about, to notice, to reason about)

Some phenomena are very obvious, and as a result are very easy to think about (for example, what thoughts are running through your head as you read this? how happy/sad you are right now? why? etc).

Some phenomena are extremely difficult to pin down and put into words, such as “precisely what causes me to get irritable when the microwave beeps? where does that feeling come from? it feels like something similar to frustration, or being interrupted, but what exactly is it?” or “whenever life is peaceful and I can’t think of any problems, I feel a sense of dread like something is about to happen – why?”

Every ounce of effort you put into putting difficult phenomena into words will strengthen your ability to put phenomena into words. Progressive overload (training near your max ability to continually get stronger) is a great way to improve your ability to perceive phenomenon. It’s when you repeatedly put effort to do something harder than what you’re used to, leading to you getting stronger.

It also works for a lot of other things like weightlifting or programming

The process of understanding my own mind typically goes like this:

1. Constantly think about my own thoughts. both current thoughts, and my pattern of thoughts over the past hour, day, week, month, year, etc
2. Notice a mental phenomenon that I want to understand
   • “some days I’m irritable and some days I am not.. why?”
   • “i like working on one type of work but hate working on another, why? precisely what is the difference?”
3. Repeatedly think about the phenomenon, iteratively getting a more detailed understanding
   • Each time I replay/re-trigger the phenomena in my head, id notice/remember more details about it, giving me a better understanding of it. For example, if the microwave beeping made me irritable, I would repeatedly replay the memory of it beeping and the memory of the irritability that resulted from it
4. Every repetition, I try to put the phenomenon into words
   • Putting concepts into words allows you to analyze them significantly more efficiently
   • After the first few repetitions, I might have enough of an understanding to start spitting out words vaguely related to the phenomenon. Not quite enough to form precise logical descriptions of it, just enough of an understanding to start pointing out characteristics.
   • Then, eventually, I’m able to characterize it more and more precisely with words and logical descriptions.
   • This process takes mental energy usually. It can be something that you have to push yourself to do, sort of like thinking about a tough math problem that requires mental effort.

3. Zeroth principle analysis: continuously diving deeper

After putting a phenomenon’s source into words, often you can dive deeper into why it happens. Once you find that source, you can dive even deeper.

I’ve never found a rabbithole that ends. I think, eventually, you get to a point where most people would give up and say “well thats just the way it is, idk, its too hard to think further”. You can just keep going further, though, lol. I have never encountered a situation where I couldn’t keep answering questions or putting low level phenomena into words (although some have taken months or years) so it seems like the most productive assumption is that you can always go further/deeper/lower-level.

Zeroth principle analysis is a never ending process of asking ‘why’, thinking about it until you have a detailed, specific, and actionable answer as to ‘why’, and then asking why again. Other forms of this, such as “5 whys” or “first principle thinking”, typically stop once it feels too hard to dive deeper while getting specific and actionable information.

The point of zeroth principle analysis is to put significant time and effort into answering each subsequent ‘why’ with a specific and actionable explanation rather than giving up and saying “I’ve hit a wall, therefore I’ve done deep enough, it’s not useful past this point anyways”. This lack of diving deeper is a massive blindspot. If you can train yourself to keep going, you’ll get a significant competitive advantage in your ability to find inefficiencies (and therefore opportunities for improvements) that other people can’t.

