All of drossbucket's Comments + Replies

Interesting post! I’ve wondered the same thing before.

I’m doing a much more half-arsed version, as a casual quantum foundations enjoyer alongside a technical writing job, and also getting endlessly distracted by other things I find interesting, so my output is not impressive. But it’s a pretty fun hobby and I’m surprised more people don’t try this!

I keep thinking about this post! I've been trying to get back into playing violin on and off, and it does a good job of describing why I've found that so hard. I stopped early on in your fourth stage, and my ear is way ahead of my ability to play anything it actually wants to listen to.

I guess once I join an orchestra I'll enjoy that enough to get some momentum, but solo playing is pretty unrewarding right now.

I’m enjoying this whole series, but this one’s extra relevant because I’m doing something similar right now in a less structured way, so I can pick up some ideas.

I’m working on being able to notice, when talking to people, that I can expand my awareness out to include my surroundings. (The idea is that this gives me space to notice what I feel and have curiosity about what they feel, rather than being locked into ‘polite conversation bot’ mode, but right now just noticing is the important bit.)

I like the noticing timeline, it fits very well with what I’m e... (read more)

One confusion I wrote down in advance was “I still don’t quite know how to predict that there will not be a simple mathematical apparatus that explains something. Why the motion of the planets, why the game of chance, why not the color of houses in England or the number of hairs on a man’s head?"

I think the main thing I'd look for is an unusual amount of regularity. This comes in two types:

• Natural regularity: unusual 'spherical cow' type situations like the movement of the planets. Things that are somehow isolated, or where some particular effect stro

Thanks for the reply! I also feel like I rely heavily on the audio loop currently, hoping I can boost the visual sketchpad side.

Happened to look this post up again this morning and apparently it's review season, so here goes...

This post inspired me to play around with some very basic visualisation exercises last year. I didn't spend that long on it, but I think of myself as having a very weak visual imagination and this pushed me in the direction of thinking that I could improve this a good deal if I put the work in. It was also fascinating to surface some old visual memories.

I'd be intrigued to know if you've kept using these techniques since writing the post.

Actually this was something that I meant to talk about in the post and forgot. I wasn't expecting that anyone would want to read the resulting posts at all, and I'm pretty sure that I wouldn't enjoy reading this sort of thing very much myself if someone else was producing it, but some people liked them a surprising amount. I don't fully understand what's appealing about them - maybe something about the immediacy of it?

Most of my sample of opinions is coming from twitter, which probably selects for people who can tolerate reading fragmented, disjointed stuf... (read more)

I like this idea a lot. I often do pomodoros but there seems to be a lot of potential for other uses of timers while working.

My favourite version of this advice is Sarah Perry's writing graph (from the Ribbonfarm longform course, I think) - maybe that's one of the places you saw it?

I also ignore it a lot :(

I'd like to give this post a second nomination. I'm also trying various experiments in tracking down and listening to hidden/ignored emotions and find other peoples' accounts of this very helpful - it was well worth a reread. I also like the vivid real-life examples.

Thanks! I have been meaning to add a 'start here' page for a while, so that's good to have the extra push :) Seems particularly worthwhile in my case because a) there's no one clear theme and b) I've been trying a lot of low-quality experimental posts this year bc pandemic trashed motivation, so recent posts are not really reflective of my normal output.

For now some of my better posts in the last couple of years might be Cognitive decoupling and banana phones (tracing back the original precursor of Stanovich's idea), The middle distance (a writeup of a use... (read more)

This is only tangentially relevant, but adding it here as some of you might find it interesting:

Venkatesh Rao has an excellent Twitter thread on why most independent research only reaches this kind of initial exploratory level (he tried it for a bit before moving to consulting). It's pretty pessimistic, but there is a somewhat more optimistic follow-up thread on potential new funding models. Key point is that the later stages are just really effortful and time-consuming, in a way that keeps out a lot of people trying to do this as a side project alongside ... (read more)

I haven't thought about the bat and ball question specifically very much since writing this post, but I did get a lot of interesting comments and suggestions that have sort of been rolling around my head in background mode ever since. Here's a few I wanted to highlight:

Is the bat and ball question really different to the others? First off, it was interesting to see how much agreement there was with my intuition that the bat and ball question was interestingly different to the other two questions in the CRT. Reading through the comments I count four other p

A possible reason for this is that the intuitive but incorrect answer in (1) is a decent approximation to the correct answer, whereas the common incorrect answers in (2) and (3) are wildly off the correct answer. For (1) I have to explicitly do a calculation to verify the incorrectness of the rapid answer, whereas in (2) and (3) my understanding of the situation immediately rules out the incorrect answers.

