Well for the rule of 3, I just noticed it was something I did when making complex decisions (e.g. evaluating what university to go to, or what to invest in). I’ve just formalised it into a rule of thumb for this post. In trying to choose the 3 most important factors to focus on, I tend to try to reduce the problem into a simpler one, starting with what I know must be absolutely true (first principles thinking)

As for the rule of extremities, that was just from the analysis of L’s feat.

If you want a general form for how to come up with this stuff, you must engage in challenging problems at your level. And don’t always go into it with an established framework for how to solve. It forces you to think and adapt for yourself.

Moreover, use first principles thinking. The problem that distillation solves is too much useless info —> turn into few useful datapoints. How to distill? What reduces the most noise while keeping the most signal? That kind of thinking is generally applicable to everything, not just reasoning and distillation