Before anything else, thank you for the small piece about “adjusting your seat”. It’s taken a considerable amount of pressure/dread off of doing Hammertime.
Anyway,
It seems like the heart of the bug hunting skill, is having enough gears in your understanding of a certain domain. Such that you can find specific faults, inefficiencies, and leverage points to address. The inclination to go meta with the domain is also very helpful.
For example, in my own practice of bug hunt, I initially found myself selecting things I was explicitly doing wrong. Over time I started realizing that while this is helpful, it is not the entire picture. Why? Because the purpose of bug hunt is to find things that, if changed, will produce a better result in some area. With this in mind I realized that by shifting my actionable model of bug hunting, I can produce not only way more bugs, but much more salient ones. This came about by way of modeling what bug hunt currently does, and what it would optimally do. The difference between these two concepts are what I now think of as bugs.(eg using bug-hunt on itself proved to be a powerful investment of my time).
Right now I think my most immodest ambition is to Try and Hammer one rationality skill every four days. I’m going to apply it with as much consistency and versatility as I possible can. I’ll then write about what I learn, and connect each skill I’ve learned before, to my current skill, to try and embed each one thoroughly in my toolbox.
I second the thank you for the “adjust your seat” thing!
Sometimes when a technique doesn’t seem to quite fit I’m not sure whether I’m missing a skill that would actually be useful to me, or whether I would actually do better to change the technique for my benefit; probably the answer is sometimes the first thing and sometimes the second.
Thanks for the feedback. After your Intermission comment I’ve updated towards continuing to add “meta-motivation” blurbs like adjust your seat at the beginning of each post. CFAR had a bunch of these which were if anything more helpful than the actual class content.
Before anything else, thank you for the small piece about “adjusting your seat”. It’s taken a considerable amount of pressure/dread off of doing Hammertime.
Anyway,
It seems like the heart of the bug hunting skill, is having enough gears in your understanding of a certain domain. Such that you can find specific faults, inefficiencies, and leverage points to address. The inclination to go meta with the domain is also very helpful.
For example, in my own practice of bug hunt, I initially found myself selecting things I was explicitly doing wrong. Over time I started realizing that while this is helpful, it is not the entire picture. Why? Because the purpose of bug hunt is to find things that, if changed, will produce a better result in some area. With this in mind I realized that by shifting my actionable model of bug hunting, I can produce not only way more bugs, but much more salient ones. This came about by way of modeling what bug hunt currently does, and what it would optimally do. The difference between these two concepts are what I now think of as bugs.(eg using bug-hunt on itself proved to be a powerful investment of my time).
Right now I think my most immodest ambition is to Try and Hammer one rationality skill every four days. I’m going to apply it with as much consistency and versatility as I possible can. I’ll then write about what I learn, and connect each skill I’ve learned before, to my current skill, to try and embed each one thoroughly in my toolbox.
I second the thank you for the “adjust your seat” thing!
Sometimes when a technique doesn’t seem to quite fit I’m not sure whether I’m missing a skill that would actually be useful to me, or whether I would actually do better to change the technique for my benefit; probably the answer is sometimes the first thing and sometimes the second.
Thanks for the feedback. After your Intermission comment I’ve updated towards continuing to add “meta-motivation” blurbs like adjust your seat at the beginning of each post. CFAR had a bunch of these which were if anything more helpful than the actual class content.