Scott Alexander on the thought process

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He writes,

When I’ve had a lot of coffee, I have more interesting thoughts than usual. New ideas and clever wordplay come easily to me. I don’t think it makes sense to say that coffee makes me smarter. . .More likely I always have some of those thoughts. . .but the relevant angel considers them too weird to be worth scooping out and bringing into the world. This is probably for the best; manic people report “racing thoughts”, a state where the angels build a giant conveyor belt . . . to consciousness and give you every single possible thought no matter how irrelevant. It doesn’t sound fun at all.

The model is one in which there are all sorts of thoughts bidding for your attention, and the thoughts that get through can vary depending on how your hormones are operating. I am reminded of my personal Minsky cycle. I sense that I am creative during the speculative phase, but on occasion I have been overwhelmed by “racing thoughts” as it shifted to the Ponzi phase.

3 thoughts on “Scott Alexander on the thought process”

  1. Noticed exactly the same thing in myself. I am trying to manage it — when I run out of creative ideas every 3 weeks or so I allow myself a Monster energy drink in addition to morning coffee. I think it shortens the thought process and allows more ideas to slip past the skepticism filter. It clearly downgrades the quality of thought, but it’s like letting a new batch of raw materials into the factory floor — something to analyze with the sober mind in the days that follow.

    It seems similar to the evolutionary process. Most mutations are detrimental, but if your species has a good filtering and selection mechanism to discard the bad ones evolution can accelerate with a mild mutations spike. I think there are many more similar frameworks in politics, business, etc.

    • Mencken got there a century ago and has a good essay on this, “The Divine Afflatus” (1917) which has one of his great quips. You absolutely should read the whole thing, or better yet, the Chrestomathy, or even better yet, all six series of Prejudices.

      … They know by hard experience that there are days when their ideas flow freely and clearly, and days when they are dammed up damnably. … But what of the underlying mystery? How are we to account for that puckish and inexplicable rise and fall of inspiration My questions, of course, are purely rhetorical. Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem – neat, plausible, and wrong.

      I always chuckle at that one.

      … I offer a new, simple, and at all events not ghostly solutions … inspiration, so-called, is a funciton of metabolism … a man’s flow of ideas is controlled and determined, both quantitatively and qualitatively, not by the whims of the gods … but by the chemical content of the blood that lifts itself from his liver to his brain

      When a man is blocked:

      … he will tempt the invisible powers with black coffee, tea, alcohol and the alkaloids, he may even curse God and invite death – but he will not write his poem or iron out his syllogism …

      Here’s one that rings true for lots of people after long travel legs. I think it’s possible to infer when certain writers are on the road from sudden drops in output and quality.

      Only the most elementary knowledge of psychology is needed to show the cause of the zig-zagging that I have mentioned. It lies in the eternal fact that the chemical composition of the blood changes every hour, almost every minute. … No man within twenty-four hours after eating a meal in a Pennsylvania Railroad dining-car, could conceivably write anything worth readind.

      He thought some people suffered from “mild toxemia” as a result of diseases that lead to genius and a manic “half-way station on the road to insanity”. Looking to the future of psychiatry:

      Perhaps the time will come when the precise effects of these diseases will be worked out accurately, and it will be possible to guage in advance their probably influence upon this or that individual. If that time ever comes, the manufacture of artists will become a feasible procedure, like the present manufacture of soldiers, capons, right-thinkers, and doctors of philosophy.

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