I must have missed this comment before, sorry. This is a really interesting point. Just to write it out explicitly,

(1) correct answer: 5, incorrect answ... (read more)

Not quite knitting, but close - you may like this piece by Sarah Perry explaining a spinning metaphor of Wittgenstein's:

And we extend our concept of number as in spinning a thread we twist fibre on fibre. And the strength of the thread does not reside in the fact that some one fibre runs through its whole length, but in the overlapping of many fibres.

Just curious, are you planning to migrate blog comments too? I didn't know about Netlify, but it looks very promising for what I want - a mostly static site with some support for storing form submissions - so I'm going to investigate it a bit now.

Oops, I fixed that in my blog version and then accidentally posted the old draft here. Edited now, thank you!

Ooh, I'd forgotten about that test, and how the beer version was much easier - that would be another good one to read up on.

Strangely, it can sometimes also go the other way!

One of my most eye-opening teaching experiences occurred when I was helping a six-year-old who was struggling with basic addition – or so it appeared. She was trying to work through a book that helped her to the concept of addition via various examples such as “If Nellie has three apples and is then given two more, how many apples does she have?” The poor little girl didn’t have a clue.

However, after spending a short time with her I discovered that she could do 3+2 with no problem whatsoever. In fact, she h

Ah yeah, I meant to make this bit clearer and forgot.

I'm not really sure what to make of that statement you put in italics. The jump in success rate could be down to better trained intuition. It could also be due to better access to formal methods. I don't really see it as good evidence for my guess either way.

If I get more time later I'll edit the post.

Thanks for the explanation!

This is the most compelling argument I've been able to think of too when I've tried before. Feynman has a nice analogue of it within physics in The Character of Physical Law:

... it would have been no use if Newton had simply said, 'I now understand the planets', and for later men to try to compare it with the earth's pull on the moon, and for later men to say 'Maybe what holds the galaxies together is gravitation'. We must try that. You could say 'When you get to the size of the galaxies, since you know nothing about

Thanks for writing this, it's a very concise summary of the parts of LW I've never been able to make sense of, and I'd love to have a better understanding of what makes the ideas in your bullet-pointed list appealing to those who tend towards 'rationality realism'. (It's sort of a background assumption in most LW stuff, so it's hard to find places where it's explicitly justified.)

Also:

What CFAR calls “purple”.

Is there any online reference explaining this?

Side note, but I really appreciated the bolded sentences marking the start and end of the 'tiring symbolic reasoning' section.

I normally give up on posts on this sort of topic precisely because I can see that I'm getting into an unknown amount of unpleasant mental effort holding all the "he said she said she said"s in my head at once. This time I could quickly gauge how much of that stuff there was, and it looked manageable, so I persevered.

I'm happy to answer questions, as I always like rambling about boring implementation details! I mentioned that I fancied trying this on Twitter and got a few takers. Right now I'm going for a pretty low tech approach where I just email it out - I write each one in a Google Doc and then paste it into Gmail and hope the formatting doesn't mess up too much. I could definitely improve this!

I have another Google Doc going throughout the month where I make brief notes on what I've been reading or thinking about, any useful links, etc, so that... (read more)

Update: I've done four of these now and have really enjoyed it. It works brilliantly for motivating me to keep a record of what I'm doing, and I've had some great followup conversations too. Thanks very much for introducing me to the idea!

my name is Dross,

and wen i see

the shiyning text

leap out at me,

i look at wot

it tels my hed -

i read the rules.

i like the red.

No, I also definitely wouldn't lump mathematical analysis in with algebra... I've edited the post now as that was confusing, also see this reply.

Your 'how much we know about the objects' distinction is a good one and I'll think about it.

Also vim over emacs for me, though I'm not actually great at either. I've never used Lisp or Haskell so can't say. Objects aren't distasteful for me in themselves, and I find Javascript-style prototypal inheritance fits my head well (it's concrete-to-abstract, 'examples... (read more)

I just start gnawing on the corn cob somewhere at random, like the horrible physicist I am :) But the 'analysis' style makes more sense to me of the two, it had never even occurred to me that you could eat corn in the 'algebra' style.

