I’ve found that I mentally verbalize several mantras taken from the Twelve Virtues.
“There is a time to confess your ignorance and a time to relinquish your ignorance.”—This one comes up less at work, as in other cases. I’ve been in a jiu-jitsu class where a student, after being shown a technique, later at the water cooler said “I don’t understand what he was trying to demonstrate.” This struck me as dumb, and triggered this mantra in my head, as the instructor would have gladly redone the move any number of times had the student asked. At work I am surrounded by my many of my industry’s best developers (this is not an exaggeration). Sometimes I run into a problem I do not know how to solve, but I know they do. This mantra helps me swallow my pride and ask for the information I need to learn how to solve the problem. (However, see #3 below.)
“Let the winds of evidence blow you about as though you are a leaf, with no direction of your own.” This one has come into play lately when I’ve been reading or listening about political issues. I used to be very conservative, then later libertarian, but now I’m trying to mentally divorce my identity from political association entirely. I see this as similarly difficult a transition as when I became an atheist after being Christian. I still get easily baited by left leaning editorials, etc. I do not like these reactions, but they happen despite my conscious desire to not have them. So, I’ve taken to largely expunging my political beliefs in an attempt to move more toward an evidence driven world view. When you start to look at news sources in this light you find that most lack useful information to operate on and you feel less guilty about unplugging from those sources.
“Those who wish to fail must first prevent their friends from helping them.” This concept has always been significant to me, but this phrase captures the essence. When I am curious, I attempt to solve the problem on my own and do my own research. There are times I get information from those who are wiser, but in those cases I prefer hints over spoilers. The key is to get help, but not too much help.
Some more on #3 that occurred to me while re-reading my post. I’ve been working on Project Euler. So far the problems haven’t slowed me down, but looking ahead I can see some really tough ones. I’ve set a goal that I would try and learn, myself, what I needed to solve the problems. This may be impossible. At what point do I condemn myself to absolute failure unless I turn to an expert for help? How do I get the right amount of help on a subject I don’t know, because, in not knowing, I am less able to distinguish between too much help and not enough? If I have a good problem to solve and someone hands me an algorithm that solves it, it robs me of the chance of deriving the algorithm. But if I lack the requisite tools to derive the algorithm, I may also not recognize the difference between the tools and the algorithm itself.
So there are three of the twelve virtues that continually pop into my mind.
Those aren’t my exact intended meanings on some of them—but they’re good meanings nonetheless!
(Usually I’m suspicious of the alleged “accidental optimization” in that sort of reinterpretation, but I deliberately wrote the Twelve Virtues in evocative/poetic language, so this is much less suspicious than it would be with sentences from a random LW post.)
I think I understand your intended meaning for most of the Twelve Virtues and would take a bet validated by a test of the subject matter (hah!), but sometimes what sticks in my mind is an isomorphism I perceive between a statement and some experience. I recognize a danger that the association created by the perception of the isomorphism creates a cached thought that might be flatly incorrect or (at the very least) could obscure a deeper, more valuable truth. Is this what you tend to be suspicious of? Or is it that you are suspicious of someone claiming an intentional reinterpretation and then saying its better than what you meant in some way?
I’m suspicious of the idea that an author could mean one thing, and yet accidentally form a statement which has a different interpretation that is still true, like taking the syllables of a true sentence in Japanese, reciting them out loud, and finding that they form a true sentence in English. My childhood experience with Judaic “reinterpretation” of inconvenient Biblical passages may have something to do with this.
But as said, this is far more plausibly going to happen with poetic, evocative, indirect statements like those in the Twelve Virtues, than with sentences from a random OBLW post.
Didn’t Hofstadter do something like a “grammatically correct sentence in one language that is also phonetically correct in another language” in one of his books or articles? Not that it undermines your point, but I couldn’t find it and vaguely remember seeing it before.
That’s not really the point, though, is it. I mean, I can write “Tengo tu estudio” (I have your studio) which is phonetically the same as “Ten go to a studio”. However, the only meaning they share is due to one word having the same parent (something I wonder about the Korean Tang and the Japanese -tan? but probably not). In any case, cross-language phonetic coincidences are much less rare than an author unintentionally including dual meanings in his text on a level deeper than “That’s what she said”. Which is what bothers me about people who read too much into Ulysses.
