"Applied Rationality Training Regime" #11: Socratic Ducking

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 January 11, so we look at Training Regime Day 11: Socratic Ducking and now the story is all about dialog. As a programmer, I'm familiar with the idea of debugging by telling it to the duck, and there's a (toy) duck right here by my desk. I've also applied "explain it to the duck" as a rule for learning...(adapted by somebody, sometime, from the standard "Docendo discimus - by teaching, we learn".) I really feel embarrassed that I've never generalized this to trying to debug the sort of issues identified as "bugs" on Day #2: Searching for Bugs.  Okay, for this I want a different duck, a symbolic story-duck for handling story-threads, so that would just have to be Spider-Duck, wouldn't it? Can I construct dialogue for me explaining the bugs in my life, and him occasionally asking questions? (Why not? As long as he doesn't have to come up with answers...)

So, SD and I have been talking about disorder on my desk and elsewhere, and ways that I've tried to combat it, and why they fail and what I should do instead. So far we haven't moved past the obvious -- stuff like the obvious relevance of today's being NATIONAL CLEAN YOUR DESK DAY. Still, we will come back to it again and again; I think I can commit to that, because it's mildly fun (takes very little willpower) to keep coming back to it. Actually doing something is another matter. I haven't accomplished much, except that while I was thinking of variations on Spider-Duck, he asked why not try variations on me? Which actually might make sense. Or not. Am I really able to decide which self to walk into, which story of myself to tell? Dunno. Meanwhile, happy birthday to... what's your name, man? (And maybe who tells your story is the right way, one of the right ways, to look at choice-making generally.)