The current CFAR workshop has a few places where participants explicitly Nail (Hamming Questions and Resolve Cycles, off the top of my head), and sometimes has a place where participants are at least exposed to the concept of Hammering (which we call Overlearning).
I was once told by an older graduate student to explicitly keep two lists: a list of problems and a list of techniques. Then, anytime I hear about a new problem, I add it to the problem list and check it against my technique list, and anytime I hear about a new technique, I add it to the technique list and check it against my problem list. I never did it (in mathematics) but it does seem like a sensible idea (in mathematics).
I’d like to do a version of this in rationality, but I find that my bugs lists decay rapidly; after a period of as little as a few days my sense of what my real bugs are shifts and I have to regenerate the bugs list from scratch or else it feels dead. I don’t keep a technique list because I find explicitly applying techniques to be mostly a chore but there might be a version of that that doesn’t suck for me.
Weird thought, but if your bugs list decays quickly, maybe you’ve not found the most important bugs? In other fields (e.g. mathematics), we continue working on the same problem for years/decades.
It’s not that my bugs change all that much or often per se—I’ve had many of the same bug symptoms—but that I keep changing my sense of what the right frame to describe the bug is.
This feels very true. One could rephrase it as the ability to ensure that what you learn/figure out/discover gets solidfied and built upon. I’m in the process of experimenting with the best way for me to keep in mind the highest leverage bugs in my life.
The current CFAR workshop has a few places where participants explicitly Nail (Hamming Questions and Resolve Cycles, off the top of my head), and sometimes has a place where participants are at least exposed to the concept of Hammering (which we call Overlearning).
I was once told by an older graduate student to explicitly keep two lists: a list of problems and a list of techniques. Then, anytime I hear about a new problem, I add it to the problem list and check it against my technique list, and anytime I hear about a new technique, I add it to the technique list and check it against my problem list. I never did it (in mathematics) but it does seem like a sensible idea (in mathematics).
I’d like to do a version of this in rationality, but I find that my bugs lists decay rapidly; after a period of as little as a few days my sense of what my real bugs are shifts and I have to regenerate the bugs list from scratch or else it feels dead. I don’t keep a technique list because I find explicitly applying techniques to be mostly a chore but there might be a version of that that doesn’t suck for me.
Weird thought, but if your bugs list decays quickly, maybe you’ve not found the most important bugs? In other fields (e.g. mathematics), we continue working on the same problem for years/decades.
It’s not that my bugs change all that much or often per se—I’ve had many of the same bug symptoms—but that I keep changing my sense of what the right frame to describe the bug is.
Sometimes I think the power of all these “keep a list of” techniques really lives in the generalized ability to keep lists.
This feels very true. One could rephrase it as the ability to ensure that what you learn/figure out/discover gets solidfied and built upon. I’m in the process of experimenting with the best way for me to keep in mind the highest leverage bugs in my life.