My gut was the one that told me that hey, maybe after your first girlfriend broke up with you, the right way to win her back back is to throw yourself into your work at MIT and call her up in tears every night for a month. My gut was the one that said: that extra slice of cake is what you want right now and will have no bearing on your fitness goals. It was the one that said: I want to appear logical and deep because somehow having other people treat me as logical and deep makes me feel like I'm actually more logical and deep.
My gut is the one that keeps telling me: the computer screen and facebook is more important than starting your homework assignment due in two days. My verbal brain ("I'll do it tomorrow!") simply gives rationalizations to this pre-written bottom line.
I don't think my gut actually follows logic, nor does anyone's. My gut's motivation comes from hard-won experience and tells me in the blink of an eye what I think will happen at any point in time. It has incredible power, and it also does not use an ounce of logical reasoning.
So why do I think my gut is telling me something so reasoned and noble as: "I want to work hard at work because I know that doing so will help me with my friends and family?"
Tuesday, February 23, 2016
Saturday, February 6, 2016
The Title of this Blog
Knotgrass.
This is a reference to a (translated) version of a poem penned by Xue Baochai, one of two heroines of the Dream of the Red Chamber -- a Chinese classic.
Remembering the Chrysanthemums
The autumn wind that through the knotgrass blows,
Blurs the sad gazer’s eye with unshed tears;
But autumn’s guest, who last year graced this plot,
Only, as yet, in dreams of night appears.
The wild geese from the North are now returning;
The dhobi’s thump at evening fills my ears.
Those golden flowers for which you see me pine
I’ll meet once more at this year’s Double Nine.
There's something about that book that had a lot of grip. It showed the world as it could be -- the idyllic titular dream, of a free pasttime with quality poetry and games, and of course diligence and work, in the gardens of Imperial Qing dynasty Jinling.
Of course, the whole point is that this dream crashes down and buries half the characters with it. Life isn't that easy.
But the good parts were so good.
*
Competence.
To build a very simplistic model, I have what's called a "competence problem". The core feature of the "competence problem" is:
(1) inability to pay attention to detail. This prevents execution
(2) lack of discernment of context -- i will react in the same way when encountering a problem I'm very familiar with (outsource it to my intuition, or System 1), as I will when encountering a task I've never done before. The latter takes much longer, even if it's easy.
One example I remember quite clearly is my interview with Hudson River Trading. The CEO asked me to do a simple task: sorting cards by suit as they come up, with an extra rule attached -- shift the sevens one suite to the right. (Clubs, Diamonds, Hearts, Spades). (Note: this was not the actual task, since I am not supposed to say those -- but it was close enough for all intents and purposes). Easy enough, I thought, and I gave an estimate of how long it would take me. Sorting a deck of cards by suit was a 30 second task -- two cards per minute seemed reasonable. Sorting it by suit with this extra layer of complexity would probably take triple that time, so one and a half minutes.
Nope. Took a long ass time. Probably more on the order of 3 minutes.
THen -- the second time I did the same task, it took 1 and a half minutes. And then the third time, even faster.
Essentially, even if the task was easy (its just sorting cards), the first time took a while -- and my System 1 and intuition kept misfiring when I tried to do it as fast as I would sort regular cards. The context and task had changed, but my intuition (System 1) was not picking up on the difference. The signals it was taking -- i had a deck of cards, was doing a sorting that I'd done before, in front of an interview where speed was premium, signaled it to try and move fast.
But the key difference -- that it was in fact a different, if trivial, task, that I had never executed on before -- made it take thrice as long, and called for an entirely different algorithm -- the algorithm in which I was slower and charting out a new space, not relying on my intuition and gut to work automatically.
*
This small insight -- about not being able to tell the difference between a familiar task and a seemingly-familiar-but-actually-quite-different task -- seems prevalent in the way that I think. Someone who is trained to grab falling objects will also grab a falling knife by instinct, and injure themselves badly.
For me personally, this comes up all the time in my life in coding, in solving math problems, in learning, in playing smash brothers -- but it's especially noticeable in coding, where I sit and churn for a while w hen lacking the models of how all the code works. One thing that seems to be interesting is picking up on signals t hat in fact this is a new task doing something I've never done before -- asking myself to imagine what the code base could be like (it could be anything for all I know), asking myself to sketch out the API and noticing I'm coming up blank, or even the fact that I just opened a f ile I have never touched beofre.
This is a reference to a (translated) version of a poem penned by Xue Baochai, one of two heroines of the Dream of the Red Chamber -- a Chinese classic.
Remembering the Chrysanthemums
The autumn wind that through the knotgrass blows,
Blurs the sad gazer’s eye with unshed tears;
But autumn’s guest, who last year graced this plot,
Only, as yet, in dreams of night appears.
The wild geese from the North are now returning;
The dhobi’s thump at evening fills my ears.
Those golden flowers for which you see me pine
I’ll meet once more at this year’s Double Nine.
There's something about that book that had a lot of grip. It showed the world as it could be -- the idyllic titular dream, of a free pasttime with quality poetry and games, and of course diligence and work, in the gardens of Imperial Qing dynasty Jinling.
Of course, the whole point is that this dream crashes down and buries half the characters with it. Life isn't that easy.
But the good parts were so good.
*
Competence.
To build a very simplistic model, I have what's called a "competence problem". The core feature of the "competence problem" is:
(1) inability to pay attention to detail. This prevents execution
(2) lack of discernment of context -- i will react in the same way when encountering a problem I'm very familiar with (outsource it to my intuition, or System 1), as I will when encountering a task I've never done before. The latter takes much longer, even if it's easy.
One example I remember quite clearly is my interview with Hudson River Trading. The CEO asked me to do a simple task: sorting cards by suit as they come up, with an extra rule attached -- shift the sevens one suite to the right. (Clubs, Diamonds, Hearts, Spades). (Note: this was not the actual task, since I am not supposed to say those -- but it was close enough for all intents and purposes). Easy enough, I thought, and I gave an estimate of how long it would take me. Sorting a deck of cards by suit was a 30 second task -- two cards per minute seemed reasonable. Sorting it by suit with this extra layer of complexity would probably take triple that time, so one and a half minutes.
Nope. Took a long ass time. Probably more on the order of 3 minutes.
THen -- the second time I did the same task, it took 1 and a half minutes. And then the third time, even faster.
Essentially, even if the task was easy (its just sorting cards), the first time took a while -- and my System 1 and intuition kept misfiring when I tried to do it as fast as I would sort regular cards. The context and task had changed, but my intuition (System 1) was not picking up on the difference. The signals it was taking -- i had a deck of cards, was doing a sorting that I'd done before, in front of an interview where speed was premium, signaled it to try and move fast.
But the key difference -- that it was in fact a different, if trivial, task, that I had never executed on before -- made it take thrice as long, and called for an entirely different algorithm -- the algorithm in which I was slower and charting out a new space, not relying on my intuition and gut to work automatically.
*
This small insight -- about not being able to tell the difference between a familiar task and a seemingly-familiar-but-actually-quite-different task -- seems prevalent in the way that I think. Someone who is trained to grab falling objects will also grab a falling knife by instinct, and injure themselves badly.
For me personally, this comes up all the time in my life in coding, in solving math problems, in learning, in playing smash brothers -- but it's especially noticeable in coding, where I sit and churn for a while w hen lacking the models of how all the code works. One thing that seems to be interesting is picking up on signals t hat in fact this is a new task doing something I've never done before -- asking myself to imagine what the code base could be like (it could be anything for all I know), asking myself to sketch out the API and noticing I'm coming up blank, or even the fact that I just opened a f ile I have never touched beofre.
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