Let them eat cake: Interpersonal Problems vs Tasks

70 HughRistik 07 October 2009 04:35PM

When I read Alicorn's post on problems vs tasks, I immediately realized that the proposed terminology helped express one of my pet peeves: the resistance in society to applying rationality to socializing and dating.

In a thread long, long ago, SilasBarta described his experience with dating advice:

I notice all advice on finding a girlfriend glosses over the actual nuts-and-bolts of it.

In Alicorn's terms, he would be saying that the advice he has encountered treats problems as if they were tasks. Alicorn defines these terms a particular way:

It is a critical faculty to distinguish tasks from problems.  A task is something you do because you predict it will get you from one state of affairs to another state of affairs that you prefer.  A problem is an unacceptable/displeasing state of affairs, now or in the likely future.  So a task is something you do, or can do, while a problem is something that is, or may be.

Yet as she observes in her post, treating genuine problems as if they were defined tasks is a mistake:

Because treating problems like tasks will slow you down in solving them.  You can't just become immortal any more than you can just make a peanut butter sandwich without any bread.

Similarly, many straight guys or queer women can't just find a girlfriend, and many straight women or queer men can't just find a boyfriend,  any more than they can "just become immortal."

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Brute-force Music Composition

13 HughRistik 22 May 2009 06:02AM

Follow-up to: Heuristic is not a bad word

When I was in high school, I wanted to compose music. I wanted to write the music that I wanted to hear. There was only one problem: I have good aural imagination, but I don't have world-class aural imagination. I can look at sheet music and hear it in my head. I can hear chords. I can hear two-part harmony. Yet my aural imagination wasn't developed enough to generate novel music, except when I was in certain moods or about to fall asleep. And most of what I could hear in my head I found impossible to transcribe.

Nevertheless, I wanted to write cool music. I know what I like when I hear it. I had the ability to critique music; the only problem was creating it. So I developed my own technique for writing music: I composed using brute force. Before I describe how this worked, and how successful it was, I would like to talk more generally about brute force as a method for problem-solving.

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Heuristic is not a bad word

8 HughRistik 06 April 2009 06:55AM

An insect tries to escape through the windowpane, tries the same again and again, and does not try the next window which is open and through which it came into the room. A man is able, or at least should be able, to act more intelligently. —George Polya, How To Solve It

Intelligence makes humans capable of many impressive feats. Unlike flies and birds, we don't bang up against windows multiple times trying to get out of our houses. We can travel to the moon. We have taken over the planet. Why? Because intelligence enables us to solve problems.

All problems start the same way. They start unsolved. Each fact humans have figured out was initially unfigured out by us. Then we did something, which converted the unknown fact into a known fact, changed the state of a problem from unsolved to solved.

I emphasize the unknown starting state of problems to make a point: problem solving, the basis of human achievement, depends on a process of discovery, discovery of new facts, new possibilities, new methods, and new ways of thought.

Heuristic—the art and science of discovery—has been integral for human progress. The word "heuristic" is related to "Eureka!"

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