I’ve found that I mentally verbalize several mantras taken from the Twelve Virtues.
“There is a time to confess your ignorance and a time to relinquish your ignorance.”—This one comes up less at work, as in other cases. I’ve been in a jiu-jitsu class where a student, after being shown a technique, later at the water cooler said “I don’t understand what he was trying to demonstrate.” This struck me as dumb, and triggered this mantra in my head, as the instructor would have gladly redone the move any number of times had the student asked. At work I am surrounded by my many of my industry’s best developers (this is not an exaggeration). Sometimes I run into a problem I do not know how to solve, but I know they do. This mantra helps me swallow my pride and ask for the information I need to learn how to solve the problem. (However, see #3 below.)
“Let the winds of evidence blow you about as though you are a leaf, with no direction of your own.” This one has come into play lately when I’ve been reading or listening about political issues. I used to be very conservative, then later libertarian, but now I’m trying to mentally divorce my identity from political association entirely. I see this as similarly difficult a transition as when I became an atheist after being Christian. I still get easily baited by left leaning editorials, etc. I do not like these reactions, but they happen despite my conscious desire to not have them. So, I’ve taken to largely expunging my political beliefs in an attempt to move more toward an evidence driven world view. When you start to look at news sources in this light you find that most lack useful information to operate on and you feel less guilty about unplugging from those sources.
“Those who wish to fail must first prevent their friends from helping them.” This concept has always been significant to me, but this phrase captures the essence. When I am curious, I attempt to solve the problem on my own and do my own research. There are times I get information from those who are wiser, but in those cases I prefer hints over spoilers. The key is to get help, but not too much help.
Some more on #3 that occurred to me while re-reading my post. I’ve been working on Project Euler. So far the problems haven’t slowed me down, but looking ahead I can see some really tough ones. I’ve set a goal that I would try and learn, myself, what I needed to solve the problems. This may be impossible. At what point do I condemn myself to absolute failure unless I turn to an expert for help? How do I get the right amount of help on a subject I don’t know, because, in not knowing, I am less able to distinguish between too much help and not enough? If I have a good problem to solve and someone hands me an algorithm that solves it, it robs me of the chance of deriving the algorithm. But if I lack the requisite tools to derive the algorithm, I may also not recognize the difference between the tools and the algorithm itself.
So there are three of the twelve virtues that continually pop into my mind.
Those aren’t my exact intended meanings on some of them—but they’re good meanings nonetheless!
(Usually I’m suspicious of the alleged “accidental optimization” in that sort of reinterpretation, but I deliberately wrote the Twelve Virtues in evocative/poetic language, so this is much less suspicious than it would be with sentences from a random LW post.)
I think I understand your intended meaning for most of the Twelve Virtues and would take a bet validated by a test of the subject matter (hah!), but sometimes what sticks in my mind is an isomorphism I perceive between a statement and some experience. I recognize a danger that the association created by the perception of the isomorphism creates a cached thought that might be flatly incorrect or (at the very least) could obscure a deeper, more valuable truth. Is this what you tend to be suspicious of? Or is it that you are suspicious of someone claiming an intentional reinterpretation and then saying its better than what you meant in some way?
I’m suspicious of the idea that an author could mean one thing, and yet accidentally form a statement which has a different interpretation that is still true, like taking the syllables of a true sentence in Japanese, reciting them out loud, and finding that they form a true sentence in English. My childhood experience with Judaic “reinterpretation” of inconvenient Biblical passages may have something to do with this.
But as said, this is far more plausibly going to happen with poetic, evocative, indirect statements like those in the Twelve Virtues, than with sentences from a random OBLW post.
Didn’t Hofstadter do something like a “grammatically correct sentence in one language that is also phonetically correct in another language” in one of his books or articles? Not that it undermines your point, but I couldn’t find it and vaguely remember seeing it before.
http://pugs.blogs.com/audrey/2009/04/post.html
That’s not really the point, though, is it. I mean, I can write “Tengo tu estudio” (I have your studio) which is phonetically the same as “Ten go to a studio”. However, the only meaning they share is due to one word having the same parent (something I wonder about the Korean Tang and the Japanese -tan? but probably not). In any case, cross-language phonetic coincidences are much less rare than an author unintentionally including dual meanings in his text on a level deeper than “That’s what she said”. Which is what bothers me about people who read too much into Ulysses.