I agree that, from your stand point, you are correct in not entirely trusting me, when I claim to know my own brains working, in the case of this single word. And that is ok.
I wrote my fist post out of frustration over this way of interpreting “try”:
I am rather offended by the the thought that when I say, “I am going to try”, some one might interpret that as “I am going to try to try”, or even “I am going to pretend to try”. Because that was not what I said, and it was defiantly not what I meant. When I say “I am going to try”, it means that I will put extra effort in to the task, just because I am aware of the risk of failure.
I usually succeed in keeping my rants of the Internet, but not always. Sorry about that, and for getting unnecessarily defensive at your responses.
As said, I am ok with you doubting me on weather I know my own brains working, in the case of this single word. But it would be fun if I could convince you. Do you want to help? Any idea of a test you could give me?
Regarding your example with Bob and Dave. How do I think is trying hardest? I do not know. To judge this, I would need to know the reasons for why they are doing what they are doing.
I have not yet defined how I want to measure the amount of trying. I have an intuitive idea, but it is less prices than my concept of trying. When I try to formalize my thoughs I get something like this:
Try X = Optimizing for X, usually given some constraints (e.g. unacceptable actions or risks, limited amount of time, money and other resources, that one is willing to spend on the try)
Amount of trying X = How much time, money and other resources one is spending directly on optimizing for X.
Trying ones best = Optimizing for X
Additionally, all the optimizations happens in the real world. Aside from deliberate constraints, there are always the real constraints of the real world, including how smart one is. (Edit: Shit, do I run in to the problem with determinism here? It should not matter, but I am not entirely sure. I need think more about this.)
This means that I can try my best at something, and you can still try harder, if you have more resources that can be invested. I expect that this sounds odd to you, but it actually lines up nicely with my intuition.
Do you want to help? Any idea of a test you could give me?
Most tests I could give you would would result in you trying to find the right answer and thus not test intuitive language usage. If you had a corpus of English text you wrote previously you could search it for “try” and get the first X examples. Then why could analyse what you meant with the word try.
But I think I can work with the rest of your post.
This means that I can try my best at something, and you can still try harder, if you have more resources that can be invested.
This suggest that investing more resources mean trying harder.
In cases where investing more resources means that success is less likely that notion of trying harder isn’t optimization for a goal.
The woman who’s playing hard to get isn’t “trying”. She isn’t investing resources. She might still use the strategy that produces the best results.
In the case of the hypnosis effect of forgetting the numbers, that’s not something I can achieve while trying to optimize for it. For me that seminar was a reference experience. I sat there and knew that I can only achieve the goal if I would stop trying to optimize for it. The fact that I really wanted to optimize for it and succeed only made it worse.
Investing resources and optimizing is different from doing what’s necessary.
Sometimes “Just be yourself” would be good advice if the answer person could accept it*, because it stops the optimization and the trying that are the biggest problem.
*In practice people can’t accept it so it usually isn’t effective advice.
This means that I can try my best at something, and you can still try harder, if you have more resources that can be invested.
This suggest that investing more resources mean trying harder.
Yes, I just said so
Amount of trying X = How much time, money and other resources one is spending directly on optimizing for X.
But only if the added resources actually goes towards optimizing for winning. More precisely: If and only if I think that adding more resources will improve my expected outcome, then adding more resources, is trying harder.
I know what you mean with the hypnosis, my experience was very similar. But I did less post analysis than you.
I am not going to get in to exactly why I hate the advise “Be yourself”, because it is a bit too personal and also off topic. But because I thought it was such a terrible advise, and why would anyone say that, I did some asking and thinking. Next time you are giving advise, Instead of saying “Be yourself”, say “Focus on others”. As you have already realized, saying “Be yourself” is telling people what not to do, which is not helpful. So tell them what to do instead. The best way to avoid doing X is to do Y instead, and there are extremely few situations where there are no possible Y to focus on. Mediation and trying to be hypnotized are the only examples I can think of, and even in mediation instructions, you are toled to focus on you breathing, or something, because doing nothing is too hard. But in most situations there are things you can focus you attention and efforts on, that are actually useful, and not just an artificial distraction. The circumstance where “Be yourself”, usually pop up is when someone needs advise on how to do a good impression on an other person (date, interview for a job, etc). In these situations, a good choice is to focus on the other person, to get to know them.
Mediation and trying to be hypnotized are the only examples I can think of, and even in mediation instructions, you are toled to focus on you breathing, or something, because doing nothing is too hard.
