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Just Try It: Quantity Trumps Quality
Followup to: Don't Fear Failure
In the same theme as the last article, I think that failure is actually pretty important in learning. Rationality needs data, and trying is a good source of it.
When you're trying to do something new, you probably won't be able to do it right the first time. Even if you obsess over it. Jeff Atwood is a programmer who says Quantity Always Trumps Quality
The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the "quantity" group: fifty pound of pots rated an "A", forty pounds a "B", and so on. Those being graded on "quality", however, needed to produce only one pot - albeit a perfect one - to get an "A".Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the "quantity" group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes - the "quality" group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.
Where have I heard this before?
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Go Try Things
This is the first in what will hopefully be a series of posts about why you should try things, and with strategies against common reasons for not doing so.
Overview:
You’ve probably read about how to properly turn information into beliefs, and how to squeeze every last bit from your data. There's been less attention on the importance of going and getting data.
This article is about how personal experience is an incredibly useful form of data, and in particular how in many activities going out and trying something is more marginally useful than doing more exploratory research into it. In particular, I'll examine how personal experience is useful because it makes information more tangible and easier to learn, is good practice, and exposes common circumstances that you didn't build your models to handle.
For precise and well-defined fields and problems, clear thinking and reasoning will get you really far. Mathematics departments don’t use that much equipment, and they’ve been going on pretty well for hundreds of years.
Rationality is about how to turn data into maps. But this still requires data. I think that in a wide variety of not particularly theoretical subjects (like sports, social interactions, negotiation, cooking, etc.) rationality needs to be augmented by personal experience. Instrumental Rationality turns models into high-utility actions, but before you can do that you need a model.
ESR's New Take on Qualia
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1192#more-1192
ADDED: Even if you disagree with ESR's take, and many will, this is the clearest definition I have seen on what qualia is. So it should present a useful starting point, even for those who strongly disagree, to argue from.
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