Chain of Thought For Humans

These past few weeks, I’ve been conducting interviews, and I often open with “make sure you articulate your thoughts out loud, so I can follow along with your thinking”. This is primarily because I’m not a mind reader, but it does also help ensure candidates avoid freezing up. It’s a very “interviewy” skill though - artificial and unlike real development. The other thing I’ve been doing is playing The Witness , a 2016 puzzle game centred around solving mazes with increasingly complicated hidden rules. The game has a unexciting presentation, no music or interesting dialog, and no story. At first I found the game fairly dull, you spend a lot of it just wrestling with possibilities and combinatorics. It can get very frustrating when you are not making progress. But, inspired by my interviews, I’ve started narrating my own thought process out loud to myself . I look like a bit of a loon, but I tell myself I’m just a streamer with an audience of one. And to my surprise, it’s working really well. Not only does it make the game more lively and energetic, but also I find I’m more effective in solving puzzles . I was initially baffled by this. Common sense says that I can’t articulate my th