Example

1. Notice a phenomena you want to understand better
   • “Why does this one particular person make me angry whenever they speak, even if what they’re saying is normal?”
2. Repeatedly think about it to get a more detailed understanding of it
   • “Whenever they speak.. it feels annoying… i feel defensive.. reminds me of something, but I can’t quite put it into words.. hmm..”
3. As you repeat #2, keep trying to put it into words
   • Eventually I get enough of an understanding to start spitting out words related to the phenomenon
   • –> “Whenever they speak I feel.. something related to criticism.., as if I’m being criticized.. but it also feels unfair, and as if they are lying/cheating/acting in bad faith..”
   • Eventually I’m able to characterize it more and more precisely
   • Which eventually becomes something like –> “this person often gives me the impression that they are lying in order to attack me unfairly, which makes me defensively angry/annoyed at the perceived unjustice. my brain associates their tone/voice with frustrating experiences, so it gets frustrated whenever it hears them talk. however, when I think about what they’re saying, generally they are actually being honest and giving me real useful feedback in good faith. so the root of the problem likely is in me. at this level of understanding, a solution could be to then practice thoughts of being grateful towards receiving useful feedback from this person after they give it. however, I could dive a few levels deeper into the root cause and maybe find a more functional solution. being upset about an injustice isn’t dysfunctional, but perceiving one where it doesn’t exist is dysfunctional. so the problem lies here.”
4. Go deeper: “why, in this situation, do I perceive an injustice where it doesn’t exist?”
   • Then, with this phenomenon, repeat 2, 3, and 4 if want to understand the problem and your mind even deeper

It might take weeks to go from 1 to 4. Or an hour. Or years. It varies a lot. Typically I’ll have many of these going on at once and I’ll juggle between thinking about different phenomena.

Exercises to get you started

1. Basic metacognition

Close your eyes and think about your own thoughts for a bit. What thoughts are going through your head? What are you feeling? Think about those questions for a bit. Then open your eyes. Can you notice a difference in the kind of thoughts that run through your head now that your eyes are open? If so, in what ways does it feel different? Maybe it’s too hard/subtle to put into words, but do you notice it?

2. Putting phenomena into words

Pick some mental phenomena you would like to better understand (this may take some time. Go throughout your day, and if you notice something about your mind you’re curious about, come back to this exercise)

1. Do you have a sense for why it happens?
   • If not: mentally visualize a scenario that triggers the phenomena. do this over and over again until you have a feeling of where it’s coming from, even if you can’t put it into words yet.
2. Now, try putting your explanation for the cause into words.
   • Imagine the scenario that triggers the phenomena, over and over again. each time you imagine it, try to describe it. keep doing this over and over and you should get to a point where you can describe it pretty well. this may take a long time.

I can’t promise instant results with this. You might get some, idk, I could see that happening. But the main idea is really to continue doing this over the long term and making it a habitual part of your thinking process, so that you develop a strong, detailed understanding of your mind over time and you sharpen your ‘scalpel’ for precisely identifying root causes of issues/phenomena and addressing them.

Over time you’ll notice a huge improvement in your ability to think about your own thoughts and precisely analyze/reason about them.

Not only should you practice this with problems you face (phenomena you don’t like), but you should think about your day/life, notice random phenomena, put words to what the root cause is, and do something actionable with that information.

Tangent:
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If you have a poor mental model of the minds of other people, improving it can address the root cause of some common problems in life.

For example, a common phenomenon I’ve seen is that people will (incorrectly) think of other people as perfect, but themselves as flawed.

This sets them up for tremendous amounts of stress and pressure. “oh, im a loser, because the people around me don’t make nearly the same amount of mistakes as I do, or solve problems as fast as I do, etc etc”.

This is a common mistake. First, it’s more useful compare yourself to your future/past self, not others. Second, if you are going to compare yourself to others, when you have gaps in your understanding of them, don’t fill them in by extrapolating the known parts over the unknown, but rather fill them in with the parts of you that are analogous. High standards can be really good and useful, but not ones based on a dysfunctional understanding of the world.

Anything becomes alien and weird looking when overanalyzed. For example, repeat a word enough times and it will start to lose its meaning and sound strange. Practice noticing when you are doing this to yourself or someone else.

Also, in life, when you don’t understand something, it looks perfect. And when you understand it, you see all of the nuances/wrinkles. Earth’s surface is smoother than a bowling ball (wait, no, it isn’t. but it’s close.), but because you are extremely zoomed in to its surface, you see tons of imperfections that look gargantuan to you.

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