… and Carol’s thoughts run into a blank wall. In the first few seconds, she sees no toeholds, not even a starting point. And so she reflexively flinches away from that problem, and turns back to some easier problems.
I spend ~10 hours trying to teach people how to think. I sometimes try to intentionally cause this to happen. Usually you can recognize it by them starting to be quiet (I usually give the instruction that they should do all their thinking out loud). And this seems to be when actual cognitive labor is happening, instead of saying things that you already knew. Though usually they by default fail earlier than “realizing the hard parts of ELK”.
Usually I need to tell them that actually they are doing great by thinking about the black wall more, and shouldn’t now switch the topic.
Infact it seem to be a good general idea generation strategy to just write down all the easy ideas first, until you hit this wall, such that you can start to actually think.
Why Physicists are competent
Here is my current model after thinking about this for 30 minutes of why physicists are good at solving hard problems (not ever having studied physics extensively myself).
The job description of a physicist is basically “understand the world”, meaning make models that have predictive power over the real world.
This is very different from math. In some sense a lot harder. In math you know everything. There is no uncertainty. And you have a very good method to verify that you are correct. If you have generated a proof, it’s correct. It’s also different from computer science for similar reasons.
But of cause physicists need to be very skilled at math, because if you are not skilled at math you can’t make good models that have predictive power. Similarly physicists need to be good at computer science, to implement physicsal simulations, which often involve complex algorithms. And to be able to actually implement these algorithms such that they are fast enough, and run at all, they need to also be decent at software engeneering.
Also understanding the scientific method is a lot more important when you are physicist. It’s sort of not required to understand science for doing math and theoretical CS.
Another thing is that physicists need actually do things that work. You can do some random math that’s not useful at all. It seems harder to make a random model of reality that predicts some aspect of reality that you couldn’t predict before, and have you not figure out anything important. As a physicist you are actually measured by how reality is. You can’t go “hmm maybe this just doesn’t work” like in math. Obviously somehow it works because it’s reality, you just haven’t figured out how to properly capture how reality is in your model.
Perhaps this trains physicist to not give up on problems, because the default assumption is that clearly there must be some way to model some part of reality, because reality is in some sense already a model of itself.
I think this is the most important cognitive skill. Not giving up. I think this is much more important than any particular pice of technical knowledge. Having technical knowledge is of cause required, but it seems that if you where to not give up on thinking how to solve a problem (that is hard but important) would make you end up learning whatever is required.
And in some sense it is this simple. When I see people run into a wall, and then have them stare at a wall they often have ideas that I like so much that I feel the need to write them down.
I spend ~10 hours trying to teach people how to think. I sometimes try to intentionally cause this to happen. Usually you can recognize it by them starting to be quiet (I usually give the instruction that they should do all their thinking out loud). And this seems to be when actual cognitive labor is happening, instead of saying things that you already knew. Though usually they by default fail earlier than “realizing the hard parts of ELK”.
Usually I need to tell them that actually they are doing great by thinking about the black wall more, and shouldn’t now switch the topic.
Infact it seem to be a good general idea generation strategy to just write down all the easy ideas first, until you hit this wall, such that you can start to actually think.
Why Physicists are competent
Here is my current model after thinking about this for 30 minutes of why physicists are good at solving hard problems (not ever having studied physics extensively myself).
The job description of a physicist is basically “understand the world”, meaning make models that have predictive power over the real world.
This is very different from math. In some sense a lot harder. In math you know everything. There is no uncertainty. And you have a very good method to verify that you are correct. If you have generated a proof, it’s correct. It’s also different from computer science for similar reasons.
But of cause physicists need to be very skilled at math, because if you are not skilled at math you can’t make good models that have predictive power. Similarly physicists need to be good at computer science, to implement physicsal simulations, which often involve complex algorithms. And to be able to actually implement these algorithms such that they are fast enough, and run at all, they need to also be decent at software engeneering.
Also understanding the scientific method is a lot more important when you are physicist. It’s sort of not required to understand science for doing math and theoretical CS.
Another thing is that physicists need actually do things that work. You can do some random math that’s not useful at all. It seems harder to make a random model of reality that predicts some aspect of reality that you couldn’t predict before, and have you not figure out anything important. As a physicist you are actually measured by how reality is. You can’t go “hmm maybe this just doesn’t work” like in math. Obviously somehow it works because it’s reality, you just haven’t figured out how to properly capture how reality is in your model.
Perhaps this trains physicist to not give up on problems, because the default assumption is that clearly there must be some way to model some part of reality, because reality is in some sense already a model of itself.
I think this is the most important cognitive skill. Not giving up. I think this is much more important than any particular pice of technical knowledge. Having technical knowledge is of cause required, but it seems that if you where to not give up on thinking how to solve a problem (that is hard but important) would make you end up learning whatever is required.
And in some sense it is this simple. When I see people run into a wall, and then have them stare at a wall they often have ideas that I like so much that I feel the need to write them down.