I’m always curious about this phenomenon where person A goes “I can’t do it!”, person B says “there is a solution”, and person A then goes “ah!”
Yes, I noticed this back when I was doing math competitions: it was often much easier for me to find a solution to a problem if someone told me that they had found a solution, especially if they had found it quickly. The obvious corollary is that you should first approach problems as if you knew someone who had found a solution quickly, but I never successfully internalized this.
My favorite variation of this was when one of our developers asked me to review a design she was contemplating for fixing a defect.
So she went through it in some detail, and I worked through some edge cases, and finally said “Yeah, this looks OK to me. You should go talk to Mark about the tax allocation bit over here, though, because he understands the tax code better than I do and he may notice stuff I won’t. For example, he’d probably notice that this will fail in cases where thus-and-such is true.… um… which I, er, wouldn’t notice.”
And she looked at me a little confused, and I said “So, there’s a problem with this design in cases where thus-and-such is true. We should modify the design” and we kept going as if that particular brain failure hadn’t been narrated out loud.
My guess is I do this all the time, but I remember that incident because I was vocalizing my thoughts.
I have also been told to use this as a problem-solving technique (namely pretending you are a different person and seeing what they would notice), but I am not very good at this either. I tried to run a simulation of MoR!Quirrell in my head, but my head is not a sufficiently interesting place for him to be at the moment, so I think he left.
chuckle * I’ve done some playing around with this and have come to the tentative conclusion, backed up by no evidence, that the key thing isn’t really pretending to be someone else, but rather relaxing the constraints that I keep around “me”. That is, it’s not so much creating a “what would Mark think?” simulation as it is temporarily purging my “what kinds of things does Dave not think?” filters. Which is to say, it’s basically a question of maximizing creativity.
Mm… in a sufficiently broad sense, yes, but in detail, not really.
I would say that rubber-ducking (by which I assume you mean the exercise of explaining a complex technical concept, like the flow of control through code, to an inanimate object before submitting it to group review) is primarily a technique for attentional control; it forces me to actually think through a problem rather than simply telling myself that i have thought through the problem.
I think what goes on in these sorts of incidents is somewhat different, though related in many ways.
Basically, I think I’ve got a set of “the sorts of things Dave thinks” filters that run in my head, and there are some useful thoughts that my brain is capable of generating that tend to get excluded from my conscious awareness by those filters (because they “aren’t the sort of thing Dave would think”), and sometimes it can be useful to subvert or reconfigure those filters.
And role-playing of this sort (“What would I say if I were Mark?”) is one way to reconfigure those filters.
And role-playing of this sort (“What would I say if I were Mark?”) is one way to reconfigure those filters.
So is that what is going on in this search and that Shannon example? But that seems a little weird, why would Benja have a ‘gwern filter’ in his head which says ‘the article has a direct quote from G89, gwern would try searching a direct quote, so I should too’?
I suppose something similar is going on: Shannon has been invited to step out of the frame that he’s in and step into a new one, where he is identifying with his brother, who knows something important about how to get to a solution to the puzzle from where Shannon is now, and that reframing helps encourage creativity. But also, and significantly, Shannon’s brother has given him a new datum: there is a discrete thing-to-be-told which would significantly help. (This is, admittedly, implicit. But if I don’t assume it, the story makes no sense to me.)
So no, I don’t think it’s the only thing going on, or necessarily the most important thing.
And I disagree with “you can always give it to yourself,” actually. Or, rather, with the implicit statement that doing so is necessarily useful. For some puzzles his brother might have instead said “Huh. You probably want to rethink your whole approach.” Which is also a hint I can always give myself, but it’s a different hint that leads me in different directions.
There’s probably a huge number of hints like that I can give myself for any given problem, but picking them at random is perhaps not the best problem solving strategy.
Still, if I’m stuck, trying a few is better than nothing.
WRT the Benja search… I suspect that was more of a case of trying harder by virtue of being motivated by the knowledge that success is possible/likely, and to some extent breaking out of transient mental sets.
