"It seemed like a good idea at the time"

 En RETROSPECTION:

"It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time"

 

"It seemed like a good idea at the time" is a stock comic phrase in the aftermath of big mistakes, but far from being a badge of stupidity, this rueful phrase, if uttered truthfully, is a clear mark of intelligence; a thinker who can accurately recall what she actually thought and how she felt about it is more than halfway to taking a major step toward debugging her own thought processes so she won't fall in that trap again. The more subtle the error, the more valuable the habit of self-monitoring that is enabled by anyone who talks to themselves on a regular basis. (The next time you try to solve a puzzle, consider indulging in a vocalized soliloquy; it''s a good way to notice gaps in hyour thinking.)

It may be possible for animals without language to "wrack their brains" for dormant clues, though there are scant signs of any such covert behavior, but in any case our practice of explicit self-questioning has the further huge advantage of making our broodings more readily memorable, so that we can review them with hindsight. And once you have a habit of going into question-posing mode, all your R&D becoems much more top-down, using more directed search, and relying less on random variation and retention. Randomness (or what counts as randomness in evolution, the decoupling of the generation of candidates to test from the criteria of success) is not eliminate; even the most sophisticated investigations often are expedited by deliberately "random" bouts of trial and error. but the search space can be squeezed by using information already acquired in other contexts to rule out large regions as unlikely or irrelevant—but only if the thinker can be reminded of it in a timely fashion. Talking to yourself, asking yourself questions, or even just the inner rehearsal of relevant words ("key words"), is an efficient way of probing the networks of association attached to each word, reminding you of overlooked possibilities that are likely to be relevant to your current perplexity.  

 

 

(Daniel Dennett, From Bacteria to Bach and Back 297-98)