I’ve gotten better at computer programming (as demonstrated by the fact that I used to not know how to code and now I can code pretty well), and not only have I never done anything that sounds like this, I am not sure I even understand what it would mean to do this. (Is it just “optimize your workflow on a task”? If so, then it seems very mis-decribed. Or is it something else?)
I am not sure what you mean by step #1 (when something “feels like it should” take some amount of time, but ends up taking more time, it’s generally not because I made some mistake, but rather because my initial “feeling” turned out to be mistaken about how much time the task “should” take—which is not shocking, as such “feelings” are necessarily probabilistic).
The rest of it seems like… learning from mistakes and optimizing your practices/workflows/etc. based on experience. Is that what you’re talking about?
I confess that I’m still confused about how any of this could be described as “how could I have thought that faster”. Eliezer writes about “retrain[ing] [himself] to perform only those steps over the course of 30 seconds”, and… that just does not seem like it has anything to do with what you’re describing? Am I missing some analogy here, or what?
I’ve gotten better at computer programming (as demonstrated by the fact that I used to not know how to code and now I can code pretty well), and not only have I never done anything that sounds like this, I am not sure I even understand what it would mean to do this. (Is it just “optimize your workflow on a task”? If so, then it seems very mis-decribed. Or is it something else?)
Do a task that feels like it should have taken 3 hours in 6 hours
Think about what mistakes you made (maybe I should have tested this functionality, before attempting to build that entire system out)
Turn it into a larger lesson (if cheap, create small test programs instead of writing 2500 new lines and debugging all of them in one pass)
Apply the larger lesson going forward
I am not sure what you mean by step #1 (when something “feels like it should” take some amount of time, but ends up taking more time, it’s generally not because I made some mistake, but rather because my initial “feeling” turned out to be mistaken about how much time the task “should” take—which is not shocking, as such “feelings” are necessarily probabilistic).
The rest of it seems like… learning from mistakes and optimizing your practices/workflows/etc. based on experience. Is that what you’re talking about?
I confess that I’m still confused about how any of this could be described as “how could I have thought that faster”. Eliezer writes about “retrain[ing] [himself] to perform only those steps over the course of 30 seconds”, and… that just does not seem like it has anything to do with what you’re describing? Am I missing some analogy here, or what?