I find it hard to do something I consider worthwhile while on a spring break, despite having lots of a free time.
Perhaps it is because you have no deadlines, no compelling reason to complete something specific?
I tend to make grandiose plans — I should meet new people! I should be more involved in sports! I should start using Anki! I should learn Lojban! I should practice meditation! I should read these textbooks including doing most of exercises!
Those aren't plans.
— and then fail to do almost anything.
This is the retrospective evidence that they weren't plans.
Yet I manage to do some impressive stuff during academic term, despite having less time and more commitments.
There you are—commitments, and a structure, in this case externally imposed, once you've made the decision to go to college.
If when you have a wish such as "I should meet new people!", your thinking does not immediately proceed to considering what sort of people, where to find them, when to do it, and what the effort will look like, then it's just daydreaming.
Good call!
Yes, your theory is more prosaic, yet it never occured to me. I wonder whether purposefully looking for boring explanations would help with that.
Also, your theory is actually plausible, fits with some of my observations, so I think that I should look into it. Thanks!
The idea that it's a habit is, in a way, boring, true.
But when I read that industriousness and creativity can be learned like described in the learned industriousness wikipedia article, I was quite surprised. So the iedea isn't boring to me at all.
Also beware of comparing a one week Spring break with a particularly memorable or otherwise highly available sample of a week from other times, rather than an actually "typical" week.
The second insight can be formulated as «the dull explanations are more likely to be correct because they tend to have high prior probability.»
That needs a LOT of caveats.
A counter-quote: "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." - H. L. Mencken
Ooh, I get to comment.
A particular dull explanation is more likely than a particular exciting one. But it is possible that dull explanations, in general, are not more likely than exciting ones, in general, because there might be more of the exciting explanations even though each individual one is less likely.
(This is not typical--if you have cold symptoms, you probably have a cold and not an exotic disease--but it's possible.)
Comments---
2 sayings i like (relevant to the nerd issue) are 'I love humanity, i just hate people' and (for those of use who could be called 'elites' as distinct from the commoners ) 'I wouldn't me a member of any group that would me as a member' (Mark Twain). I'm not that convinced of the 'broken brain theory'. I tend to think in terms like 'frequency dependence' in biology or 'division of labor' in economics. Not everyone is the same, and there are reasons for that. (This is related also to the 'pigeonhole principle' and things like the existance of 'runts' in dog litters, various forms of hierarchies----in the real world, not everyone is in reaching distance of the same set of resources. Some don't get to sit in a warm place next to the fire, and so adapt to the cold. (And, very often, when occassionaly they get invited to be in the heat, since they have learned to live in, and even enjoy the cold, they are considered antisocial, rude and disturbed if they don't accept the invitation (eg 'you can take this job, or seat, and shove it'). Or if you invite people to consider coming into the cold, that will be considered insanity.
(This goes for other things too---if you decide religion is very narrow, boring, intolerant etc. but then one day the confgregation decides that, since they are losing members and tithes, they will 'lighten up' and invite you back (but again on their slightly revised terms---eg they won't preach that you are going to hell, but will still tell you to shut up why they preach to you the truth which you know nothing about). If you decide your peer group who does nothing but bar hop is boring and find new activities, when they see you again and say 'hey come on, lets party' they will say 'you've really changed and are no fun anymore, unlike us party animals'. Darwin was probably a nerd and didnt attend church (or half heartedly, mostly for show). Einstein wasn't a big zionist type studying the torah and waiting to return to the promised land, but was interested in larger parts of the space of possibilities. He also wasn't much of a family man it seems, preferring to do stuff like EPR rather than like mowing the lawn, going to July 4 fireworks etc. (He did sign a letter written to Joe McCarthy (congressman) supporting Paul Robeson who was being accused of being a communist, and he helped get Godel citizenship, so that may have some relation to being a patriot).
To me the 'dull prior' is similar to the 'maximum entropy' postulate in statistical mechanics (which Jaynes i think identified with bayesianism). There are (as a caveat) in my view many ways of applying this postulate, so there can be a hierarchy of 'dullness' ---its what you call dull, or what your information is. (This is why i personally don't really consider bayesianism distinct from frequentism, any more than i consider so called 'linear' sciences as distinct from 'nonlinear' ones. (The former just comes usually by truncating your equation, or changing coordinates,, or aggregating). This is also why I am highly skeptical of many applications of maximum entropy especially in fields like economics or other social sciences. The formalism is so general that you can find any result you want, or fit any distribution (with your prior 'principle of impotence'---equal a priori probability ---like 'overfitting' (eg Norbert Weiner on elephants) .). EG just because someone fits the description, doesn't mean they did the crime though this sort of 'prior' is often used since it seems to work (eg you solve the crime, case closed, god said it, i believe it and that is all there is to it, qed.).
Einstein wasn't a big zionist type studying the torah and waiting to return to the promised land,
Just some historical nitpicking, but "Zionist" is a political descriptor, not a religious one. Particularly in Einstein's time, the word would have meant something more like "socialist commune member" than "observantly religious person".
In fact, most usages of the term "Zionist" today are wrong, since the word is used more often by its enemies than by its supporters.
I agree with you on this---its a political term nowadays , and im in DC so i fairly commonly come across all the uses (and i even have distant cousins in Israel, my closer ones came through ellis island from russia around 1910, have some distant ones who died in the holocaust, etc.). but technically i'm goy through genetics and/or descent. (other half of my family were essentially expelled from britain because they were a dissident protestant sect---the brethren, related in a way to the mennonites. they werent involved in salem witch trials, nor indigenous genocide, though did get their 40 acre farm in north dakota---before fracking ). (I gather Herzl (sic) maybe wrote early ideas on zionism for various reasons (religion, political persecution---russia had pogroms (see 'fiddler on a roof' movie i think )). Einstein does have an essay 'why i am a socialist' (one can also consider bertrand russel's 'why i am not a christian' (he was, like me, agnostic) . kibbutz idea. Sorin Solomon of Weiszmann Inst and NewInstitute for Economic thinking is one prof there (writes on statistical mechanics of income distribution); i think he was in Peace Now. Einstein was on first board of Hebrew U.
Some property X is 'banal' if X applies to a lot of people in an disappointingly mundane way, not having any redeeming features which would make it more rare (and, hence, interesting). In the other words, X is banal iff base rate of X is high. Or, you can say, prior probability of X is high.
I doubt that (widespread belief) <=> (high prior probability). If a statement is believed and considered obvious by a lot of people, it can be really obvious and true. Or it can be a wrong cached thought. Or just a common misconception.
If you are proficient in some area, your feeling of prior probabilities in this area is better than average, because you are already used to some counterintuitive facts of that field, and you have some idea about how proper 'counterintuitive-ness' looks like. In fact, you update your intuition. If you already believe General Relativity, you will be more apt to believe counterintuitive facts from Quantum Mechanics. Probably the same holds true if you are on the right side of the Bell Curve.
By the way, Boring Advice Repository seems not boring at all. It's more like a collection of 'lifehacks' and advices aimed to shoot blind spots and ugh fields
There are two insights from Bayesianism which occurred to me and which I hadn't seen anywhere else before.
I like lists in the two posts linked above, so for the sake of completeness, I'm going to add my two cents to a public domain. This post is about the second penny, the first one is here.