Huh! Measure the speed of the ball coming off of the ramp was one of the first things that I thought of, but I assumed that that came too close to a full “dry run” to count. I think the lesson to be learned in this case is to first try it and see if someone stops you.
You can even do partial runs, e.g. roll the ball down the ramp and stop it at the bottom, or throw the ball through the air.
But you only get one full end-to-end run, and anything too close to an end-to-end run is discouraged.
I heard “you can roll the ball down the ramp and stop it at the bottom, but we will discourage it and look at you sideways and you will get less metaphorical points if you do”.
The way I read the combination of those two bullets was “You can roll the ball down the ramp and stop it at the bottom, but in that case, the ball can’t start at the top of the ramp, you need to put it down at the halfway point or something like that”.
In retrospect I guess “end-to-end run” meant “from the ramp to the cup” but for some reason, I interpreted it as “from one end of the ramp to the other”.
Confirming that I came to this later, and I still thought this was metaphorically going to lose a bunch of points versus not doing it since the metaphorically similar action does not seem especially safe and also it seemed to screen off the actually hard parts of the problem (and thus felt too easy).
Getting around having to solve the hard parts of a problem entirely and still getting to the correct solution is what I’d generally consider an intelligent approach.
Sure, it might feel a lot less satisfying than actually figuring out all the details, but it is goal-oriented and I’d say goal-oriented thinking is very encouraged on a “time-limited you only have one try to get it right”- problem.
I suppose this actually raises the question which shortcuts are allowed and which are likely to cause issues later if not figured out at the start since there were ways around having to do that.
Either way, I interpret the existence of a tight time span as: “You don’t get to figure out every detail of this problem.”
My takeaway is that the metaphorical style points only start mattering AFTER you have any valid solution at all.
Another lesson is doing hard things sometimes requires doing things that bend the rules or causes people to disapprove of you. In my personal experience, lesswrongers seem to worry about stuff a bit more than average, and I think the average person worries about stuff much more than is optimal.
Also an extremely important lesson to learn is that toy problems are actually useful, it’s actually useful to try to solve them, their design is sometimes difficult, a well designed toy problem often works better than it seems from a surface reading, and that continually trying to “subvert the rules” and find “out of the box solutions” does not end up getting you the value that the toy problem designer was aiming to give you.
I think I either moderately or strongly disagree about the “bend the rules” part. I think some locals are far too willing to bend rules or break implicit (and in many cases explicit) norms, and many other locals are far too unwilling to enforce norms or to punish norm deviance. Arguably the combination has already gotten quite a few people in trouble and has caused a number of negative externalities to others, and there’s no particular reason to think this will stop.
I’m more sympathetic to “doing hard things requires doing things that cause people to disapprove of you” claim, particularly if we restrict to people who negatively judge your competency (as opposed to negatively judge your morality).
Huh! Measure the speed of the ball coming off of the ramp was one of the first things that I thought of, but I assumed that that came too close to a full “dry run” to count. I think the lesson to be learned in this case is to first try it and see if someone stops you.
Uh-oh. (This is what we in business call a broken aesop.)
I mean, “roll the ball down the ramp and stop it at the bottom” is explicitly ruled in, at the beginning.
FWIW, when I read
I heard “you can roll the ball down the ramp and stop it at the bottom, but we will discourage it and look at you sideways and you will get less metaphorical points if you do”.
The way I read the combination of those two bullets was “You can roll the ball down the ramp and stop it at the bottom, but in that case, the ball can’t start at the top of the ramp, you need to put it down at the halfway point or something like that”.
In retrospect I guess “end-to-end run” meant “from the ramp to the cup” but for some reason, I interpreted it as “from one end of the ramp to the other”.
That’s useful, thanks. I’ve edited to clarify.
Confirming that I came to this later, and I still thought this was metaphorically going to lose a bunch of points versus not doing it since the metaphorically similar action does not seem especially safe and also it seemed to screen off the actually hard parts of the problem (and thus felt too easy).
Getting around having to solve the hard parts of a problem entirely and still getting to the correct solution is what I’d generally consider an intelligent approach.
Sure, it might feel a lot less satisfying than actually figuring out all the details, but it is goal-oriented and I’d say goal-oriented thinking is very encouraged on a “time-limited you only have one try to get it right”- problem.
I suppose this actually raises the question which shortcuts are allowed and which are likely to cause issues later if not figured out at the start since there were ways around having to do that.
Either way, I interpret the existence of a tight time span as: “You don’t get to figure out every detail of this problem.”
My takeaway is that the metaphorical style points only start mattering AFTER you have any valid solution at all.
Another lesson is doing hard things sometimes requires doing things that bend the rules or causes people to disapprove of you. In my personal experience, lesswrongers seem to worry about stuff a bit more than average, and I think the average person worries about stuff much more than is optimal.
Also an extremely important lesson to learn is that toy problems are actually useful, it’s actually useful to try to solve them, their design is sometimes difficult, a well designed toy problem often works better than it seems from a surface reading, and that continually trying to “subvert the rules” and find “out of the box solutions” does not end up getting you the value that the toy problem designer was aiming to give you.
I think I either moderately or strongly disagree about the “bend the rules” part. I think some locals are far too willing to bend rules or break implicit (and in many cases explicit) norms, and many other locals are far too unwilling to enforce norms or to punish norm deviance. Arguably the combination has already gotten quite a few people in trouble and has caused a number of negative externalities to others, and there’s no particular reason to think this will stop.
I’m more sympathetic to “doing hard things requires doing things that cause people to disapprove of you” claim, particularly if we restrict to people who negatively judge your competency (as opposed to negatively judge your morality).