The unreasonable effectiveness of doing, then thinking; vs thinking too much before doing
In other words, you may have looked at someone and gone:
Wow, they’re really smart. Thinking really works for them.
But why does it work for them? Because first, they did. And/then they learned from it.
(Welcome back to learning about how minds work from neural networks. Today we will be covering the importance of: ‘data’ also known as ‘a good train set’. Other methods act in an environment, but this also produces a dataset. The question of quality is resolved in the case of AlphaGo...)
“why is this rash, you’re not trying to spear-hunt a fucking bear, you’re writing some code in the privacy of your own home
If you start exercising you might...become an Olympic athlete. Such a terrible fate often awaits those who head down this slippery slope. Each cries ‘that probably won’t happen to me’. And then it does.
Anyway, I’m not going to try to convince anyone to do then think. I can’t prove nor even properly conceptualize why you should start doing that. But I want to try and at least think about a few reasons why doing before thinking, or at least doing something that seems like doing before thinking, is so unreasonably ineffective.
Tools are created to solve a problem.
You don’t become a writer by saying ‘I want to become a writer’. Maybe you say ‘I want to write this story’. Or maybe you don’t—you just write a story.
Maybe you become a blogger by blogging.
It’s important to note that riding a bike can’t be first learned at a theoretical level.
First? Who has learned it at a theoretical level?
Anyway, we’re talking about things that are more complex than bike riding here
I’m going to guess that bike riding is complex.
mechanics
What do you mean by this?
Alas, we are usually in lack of life and death scenarios
Something is wrong with this sentence. It’s still readable, but-
So it might be that doing than thinking
then
is unreasonably effective because we trade-off on wasting time and producing anxiety that might make us never take useful action, to begin with.
Yeah. A brain saying ‘you’re not doing anything, why think’ makes sense—as does, doing things that aren’t related:
recharges
helps/allows unconscious working
Helps get people out of dead ends
Sure, it’s good to question the fundamentals of math every now and then, but maybe it’s not best to do it as part of solving a mildly annoying but certainly-doable calculation
What are the fundamentals of math?
It’s also worth thinking if you’ve gone a bit too extreme with your dieting, but doing so in the middle of a diet is bound to always result in you rationalizing “yes” to be the answer in order to splurge on sweets.
When is the diet end point?
maybe they are all bad because I didn’t spend more than 30 minutes consciously ruminating on the subject,
Earlier:
Even though we have a lot of “mental power” available at any given moment, most of what we do with it feels “unelected”, we lack understanding about why conscious thoughts flow the way they do.
Perhaps by doing then thinking you will
learn more about why thoughts flow the way they do
(not sure about the conscious bit. Also not sure why conscious thought is so important.)
Also—on tales of monkeys:
It’s not obvious that circumstances have lots to do with
this is biological
instead of
this is how I grew up/learned.*
*Flexible enough accomdate:
I live in the woods
the mountains
The world is flat.
The world is round.
Also about the cyborg story:
AGI will take over the world.
What would an elf do?
Write poetry.
Do people think that taking over the world is easy if you don’t have self doubt?
In other words, you may have looked at someone and gone:
Wow, they’re really smart. Thinking really works for them.
But why does it work for them? Because first, they did. And/then they learned from it.
(Welcome back to learning about how minds work from neural networks. Today we will be covering the importance of: ‘data’ also known as ‘a good train set’. Other methods act in an environment, but this also produces a dataset. The question of quality is resolved in the case of AlphaGo...)
If you start exercising you might...become an Olympic athlete. Such a terrible fate often awaits those who head down this slippery slope. Each cries ‘that probably won’t happen to me’. And then it does.
Tools are created to solve a problem.
You don’t become a writer by saying ‘I want to become a writer’. Maybe you say ‘I want to write this story’. Or maybe you don’t—you just write a story.
Maybe you become a blogger by blogging.
First? Who has learned it at a theoretical level?
I’m going to guess that bike riding is complex.
What do you mean by this?
Something is wrong with this sentence. It’s still readable, but-
then
Yeah. A brain saying ‘you’re not doing anything, why think’ makes sense—as does, doing things that aren’t related:
recharges
helps/allows unconscious working
Helps get people out of dead ends
What are the fundamentals of math?
When is the diet end point?
Earlier:
Perhaps by doing then thinking you will
learn more about why thoughts flow the way they do
(not sure about the conscious bit. Also not sure why conscious thought is so important.)
Also—on tales of monkeys:
It’s not obvious that circumstances have lots to do with
this is biological
instead of
this is how I grew up/learned.*
*Flexible enough accomdate:
I live in the woods
the mountains
The world is flat.
The world is round.
Also about the cyborg story:
AGI will take over the world.
What would an elf do?
Write poetry.
Do people think that taking over the world is easy if you don’t have self doubt?