justing.net

The Experiment Frame

By Justin G. on 23MAY29MON

• The Experiment Frame/framework/framing
• Know thyself by experiment
• Introspective experimentation
• Reframe to experiment

I’ve found it useful to reframe a problem to be solved and instead to think about experiments that I can do to help me understand. There are a few reframes that I’ve found useful when thinking about a problem or situation. This time I want to write about reframing to an experiment, particularly when working with the problem¹ of knowing yourself. I suppose it helps that I am an experimentalist by training, so I’ve spent a lot of time formulating experiments to help understand.

When faced with any sort of problem where I’m not sure how to proceed, I’ve found that a useful strategy is to reframe the problem to experiments aimed at learning more. The challenge is usually remembering that this is a strategy that works in a lot of contexts: introspective, inter-personal, technical, and even more. Let me focus on the tricky problem of personal growth, and how this technique can be applied.

Let me outline.

1. I am going to tell you about the thinking tool of the Experiment Reframe.
2. I’ll focus on knowing yourself via experiment.
3. My default, without this tool is to assume I already know enough.
4. How to operate an experiment.
5. An example.
6. I told you about the Reframe to an Experiment tool for thinking.
7. This tool applies in a lot of places, so I expect that I’ll revisit to work through the problem of the experiment frame again.
8. By the way, here are some other frames that I’ll tell you about later.

Introduction

Ok, so I want to tell you about this tool that I use when thinking about a problem. I call it the experiment framing. One step in the process is that I recognize that I need to know more than I currently do about something. So I frame my gathering of that as an experiment and attempts at solving it are ways to get more information. This reduces the emotional burden of expecting success on each attempt. It’s sort of meta thinking, or parallel thinking. Thinking about your thinking; thinking with your thinking.

Know yourself by experiment

One place that is pretty good to apply this is to your own image of yourself. The old adage to “know yourself” and “a life unexamined is a life not worth living” come to mind. This tool is one way to further those efforts. I think it’s particularly useful because we’re often blind to ourselves. This method can offer some insights. It takes a lot of time and effort and introspection to know ourselves. Maybe it’s also a “getting older” thing.

Knowing yourself ab initio

Personally, I have had to unlearn the habit of assuming that I already know my limitations, or preferences, or abilities. It’s so easy to just be in our own heads, living by rote or routine. This is a sort of unknowing and unexamining of ourselves. We change over time, so it’s worthwhile to revisit past experiments too- we’re not the physical world where experiment outcomes shouldn’t change over time. Our minds are plastic, learning, and changing. Check up on that.

Principles of how do Experiment

So, how to do it? The rigorously correct way is to first state the problem, second formulate a hypothesis, third perform the experiment, fourth review the results. Let me break that down a bit more. Some examples of problems where experimenting might help you understand: “I don’t like clams,” “I’m bad at sports,” “I am not a morning person.” The corresponding hypotheses might be “clams have a bad taste,” “I won’t sink a free-throw,” “getting up early is very hard.” I think the experiments are pretty obvious, but for pedantic reasons I’ll write them down anyway: “make some clam chowder and try to eat it,” “get a basketball and shoot some free-throws,” “set the alarm clock earlier than usual.” Finally, note what happened: “still don’t like clams, but the soup part was good,” “sank some free-throws and actually had a good time,” and “it was hard to get up early but doable.”

I think what’s going on here is that by framing it as an experiment you are primed to notice more aspects. You become an observer of yourself, and inquire more deeply about thing other dual of the experiment. Instead of focusing on your remembered reaction to it, and replaying that when confronted with that thing again (clams, basketballs, or early mornings), you are open to noticing more of the experience of it. You are open to some surprises, even if just a little bit.

Practical example

Let me run through it again, but with just one example from my own life, and in a lot more messy detail.

At the high level, this is what I’m doing.

Here are the messy details.

So that’s the experiment framing

it’s not only for knowing yourself

Some other tools for thinking that I use

I didn’t talk about when to use it

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