bcoburn comments on One thousand tips do not make a system - Less Wrong

44 [deleted] 30 November 2012 05:38AM

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Comment author: chaosmage 30 November 2012 12:08:55PM *  9 points [-]

The people who excel at Starcraft don't do it because they follow explicit systems. They do it mostly by practice (duh) and by listening to the advice of people like Day[9].

Day9 is the best-known Starcraft II commenter, with many YouTube videos (here's a random example) and many millions of views. He occasionally does explain systems (or subsystems really) for playing, but what I think he mostly does right is that

  • he entertains and engages his audience really well,
  • he evidently knows what he's talking about,
  • he is relentlessly positive and has a good video about that,
  • he exudes total confidence that luck has almost nothing to do with your results,
  • he can talk way better than anyone I've ever heard talk about rationality and
  • he is easy to like, and easy to want to be like.

I may be missing something, but I think this is most of what he does so right about teaching what he teaches. Anyway, my point is clear: We don't need systems, we need a Day[9] of rationality.

AIs may need systems. We aren't AIs.

Comment author: bcoburn 01 December 2012 04:49:39PM *  4 points [-]

I think that the main difference between people who do and don't excel at SC2 isn't that experts don't follow algorithms, it's that their algorithms are more advanced/more complicated.

For example, Day[9]'s build order focused shows are mostly about filling in the details of the decision tree/algorithm to follow for a specific "build". Or, if you listen to professional players talking about how they react to beginners asking for detailed build orders the response isn't "just follow your intuition" it's "this is the order you build things in, spend your money as fast as possible, react in these ways to these situations", which certainly looks like an algorithm to me.

Edit: One other thing regarding practice: We occasionally talk about 10,000 hours and so on, but a key part of that is 10,000 hours of "deliberate practice", which is distinguished from just screwing around as being the sort of practice that lets you generate explicit algorithms.

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