Being told to focus on breathing is indeed the version of meditation that’s popular for teaching beginners because it’s an easy entry. It isn’t too hard. There are harder version to mediate that don’t work via easy prompts.
The same goes for “Just be yourself” it’s too hard to expect the other person to do it, so you give them another prompt. But generally good social advice is more targeted to the individual person.
I agree that, from your stand point, you are correct in not entirely trusting me, when I claim to know my own brains working, in the case of this single word. And that is ok.
I wrote my fist post out of frustration over this way of interpreting “try”:
I usually succeed in keeping my rants of the Internet, but not always. Sorry about that, and for getting unnecessarily defensive at your responses.
As said, I am ok with you doubting me on weather I know my own brains working, in the case of this single word. But it would be fun if I could convince you. Do you want to help? Any idea of a test you could give me?
Regarding your example with Bob and Dave. How do I think is trying hardest? I do not know. To judge this, I would need to know the reasons for why they are doing what they are doing.
I have not yet defined how I want to measure the amount of trying. I have an intuitive idea, but it is less prices than my concept of trying. When I try to formalize my thoughs I get something like this:
Try X = Optimizing for X, usually given some constraints (e.g. unacceptable actions or risks, limited amount of time, money and other resources, that one is willing to spend on the try)
Amount of trying X = How much time, money and other resources one is spending directly on optimizing for X.
Trying ones best = Optimizing for X
Additionally, all the optimizations happens in the real world. Aside from deliberate constraints, there are always the real constraints of the real world, including how smart one is. (Edit: Shit, do I run in to the problem with determinism here? It should not matter, but I am not entirely sure. I need think more about this.)
This means that I can try my best at something, and you can still try harder, if you have more resources that can be invested. I expect that this sounds odd to you, but it actually lines up nicely with my intuition.
Most tests I could give you would would result in you trying to find the right answer and thus not test intuitive language usage. If you had a corpus of English text you wrote previously you could search it for “try” and get the first X examples. Then why could analyse what you meant with the word try.
But I think I can work with the rest of your post.
This suggest that investing more resources mean trying harder.
In cases where investing more resources means that success is less likely that notion of trying harder isn’t optimization for a goal.
The woman who’s playing hard to get isn’t “trying”. She isn’t investing resources. She might still use the strategy that produces the best results.
In the case of the hypnosis effect of forgetting the numbers, that’s not something I can achieve while trying to optimize for it. For me that seminar was a reference experience. I sat there and knew that I can only achieve the goal if I would stop trying to optimize for it. The fact that I really wanted to optimize for it and succeed only made it worse.
Investing resources and optimizing is different from doing what’s necessary.
Sometimes “Just be yourself” would be good advice if the answer person could accept it*, because it stops the optimization and the trying that are the biggest problem.
*In practice people can’t accept it so it usually isn’t effective advice.
Yes, I just said so
But only if the added resources actually goes towards optimizing for winning. More precisely: If and only if I think that adding more resources will improve my expected outcome, then adding more resources, is trying harder.
I know what you mean with the hypnosis, my experience was very similar. But I did less post analysis than you.
I am not going to get in to exactly why I hate the advise “Be yourself”, because it is a bit too personal and also off topic. But because I thought it was such a terrible advise, and why would anyone say that, I did some asking and thinking. Next time you are giving advise, Instead of saying “Be yourself”, say “Focus on others”. As you have already realized, saying “Be yourself” is telling people what not to do, which is not helpful. So tell them what to do instead. The best way to avoid doing X is to do Y instead, and there are extremely few situations where there are no possible Y to focus on. Mediation and trying to be hypnotized are the only examples I can think of, and even in mediation instructions, you are toled to focus on you breathing, or something, because doing nothing is too hard. But in most situations there are things you can focus you attention and efforts on, that are actually useful, and not just an artificial distraction. The circumstance where “Be yourself”, usually pop up is when someone needs advise on how to do a good impression on an other person (date, interview for a job, etc). In these situations, a good choice is to focus on the other person, to get to know them.
Being told to focus on breathing is indeed the version of meditation that’s popular for teaching beginners because it’s an easy entry. It isn’t too hard. There are harder version to mediate that don’t work via easy prompts.
The same goes for “Just be yourself” it’s too hard to expect the other person to do it, so you give them another prompt. But generally good social advice is more targeted to the individual person.