Thanks a lot for your comment! I think you’re absolutely right with most points and I didn’t do the best possible job of covering these things in the post, partially due to wanting to keeping things somewhat simplistic and partially due to lack of full awareness of these issues. The conflict between the point of easy progress and short-sightedness is most likely quite real and it seems indeed unlikely that once such a point is reached there will be no setbacks whatsoever. And having such an optimistic expectation would certainly be detrimental. In the end the point of easy progress is an ideal to strive for when planning, but not an anspiration to fully maintain at all times.
Regarding willpower I agree that challenge is an important factor, and my idea was not so much that tasks themselves should become trivially easy, but that working on them becomes easy in the way that they excite you. Again that’s something I could have more clear in the text.
but you need to encounter this uphill part where things become disorienting, frustrating and difficult to solve more complex problems in order to progress in your knowledge
I’m not so sure about this. I like to think there must be ways to learn things, even maths, that entail a vast majority of positive experiences for the person learning it. This might certainly involve a degree of confusion, but maybe in the form of surprise and curiosity and not necessarily frustration. That being said, 1) I might be wrong in my assumption that such a thing is realistically possible and 2) this is not at all the experience most people are actually having when expanding their skills, so it is certainly important to be able to deal well with frustration and disorientation. Still, it makes a lot of sense to me to reduce these negative experiences wherever possible, unless you think that such negative experiences themselves have some inherent value and can’t be replaced.
I think it remains valuable from an idealistic point of view. And as with many idealistic views, the problems mainly arise when things become a little bit too absolute, not letting enough room for changing context. Nevertheless, this idealism can still have a value.
Take for instance the first remark I made about the idea of “point of easy progress” becoming a case of “short-sightedness”. I find value in the idea of recognizing certain points in your progress and using them as a drive to continue and motivate yourself. As a matter of fact, this appeared to help you through some projects, and in the end, isn’t that what’s more important? I also have the impression that this is mostly the core of your message. The element that made me question was the idea of the “event horizon: once there, there’s no stopping” as an absolute statement that would be difficult to defend in practice. Lastly, there’s also the choice to approach this descriptively as how progress goes, or normative, as how progress should go.
Regarding the need for frustration, challenge and so on, I also use a lot of assumptions stemming from my background in Psychology and existentialism. I hold the idea that positive experience appears to be relative instead of absolute, and positivity loses its valance without any negativity as a context. In this sense, some kind of suffering (how dramatic it may sound) is essential. It appears to me that it’s natural for people to hedonically maximize pleasure, and avoid suffering, which I believe is a good thing, a verry Human thing to do. However, we sometimes struggle with this kind of neurosis by overemphasizing this chase for the good and pleasure in a world where suffering is inevitable.
The good academic in me would elaborate on this perspective and provide further evidence to this idea, however, it isn’t my intention for this comment to persuade anyone. Instead of me philosophizing about it, it might be more meaningful to have people trying out this ideal and reporting their good and bad experiences to update the model.
Thanks a lot for your comment! I think you’re absolutely right with most points and I didn’t do the best possible job of covering these things in the post, partially due to wanting to keeping things somewhat simplistic and partially due to lack of full awareness of these issues. The conflict between the point of easy progress and short-sightedness is most likely quite real and it seems indeed unlikely that once such a point is reached there will be no setbacks whatsoever. And having such an optimistic expectation would certainly be detrimental. In the end the point of easy progress is an ideal to strive for when planning, but not an anspiration to fully maintain at all times.
Regarding willpower I agree that challenge is an important factor, and my idea was not so much that tasks themselves should become trivially easy, but that working on them becomes easy in the way that they excite you. Again that’s something I could have more clear in the text.
I’m not so sure about this. I like to think there must be ways to learn things, even maths, that entail a vast majority of positive experiences for the person learning it. This might certainly involve a degree of confusion, but maybe in the form of surprise and curiosity and not necessarily frustration. That being said, 1) I might be wrong in my assumption that such a thing is realistically possible and 2) this is not at all the experience most people are actually having when expanding their skills, so it is certainly important to be able to deal well with frustration and disorientation. Still, it makes a lot of sense to me to reduce these negative experiences wherever possible, unless you think that such negative experiences themselves have some inherent value and can’t be replaced.
Thanks for your humbleness in return.
I think it remains valuable from an idealistic point of view. And as with many idealistic views, the problems mainly arise when things become a little bit too absolute, not letting enough room for changing context. Nevertheless, this idealism can still have a value.
Take for instance the first remark I made about the idea of “point of easy progress” becoming a case of “short-sightedness”. I find value in the idea of recognizing certain points in your progress and using them as a drive to continue and motivate yourself. As a matter of fact, this appeared to help you through some projects, and in the end, isn’t that what’s more important? I also have the impression that this is mostly the core of your message. The element that made me question was the idea of the “event horizon: once there, there’s no stopping” as an absolute statement that would be difficult to defend in practice. Lastly, there’s also the choice to approach this descriptively as how progress goes, or normative, as how progress should go.
Regarding the need for frustration, challenge and so on, I also use a lot of assumptions stemming from my background in Psychology and existentialism. I hold the idea that positive experience appears to be relative instead of absolute, and positivity loses its valance without any negativity as a context. In this sense, some kind of suffering (how dramatic it may sound) is essential. It appears to me that it’s natural for people to hedonically maximize pleasure, and avoid suffering, which I believe is a good thing, a verry Human thing to do. However, we sometimes struggle with this kind of neurosis by overemphasizing this chase for the good and pleasure in a world where suffering is inevitable.
The good academic in me would elaborate on this perspective and provide further evidence to this idea, however, it isn’t my intention for this comment to persuade anyone. Instead of me philosophizing about it, it might be more meaningful to have people trying out this ideal and reporting their good and bad experiences to update the model.