🚧 The Einstellung Effect 🚧

Hello everyone, welcome to my very first blog post! I hope it will provide you some value, and what's more important, a bit of reflection. 🧠

Today I'll briefly cover the Einstellung effect, something I recently discovered while progressing Learn how to Learn course by dr Barbara Oakley.

What does it mean? 🤔

The German word Einstellung can be loosely translated as mindset or attitude. In terms of problem solving, it means to create sort of an automated state of mind. 🤖 This can be useful, especially when we want to master a repetitive manual task - see this takoyaki master. In case of a software engineer however, it can sometimes make our life harder!

Why does it matter? 🤷

The Einstellung can be also referenced as a problem solving set. It determines our predisposition to handle given problem in specific way, often ignoring better or more appropriate solutions. Think of a last time when you solved an issue that you found relatively easy, maybe even trivial - depending on your experience it can be related to implementation, design or architecture. You didn't give it much thought, did you? Yeah, and neither did I!

Our brains have this amazing superpower to create neural patterns, kind of paths that our mind follows step by step after initial thought. It takes time and repetition to create such patterns, otherwise they faint and disappear. When we learn something new and keep repeating this thing over and over, it strengthens our neural pattern and leads us to automaticity - this is exactly what Einstellung is all about.

How can we prevent it from affecting us? 🛡

The best way to make sure we don't fall for our mind's traps is stopping for a while and simply asking yourself a question - is this really the best way to do it? Try a different approach from time to time, always keep doing your research. Look for current state-of-art solutions, compare it with yours. Simply put, give it another thought!

Wrap up 🎗

Today we learned about The Einstellung, a of mechanised way of thinking. We discovered how this negative effect of previous experience can influence our problem solving effects, and how to handle falling for it!

Thank you for reading! 🙇

Consider giving me a feedback on how to improve in writing, I will be grateful for life. 🙏
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