On Cognitive Debt

Nikita Prokopov, in their People and Blogs interview from last week:

I don’t blog often, so it’s the worst: you come back to your blog once every few months, completely without context, and you need to spend hours just restoring it to the status quo.

I think of this as a kind “cognitive debt,” similar to the much-discussed variant that is said to accumulate from using AI assistants.

Like Prokopov, I experience this with things I do seldom, like filing income tax returns. Today, for example, I filed a T5 for my corporation (a report of divident payments), something I only need to do once a year. This required:

• Getting a summary of dividents from my financial advisor.
• Finding the place on the Canada Revenue Agency website where I can file a T5 (it’s cleverly hidden in a small button at the bottom of the screen that shows previous filings).
• Looking up my credit union’s transit number.
• Looking up what the various boxes on the return mean in human-style language, boxes like “Actual Amount of Dividends” and “Taxable amount of dividends other than eligible dividends.”
• Looking up the percentages that apply from box to box (the web form doesn’t calculate these for some reason).
• Submitting the form.

It’s not that any of these steps is overly complicated, it’s just that I need to relearn it every year. And because it’s not intuitive, and I tromp through the process with a “I just want to get this done” attitude, I don’t retain any useful information to carry through to next year.

The same mechanism applies when I go to do my company bookkeeping: for complex historical reasons, I maintain the books in AccountEdge for Windows, running in an emulator on my Mac Mini, through screen sharing from my MacBook Air. So every year I need to remember all the various technical bits that go together to make this work, then remember how AccountEdge works, and how to download and import bank statements, and so on.

The greatest appearance of cognitive debt was back in the days when I was trying my hand as a mobile app developer for both iOS and Android, developing apps in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, then wrapping them together as “app store” apps and submitting them through the respective Apple and Google systems for listing and selling apps.

The number of hoops this required, and that the hoops changed entirely on a regular basis, made the entire process a frustrating morass molasses-wading. And because I generally only updated apps on a yearly basis, I had to learn it all anew every year.

I suppose the opposite of “cogitive debt” is “cognitive investment,” which you might also simply call “learning.”

While some might be “read, plan, execute” learners, my cognitive investment strategy is more “bash my head against the wall, reflect, repeat.” 

Try something, see what works, see what doesn’t, adjust (talk to people, build a jig, walk away). 

Go at it again. 

Repeat. 

The neural pathways this practice builds are strong and long-lasting. 

It’s why I can make waffles without a recipe, have figured out how wet cornflour should be to make good tortillas, know what the arcane keystrokes needed to use vi are, can drive a car, do an unbroken set of 50 single-unders in the gym, make a solid martini, and tie my shoes.