JB:Later, Garfunkel's father bought him a wire recorder and from then on, Garfunkel spent his afternoons singing, recording, and playing it back, so he could listen for flaws and learn how to improve.
heh
R:This appears to be one of the patterns for all the skills
DA:hmm
should that entire conversation about 'everyone getting better at everything all at once' be a blog post
JB:the primordial skill is noticing
DA:or posted to lesswrong actually
R:A blog post, at least
DA:it feels like it was a useful product of the chat channel and should be saved
JB:do you feel like writing it
or would you just copypaste the convo
DA:maybe, will anyone read it?
JB:i think so
[link one: osteen...]
DA:damn
are the replay analysis queens of esports
actually uh
better at learning and self-development than baseline humanity
and getting better at any skill is the same ur-skill, which could be developed better for literally everyone, including men of the fine cut
does western society have an underdeveloped understanding of the state of the art of theory of learning?
[link deux: there was a moment in sports...]
[link three: most surgery is done in your head...]
DA: maybe, idk
if the cost of masterful action is humility, it might be too expensive
JC:@DA Nice find. This isn't news to me - I've seen similar about coaching in surgery before. Yes. Society is systematically underdeveloped in the theory of of learning. It's not an accidental failure. Before you try to change it, you need to understand why.
DA: i mean, i have to have an explanation for why useful new information hasn't spread to saturation yet
the answers are normally going ot be 'communication hard' 'emotions hard' or 'pricing / extracting value hard' from my general expectations about efficiency
but sometimes it's just because 'nobody has put the work into spreading the idea yet'
those would be the 'ideas' to try to build a business or school of philosophy off of
e.g. i am very confident that the lakoffian theory of language as metaphor just never spread yet, and has low-hanging fruit everywhere if i push it on enough people or try to develop it
R: It's also a benefit to know it and not spread it, if you try to spread it and no one's willing to listen, might as well just use it for yourself, and then when you win with it enough, they'll start copying you.
DA: I'm not in the practice of trying to disgorge all of my knowledge to all people all of the time, that would be wrong
but releasing some things i think are valuable to some people sometimes is a way of showing i have 'skin in the game' i think
DA:yud had to push for a decade straight and write a harry potter fanfiction describing his canon to try to get people to think about ai threat
JC:just because 'nobody has put the work into spreading the idea yet'
No. I think the system is actively inefficient and deskilling. It's not as if learning techne is completely unknown.
DA:that is also possible!
JB:why
DA:I don't let myself use organized opposition as the 'first reason' why something good hasn't happened yet
JB:and if you know how to learn techne please tell me
DA:it can be allowed in second passes of reasoning but not the first pass
it's too easy, it can explain too many things
JC:@JB: Ian Hyslop had some good historical content about how schools had been designed to keep the trades in their places.
Our schools are descended from those.
DA:haven't i made some remarks on this too JB?
maybe it was in this chat
math pedagogy is inefficient because it's an exercise in teaching children to not 'look ahead' in lists of tasks even if they're capable
and the primary goal of math pedagogy is to teach heirarchy, not to teach math
JB:sorry i have rona brainrot apparently
ah yeah ok
DA:this is why math teaching levels aren't like, tuned to developmental neurology and how much a kid can learn at a certain developmental stpe
with branch paths for children that finish certain capacities early and certain ones late
JB:ok i get the general argument now
JC:@JB: if you want to increase your learning techne, the areas for attention are around managing motivation - sorely neglected most places.
DA:managing motivation means combing out tangles in your reward function
i mean your emotional life
JC:Yes.
JB:it's funny because if you want to "figure out your motivation" you have to be ready to change your focus for something that motivates you better
in any case, that's what I did
JC:I spent a year in Trinity College Dublin working as a visiting research fellow on their innovative new pedagogy research initiative.
It was nothing like as innovative or new as it should have been, and they could not see that.
@JB: What would you actually like to learn, and why?
JB:is that a rhetorical question or are you really asking
JC:I am really asking. Heck, let's not waste time.
JB:oh, i'm fine on the motivation end
JC:But are you? Tell me what you would like to learn?
...
JC:But hacking motivation should be consensual.
Whose playing skills do you admire?
...
[link four: "yet money isn't the whole story..."]
JB:i'm not sure about this
DA:people have been gushing this for athletics for a long time
JB:ok yeah
but what changed
DA:i don't know
JB:what's happening
DA:maybe it was the flouride in the water supply
JB:it's very strange
DA:i think it's 'things getting cheaper'
JB:more learning material available?
i can't see what changed in classical music pedagogy in recent years
DA:as electronics get cheaper, more people pick up more electronics engineering projects for more spurious reasons
if speakers cost 100x what they do now, i wouldn't have gotten multiple breadboarded filter circuits for torn apart rebuilt speakers from one of my friends
because the components cost pennies, the barrier to action for 'doing the thing you learn from' plummets
JB:one thing that changed is that it's very cheap to record yourself
DA:small decreases in ux friction cause huge increases in quality, right?
that would be one change
i bet we're in the middle of like
20 sigmoid curves
stacked on top of each other
and we keep puncturing new prerequisites to unlock new sigmoid curves faster and faster
JB:especially, nowadays, in video
i film myself playing all the time and can thus easily pinpoint technique problems
and presence problems
and also rewatch myself for the ego boost
DA:and that's what a singularity is made from
winning became easier
people win more
people experience winning more, they want to win more
the growth in the want causes investment of time and energy and communication into making winning easier
i'm convinced it's a feedback loop where wins build emotional strength to win harder
JC:@JB: YES! And that (recording) allows feedback after the event, in the same way that chess analysis does. Or video for basketball. [If you have the emotional strength to face it.]
