whales
A geometric pattern or construction. Maybe a golden spiral. Or something that looks like it’s out of Da Vinci’s notebooks.
A map, or a star map.
A perspective drawing with very obvious foreshortening.
Something based on the allegory of the cave or the divided line of Plato? The latter probably wouldn’t stand without explanation, though.
Yeah, I just want to chime in as another person who got burned (out) by this early on, and who keeps seeing it happen to other people. I’ve since practiced better motivation hygiene and it’s served me well.
I agree with the gist of what others have said here. There are lots of ways to contaminate productive tasks with aversiveness that isn’t intrinsic to the task. Unpleasant work environment is pretty obvious. I spent one undergrad summer commuting by bike, and I’d always get to work sweaty and tired in a bad way. Because that’s what I thought of when I thought about going to work, I spent a lot of days unproductively working from home. For the next job that had a bike commute, I took active measures to avoid the same problems, and now I look forward to biking to work.
I agree especially strongly with what Kaj_Sotala says about using guilt (or other negative emotions). Boredom and frustration can also be problems. When I notice them, it’s usually not because my task is itself boring or frustrating; I’ve just become disengaged or I feel stuck. So I remind myself of this, think of all the reasons my work is actually cool and worthwhile or of the progress I’ve made, and then take a break, switch tasks, or carry on.
Or sometimes I notice that I strongly don’t feel like working and am unlikely to get much done. In these cases I’ve found it’s better to simply set things down for a while and to do some mental work to make sure I don’t feel guilty about quitting, rather than try to force myself through it. (Of course, it’s even better to make myself feel like working again. But that’s quite a trick itself.)
Conversely, I spend leisure time doing things I enjoy and endorse. The taste I’ve cultivated means that a lot of cheap and addictive entertainment doesn’t especially appeal to me, and it gives me a sense that my enjoyment of things is a little more meaningful than it was before. I’ve spent some serious thought concerning blocked-out leisure time and endorsed activities, so that I can trust my past self’s strategic planning and not worry about wastefulness.
I guess I haven’t been too specific. These ideas depend on more fundamental skills like mindfulness, or noticing and dealing with negative thoughts. Those are big topics themselves and the specific implementations tend to be idiosyncratic. Still, I hope this is helpful.
Yeah, when I first looked into this, I found all these popular sites talking about tinnitus and infection, but couldn’t track down any sources. Wikipedia just cites those websites. One actually does give a source: Journal of Hearing Sciences, 2006: 9-10. This seems to be made up by its “SEO professional” author. (“Journal of Hearing Science” at least exists, but started in 2011. Bizarre.)
I don’t remember finding anything especially scientific and reliable on risks when I first looked into it. The best I could do was Ear Infection and the Use of Hearing Protection (1985), a review of epidemiological studies by a researcher employed by an earplug manufacturer, mostly concerning workplace use.
Anecdotal comments abound, but controlled studies are “conspicuous by their absence.” By implication the problem is neither significant nor widespread; otherwise it would have drawn greater attention and research interest.
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Although hearing protection devices should not be worn in the presence of some preexisting ear canal pathologies, and care must be exercised regarding selection and use under certain environmental conditions, regular wearing of HPDs does not normally increase the likelihood of contracting otitis externa.
I don’t know how much you want to rely on that. I just follow the manufacturer’s instructions for cleaning and reuse, and plan to stop if I notice irritation.
To what extent did you study math on your own initiative? (What kind of support did you have from parents, teachers, and institutions? Were resources readily available, or did you have to work to seek them out?)
What is the philosophy behind your prolific commenting?
I’m reminded of Bret Victor’s recent comment on reading Latour:
It’s tempting to judge what you read: “I agree with these statements, and I disagree with those.” However, a great thinker who has spent decades on an unusual line of thought cannot induce their context into your head in a few pages. It’s almost certainly the case that you don’t fully understand their statements. Instead, you can say: “I have now learned that there exists a worldview in which all of these statements are consistent.” And if it feels worthwhile, you can make a genuine effort to understand that entire worldview. You don’t have to adopt it. Just make it available to yourself, so you can make connections to it when it’s needed.
That, to me, is a principle of charity well applied. I wouldn’t at all say that steelmanning is a stronger form of that—a rationalist trying to steelman Latour would be like your Roman trying to steelman progressivism. Steelmanning is about constructing what you see as stronger versions of an argument, while the principle of charity is about trying to get into your interlocutor’s head under the assumption that whatever they’re saying or doing seems reasonable and right to them. The latter is much harder and rarer, in my experience, although that’s not to say the former isn’t more valuable in some situations.
You describe some real problems with steelmen. I think a first-order defense against them is just to ask whether your interlocutor agrees with your steelman or not.
It’s tempting to judge what you read: “I agree with these statements, and I disagree with those.” However, a great thinker who has spent decades on an unusual line of thought cannot induce their context into your head in a few pages. It’s almost certainly the case that you don’t fully understand their statements. Instead, you can say: “I have now learned that there exists a worldview in which all of these statements are consistent.” And if it feels worthwhile, you can make a genuine effort to understand that entire worldview. You don’t have to adopt it. Just make it available to yourself, so you can make connections to it when it’s needed.