I also think about linear algebra in a very visual way. I'm missing that for a lot of group theory, which was presented to us in a very 'memorise this random pile of definitions' way. Some time I want to go back and fix this... when I can get it to the top of the very large pile of things I want to learn.

Ah, that probably needs clarifying... I was using 'analysis' in the sense of 'opposed to synthesis' as one of the dichotomies, rather than the mathematical sense of 'analysis'. I.e. 'breaking into parts' as opposed to 'building up'. That's pretty confusing when one of the other dichotomies is algebra/geometry!

I agree that algebra and (mathematical) analysis are pretty different and I wouldn't particularly lump them together. I'd personally probably lump it with geometry over algebra if I had to pick, but that's likely to be a feature of how I learn and really it's pretty different to either.

Thanks for writing this up! I was interested last time you mentioned it somewhere, and this time you've motivated me enough that I'm going to try it for a couple of months.

I also identify more with the elephant, which I (probably unhelpfully) think of as the one that 'actually does maths and physics', in the sense of gaining insights into problems and building intuitive understanding.

I (also probably unhelpfully) think of the rider as a more of a sort of dull bean counter who verifies the steps in my reasoning are correct afterwards, and ruins my fun for some of my wilder flights of fancy.

I'm slowly learning to like the rider more - it's doing more than I give it credit for.

Probably some of the issue is t... (read more)

I like this and agree that this thing deserves its own name. In my own head (you may not agree) this view often also includes ideas like 'explicit formal metrics often get Goodhart-ed into useless cargo cults, top-down rational plans often erase illegible local wisdom', etc. The kind of cluster people seem to get from Seeing Like A State, The Great Transformation, etc. (I've never read either of those myself though.)

To my mind this cluster is something like 'pomo ideas grafted on analytic rootstock', rather than the normal continen... (read more)

I would also be interested in this! I saw a use for it within about an hour of reading the post, when I did something stupid and easily fixable with a bit of thought. I just wrote the problem into a gmail draft, but if doing this turns out to be useful I'll try something more structured.

I'm in Bristol! No idea if anyone else is.

There are some great questions at the end of your posts and it's a bit of a shame you haven't had much uptake on them. It would be a lot of work to do many of these (which is why they're good questions!), but I'll have a go at your 'slipping through the cracks' question and do a worked example. Mine is also to do with making appointments.

I thought I did have a good system. I set a lot of Google Calendar email reminders and normally turn up to things with no problems. But actually I screwed up unusually badly twice last year a... (read more)

I've been reading through this series this week based on seeing your review posts, and have enjoyed it, so thanks! I think this was my favourite of the series, maybe because it covers things I was already thinking about anyway (but also the sentry part was really interesting).

I'm really not a natural at operationalising things, but have come to appreciate it in the last couple of years, mainly through accidentally ending up in a job that's quite ops-heavy and realising I badly needed to get better at it. I like the tone of 'this stuff ... (read more)

Hm, I think people vary a lot on this. I like to have a blurred outline of a thing before I fill in detailed steps; I find it painful and frustrating to be dragged through detailed logical steps without that context. I find mimesis is good for producing the blurred outline.

Agreed that classes also often go way too fast. University intro maths courses (in the UK at least) are often pretty terrible for this. But I have no problem in principle with people learning a mix of syntax and substance at the same time.

I like this, but I don't think mimesis is always a bad thing, at all. It's often a useful stage on the route to deeper understanding. You see this in teaching sometimes: you're trying to teach the cross product, but they're learning that they need to underline their vectors, and that they should put some punctuation and explanatory words between their equations so another person can follow the argument. Eventually they will definitely need to learn both sets of things, but if you just get back vector salad with explanatory words interpolated between it the... (read more)

I like the sound of the monthly journalling thing - normally I see reviewing included in these things as some kind of virtuous-but-dull thing people make themselves sit down to do at the end of the week or whatever, and it sounds so unappealing I can never be bothered to even try it. Your version sounds pretty enjoyable.

Cool, I like these sorts of lists! Here's mine:

1. (Mostly) giving up caffeine. 7 points, ~5 years. Much easier to get up in the morning. I have a single cup of tea maybe once or twice a month if I feel like I need waking up more, and that's enough to do the job now. Best used in combination with another elite lifehack, highly recommended if you can manage it:

2. Getting enough sleep. 7 points, ~5 years.

3. Pomodoros. 8 points, ~9 months. Really excellent and not sure why I resisted the idea so long. Turns out lots of half hour blocks really add up, and it's si