JB:oh i record in video as much as possible
storage is no issue at all thanks to google
DA:What is obsolete about scholasticism?
even as materials drop to price:0
and winning is easier than ever
there's no deliberate 'classes in winning'
JB:google will have enough videos of my playing that they'll be able to recreate arbitrary performances once im dead
DA:to teach this motive drive to explode into perfection
JB:but cheap tape recorders exist since the 70s or maybe earlier
DA:the recorders also sucked
JC:The trick is to align the different feedbacks.
DA:but also JB, the cultural awareness of how and why to use the tape recorders had to spread
that takes years
decades?
trying new things is emotionally and mentally expensive
JB:we have for example home tape recordings of nick drake practicing
but i think they were mostly used for demos
JC:(And with really cheap tape recorders you'd be distracted by the recording artefacts)
JB:but! tape was expensive I think
DA:the quality of the cheap recorder matters too yeah
JB:so you couldn't keep archives
you can't play the piano over the phone these days either
because it's vocoded
i would use audacity for my sketch recordings but it takes a lot of RAM on my machine for some reason :disappointed:
and the playback head is invisible when it plays
anyway
still haven't found a webcam recorder that doesn't crash
DA:but really it seems more like being able to produce new insights is a skill that can be developed or super-developed and ambitious people should drip business cases off their back when they sweat
CD:Currently the brand name for this is "Design Thinking." It's a terrible grand but IDEO sucked up the mind share in the 80s
DA:oh yeah CD, i read some retrospectives on that, it sounded like the idea has tainted mindshare from lazy 'design' branding
wow, what an incredible wikipedia 2 line history of brain drain into complete irrelevance
[firefox_2020-09-30_15-30-56.png]
[firefox_2020-09-30_15-30-56.png]
JB:one company's brain drain is another company's brain gain
maybe
DA:one man's brain droll, another man's brain swole
JB:pay the mole toll
CD:Yeah David Kelley was the OG. He knew what made their process special, then it became commodotized as they let researchers study them in order to market to HBR subscribed consultants
DA:also like, why 'spend design on underprivileged communities'
why not hire poor people to work as designers in your palo alto offices where they make you 10 million a year each minimum
very 'doling out power' and not 'creating new power from nothing'
tsk tsk
CD:Long tail innovation
DA:so its sounding again like stanford in the 80s was literally the most interesting place on earth
CD:It was the reason for the success of Rocket Internet and others like it
DA:what went right there?
hmm, it sounds like calcification happened in concert with and or because of attempts to turn the design group into 'university education plans'
did this happen because the people who worked there got literally old
and started to turn narcissistic and obsessed with legacies
this is all wikipedia level analysis, which is my favorite kind of analysis because wikipedia is consistently low information in such precise ways that it becomes a valuable source of information again
through what is missing from the wikipedia page, you learn all that you need to know about the organization
CD:I should mention that innovation consulting is work you only get once every 10 years or so, because clients have to scale the thing you built for them, so IDEO thought they would fill in the time between by helping clients assemble their own internal innovation organizations
Turns out that was a bad move as it commodotized their process
Bing Crosby -> magnetic tape -> semi-conductors -> mainframes -> darpanet -> pc's -> www -> web 2.0
DA:so it was all bing crosby this whole time
damn
JB:what about bob crosby
he had a good voice too
c.f. fallout 3
im not sure i would have gotten into jazz without that game
CD:I guess I should also mention radio and sigint/cointelpro which was first funded at Stanford
That was pre-Crosby, but the reason he dumped private money into magnetic tape
DA:hold up
they invented laugh tracks in the same team that commissioned
a million magnetic tape recording units
CD:Yup
DA:ok so tape recording was actually responsible for part of the explosive growth in human talent
CD:Yup
JB:yeah tape is compositional, you literally, well, tape bits of tape together
see musique concrete shit
[Pierre Henry (& Pierre Schaeffer) - Bidule En Ut [1950]]
so DA when you said samplers were the most important invention in the history of music
you were correct
DA:i mean, yeah jolly
it destroys the distinction between 'things that are instruments or musical voices' and 'things that are not'
JB:good observation
DA:this track still holds up btw
JB:yup
i think you'd like these electronic music innovators
they had pretty extensive theory about classifications of sounds
which is still taught in french music schools, but is otherwise unknown
conceiving of sounds as motions of energy
sound-objects
CD:France used to be the center of all art and then lost it when the commies are ate their lunch (edited)
JB:hm wait what do you mean by commies ate their lunch
CD:It all moved to global communes after that. The Surrealist Manifesto tore hegemony from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Artes lifeless mortised hands
And art became a people's project. Trotsky evangelized with Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera for a people's movement of art, and then the Bolsheviks adopted the strategy and formalized it with Communist International and the Proletkult
JB:I see
CD:No one institution, or country, has been able to claim art since. The French have been trying to hang onto cinema but I don't think anyone actually believes it still lives there (edited)
Maybe Tokyo owns fashion
Czech owns puppetry I guess
JB:netflix lol
CD:The French won't even let them into Cannes