Yes, but consider that a hammer is a useful tool when you need to drive a nail or bash something, but not if what you are trying to do is drill a hole. I don't often think about wheaton levels. I spent/spend more time thinking about reverse fishbones and WoGs/systems thinking *when I'm doing theoretical/abstract thinking.*RoamingFrancis wrote: ↑Sun Sep 17, 2023 1:45 pmDo you think the Wheaton Levels are a useful framework?
But of my total thinking time, only a minority is spent on these sorts of things. Most of my thinking time is spent on puzzling out designs and solutions for my builds and other creative projects (writing, trips, relationships...).
In other words, I zoom up and down scales of thinking fluidly but tend to spend most of my time thinking at the project and action level. Higher level thinking happens when I sense friction or too much uncertainty and know that I ought to bump up a scale or two to check out the view from 30k feet. Similar (the exact same?) as the familiar feeling of having skipped too many Weekly Reviews.
It sounds like you've got an intuition that becoming absorbed in theory isn't the right move. The WL discussion in particular probably isn't very relevant to your desire to level up. If you're having trouble feeling confident in deciding what actions to take, what skills to learn, etc, then maybe working with the concepts of reverse fishbones and wogs (chapter five) can be helpful to point you in the right direction.
An epiphany I had during the WoGshop at EREfest was that 'WoGs are useless: sketching WoGs is essential'. Every sketch I've ever made was useless to me after the fact, but the process of producing it generated/cultivated intuition/wisdom with respect to what actions to take.
It's important that the activity isn't abstract. It's a systems-thinking approach to pro-and-conning, stream of consciousness exploration, journaling, insight meditating, etc -- working with the actual events and decisions you have facing you.
And maybe the output of the exercise for you will be that you're wired different and these particular tools aren't useful for you. That'll be an educational success; you won't have to waste time with those tools in the future.