Rationality advice from Terry Tao
Via a link on IRC, I stumbled upon the blog of the mathematician Terry Tao. I noticed that several of his posts contain useful rationality advice, part of it overlapping with content that has been covered here. Most of the posts remind us of things that are kind of obvious, but I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing: we often need reminders of the things that are obvious.
Advance warning: the posts are pretty well interlinked, in Wikipedia/TVTropes fashion. I currently have 15 tabs open from the site.
Some posts of note:
Be sceptical of your own work. If you unexpectedly find a problem solving itself almost effortlessly, and you can’t quite see why, you should try to analyse your solution more sceptically. Most of the time, the process for solving a major problem is a lot more complex and time-consuming.
Use the wastebasket. Not every idea leads to a success, and not every first draft forms a good template for the final draft. Know when to start over from scratch, know when you should be persistent, and do keep copies around of even the failed attempts.
Learn the limitations of your tools. Knowing what your tools cannot do is just as important as knowing what they can do.
Learn and relearn your field. Simply learning the statement and proof of a problem doesn't guarantee understanding: you should test your understanding, using methods such as finding alternate proofs and trying to generalize the argument.
Write down what you've done. Write down sketches of any interesting arguments you come across - not necessarily at a publication level of quality, but detailed enough that you can forget about the details and reconstruct them later on.
Rolf Nelson's "The Rational Entrepreneur"
New blog up by longtime OB/LWer Rolf Nelson, "The Rational Entrepreneur" at rolfnelson.com. On "the overlap between entrepreneurship and the modern tools of rationality". Rolf will post daily through November, and after that it will depend on how much traction the blog gets.
First posts: Pay more attention to the statistics! (which say to do what you know, not what you love) and Having co-founders is valuable but not crucial (according to a study).
Biking Beyond Madness (link)
‘‘During race, I am going crazy, definitely,’’ he says, smiling in bemused despair. ‘‘I cannot explain why is that, but it is true.’’
The craziness is methodical, however, and Robic and his crew know its pattern by heart. Around Day 2 of a typical weeklong race, his speech goes staccato. By Day 3, he is belligerent and sometimes paranoid. His short-term memory vanishes, and he weeps uncontrollably. The last days are marked by hallucinations: bears, wolves and aliens prowl the roadside; asphalt cracks rearrange themselves into coded messages. Occasionally, Robic leaps from his bike to square off with shadowy figures that turn out to be mailboxes. In a 2004 race, he turned to see himself pursued by a howling band of black-bearded men on horseback.
‘‘Mujahedeen, shooting at me,’’ he explains. ‘‘So I ride faster.’’
This 2006 New York Times story is about Jure Robic, a Slovenian ultra long distance bicycler who goes seriously insane when he pushes himself far enough during the races. At the point he feels like dying out of fatigue he still has a major portion (estimated 50 % by his team) of his strength left. So he hands over control to his team and with their help, pushes himself into the realm of insanity and gives up control to the team:
Link: PRISMs, Gom Jabbars, and Consciousness (Peter Watts)
http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=791
Morsella has gone back to basics. Forget art, symphonies, science. Forget the step-by-step learning of complex tasks. Those may be some of the things we use consciousness for now but that doesn’t mean that’s what it evolved for, any more than the cones in our eyes evolved to give kaleidoscope makers something to do. What’s the primitive, bare-bones, nuts-and-bolts thing that consciousness does once we’ve stripped away all the self-aggrandizing bombast?
Morsella’s answer is delightfully mundane: it mediates conflicting motor commands to the skeletal muscles.
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