Damn. I came up with a hypothetical System 3 last year!

Current status: partially solved.

TLDR: What is the goal? What are my assumptions? Is there anything I am missing?

I repeatedly found myself getting into lots of trouble due to unquestioned assumptions. System 2 is supposed to be rational, but I found this to be far from the case.

So I tried inventing an "actually rational system" that I could "operate manually", or with a little help. I called it System 3, a system where you use a Thinking Tool to help you think more effectively.

Initial attempt was a "rational LLM prompt", but these mostly devolve into unhelpful nitpicking. (Maybe it's solvable, but I didn't get very far.)

Then I realized, wouldn't you get better results with a bunch of questions on pen and paper? Guided writing exercises?

So here are my attempts so far:

reflect.py - https://gist.github.com/a-n-d-a-i/d54bc03b0ceeb06b4cd61ed173...

unstuck.py - https://gist.github.com/a-n-d-a-i/d54bc03b0ceeb06b4cd61ed173...

I'm not sure what's a good way to get yourself "out of a rut" in terms of thinking about a problem. It seems like the longer you've thought about it, the less likely you are to explore beyond the confines.

I haven't solved System 3 yet, but a few months later found myself in an even more harrowing situation which could have been avoided if I had a System 3.

The solution turned out to be trivial, but I missed it for weeks... In this case, I had incorrectly named the project, and thus doomed it to limbo. Turns out naming things is just as important in real life as it is in programming!

So I joked "if being pedantic didn't solve the problem, you weren't being pedantic enough." But it's not a joke! It's about clear thinking. (The negative aspect of pedantry is inappropriate communication. But the positive aspect is "seeing the situation clearly", which is obviously the part you want to keep!)

Thinking Fast, Slow, and Artificial: How AI Is Reshaping Human Reasoning