Bret Victor, reflecting on Visualisation and Cognition: Drawing Things Together by Bruno Latour
Done, thanks for the reminder.
I have one project that came to mind immediately when I read your comment, so I feel like I know what you mean. A fix turned out to be “tell a friend I want to do X, and ask her to remind + encourage me when the appropriate chance comes up.” But social-commitment-type things don’t always apply.
I have more experience with projects that started becoming aversive, and that pushed me harder (both emotionally and otherwise) to tweak my approach, which in the end led to renewed focus and progress. Having those examples available helps motivate me in situations where I don’t otherwise want to attend to operations long enough to change them from their default. Could the same be true for you? That’s the only general suggestion I have.
Interesting—looks like it’s come a long way on indexing and general usability since I last played with it (I think it was all Flash back then). I’ll give it a second chance, thanks.
How Learning Works: Seven Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching (2010) is the standard text that gets thrown around (as far as education in general). I’m surprised it apparently hasn’t come up here before, since the approach is very well aligned with LW norms. I’d say it’s worthwhile for anyone who expects to teach (or learn) in the future.
I’ll plan on writing up a summary/review if no one beats me to it.
OK, it’s done.
I’m just now skimming it. It looks orthogonal to HLW, which talks about models of learning and general strategies. Lemov seems to focus more on the mechanics of elementary- and middle-school classroom management. He apparently found a number of exceptionally effective teachers, observed them closely, and extracted common activities and techniques. I’m not in a position to evaluate that sort of thing, but tanagrabeast’s take sounds reasonable.
I don’t, unfortunately. If I were looking for something similar to How Learning Works, I might start with a few books like (1, 2, 3) if I could find them in a library or elsewhere to skim. You might also have better luck than I did looking for useful edited volumes/handbooks and review papers. There seems to be a lot of navel-gazing in the math education research community; you might even be better off just reading Pólya.
If anyone has a good answer to this question, I’m also very interested.
Slightly different but still-important questions—what about when you remove the requirement that the idea be strange or unconventional? How much of taking ideas seriously here is just about acting strategically, and how much is non-compartmentalization? To what extent can you train the skill of going from thinking “I should do X” to actually doing X?
Other opportunities for victory, not necessarily weird, possibly worth investigating: wearing a bike helmet when biking, using spaced repetition to study, making physical backups of data, staying in touch with friends and family, flossing.
I generally find that it takes less willpower to execute a plan that I’ve already made. I set aside a little time every morning, and a longer period every Sunday, to be effortfully strategic and come up with some specific next actions that I can mindlessly execute for the rest of the day/week. I think this is more or less standard GTD (although I’ve been iterating on my personal system for long enough that I can’t really remember exactly what David Allen describes).
I agree that separating ‘planning’ and ‘doing’ like this works especially well for doing aversive things. Your ‘planning self’ doesn’t have to worry about actually doing anything, and your ‘doing self’ just has to trust your planning self.
Nice, and good luck! I’m glad to see that my post resonated with someone. For rhetorical purposes, I didn’t temper my recommendations as much as I could have—I still think building mental models through deliberate practice in solving difficult problems is at the core of physics education.
I treat even “signpost” flashcards as opportunities to rehearse a web of connections rather than as the quiz “what’s on the other side of this card?” If an angle-addition formula came up, I’d want to recall the easy derivation in terms of complex exponentials and visualize some specific cases on the unit circle, at least at first. I also use cards like that in addition to cards which are themselves mini-problems.
That’s true if you’re just using spaced repetition to memorize, although I’d add that it’s still often helpful to overlearn definitions and simple results just past the boundaries of your understanding, along the lines of Prof. Ravi Vakil’s advice for potential students:
Here’s a phenomenon I was surprised to find: you’ll go to talks, and hear various words, whose definitions you’re not so sure about. At some point you’ll be able to make a sentence using those words; you won’t know what the words mean, but you’ll know the sentence is correct. You’ll also be able to ask a question using those words. You still won’t know what the words mean, but you’ll know the question is interesting, and you’ll want to know the answer. Then later on, you’ll learn what the words mean more precisely, and your sense of how they fit together will make that learning much easier. The reason for this phenomenon is that mathematics is so rich and infinite that it is impossible to learn it systematically, and if you wait to master one topic before moving on to the next, you’ll never get anywhere. Instead, you’ll have tendrils of knowledge extending far from your comfort zone. Then you can later backfill from these tendrils, and extend your comfort zone; this is much easier to do than learning “forwards”. (Caution: this backfilling is necessary. There can be a temptation to learn lots of fancy words and to use them in fancy sentences without being able to say precisely what you mean. You should feel free to do that, but you should always feel a pang of guilt when you do.)
The second point I’d make is that the spacing effect (distributed practice) works for complex learning goals as well, although it will help if your practice consists of more than rote recall.
Why does it need to be a hidden random timer? Reward yourself if you stayed on task for the past 30 minutes. (Hmm, I think we’ve just reinvented the Pomodoro Technique.)
Incidentally, have you (or others who use schemes like this) considered using intermittent reinforcement? Like, instead of just rewarding yourself upon meeting the victory condition, you flip a coin to see if you get the reward. It seems the obvious thing to do if you’re going for the whole inner pigeon thing.