But even if it were a case of temporarily reconfiguring more persistent unhelpful filters like I describe, it wouldn’t follow that Benja has a “gwern filter”, merely that Benja, like gwern, has some learned techniques for finding stuff on Google, which includes ‘search for direct quotes’ along with a million other things, and that the default Benja filter for whatever reason excludes that technique when it searches for techniques to suggest for this kind of problem, and the role-playing exercise encourages disabling the default Benja filter, making that technique easier to access. The “gwernyness” of that reconfiguration, much like the “markiness” in my example, is rather tangential; the importance of being gwern, in this hypothetical, would be that it entails not being Benja.
But also, and significantly, Shannon’s brother has given him a new datum: there is a discrete thing-to-be-told which would significantly help. (This is, admittedly, implicit. But if I don’t assume it, the story makes no sense to me.)
But he’s solving a puzzle, there’s always a thing-to-be-told!
(shrug) Indeed. More generally, he’s a bounded agent, there’s always a thing-to-be-told, which may or may not have anything to do with solving jigsaw puzzles.
For example, “there’s a piece that fits with another piece somewhere in this puzzle box” is certainly a thing to be told, and is always true of non-pathological jigsaw puzzles. And “There are no sharks on Mars” is also a thing his brother could have told him.
But, yes, if the Shannons didn’t have an implicit shared context that strongly suggested that there was a less generic thing-to-be-told in his brother’s mind than those examples, then most of what I said about the Shannon example is simply false.
What you said out loud wasn’t wrong. There are likely cases which are much like the one that you did find, except that you would not be able to find them.
The other question is whether it’s helpful to quickly look for obvious answers when there isn’t one. The information content of “there is a solution” is actually not only one bit (yes vs no), because the fact that that person told it to you means that they solved it quickly using techniques that they already know about. This usually helps you because you either share much of their knowledge, or have an idea of what things they are knowledgeable about. The correct advice in some other cases might have been “you need to learn something else completely new before you’ll get it” or “just stop trying because this problem is really of no value and has no easy answer”.
Yes, I noticed this back when I was doing math competitions: it was often much easier for me to find a solution to a problem if someone told me that they had found a solution, especially if they had found it quickly. The obvious corollary is that you should first approach problems as if you knew someone who had found a solution quickly, but I never successfully internalized this.
My favorite variation of this was when one of our developers asked me to review a design she was contemplating for fixing a defect.
So she went through it in some detail, and I worked through some edge cases, and finally said “Yeah, this looks OK to me. You should go talk to Mark about the tax allocation bit over here, though, because he understands the tax code better than I do and he may notice stuff I won’t. For example, he’d probably notice that this will fail in cases where thus-and-such is true.… um… which I, er, wouldn’t notice.”
And she looked at me a little confused, and I said “So, there’s a problem with this design in cases where thus-and-such is true. We should modify the design” and we kept going as if that particular brain failure hadn’t been narrated out loud.
My guess is I do this all the time, but I remember that incident because I was vocalizing my thoughts.
I have also been told to use this as a problem-solving technique (namely pretending you are a different person and seeing what they would notice), but I am not very good at this either. I tried to run a simulation of MoR!Quirrell in my head, but my head is not a sufficiently interesting place for him to be at the moment, so I think he left.
chuckle *
I’ve done some playing around with this and have come to the tentative conclusion, backed up by no evidence, that the key thing isn’t really pretending to be someone else, but rather relaxing the constraints that I keep around “me”. That is, it’s not so much creating a “what would Mark think?” simulation as it is temporarily purging my “what kinds of things does Dave not think?” filters.
Which is to say, it’s basically a question of maximizing creativity.
So you think these sorts of incidents are just another form of rubber-ducking?
Mm… in a sufficiently broad sense, yes, but in detail, not really.
I would say that rubber-ducking (by which I assume you mean the exercise of explaining a complex technical concept, like the flow of control through code, to an inanimate object before submitting it to group review) is primarily a technique for attentional control; it forces me to actually think through a problem rather than simply telling myself that i have thought through the problem.
I think what goes on in these sorts of incidents is somewhat different, though related in many ways.
Basically, I think I’ve got a set of “the sorts of things Dave thinks” filters that run in my head, and there are some useful thoughts that my brain is capable of generating that tend to get excluded from my conscious awareness by those filters (because they “aren’t the sort of thing Dave would think”), and sometimes it can be useful to subvert or reconfigure those filters.
And role-playing of this sort (“What would I say if I were Mark?”) is one way to reconfigure those filters.
So is that what is going on in this search and that Shannon example? But that seems a little weird, why would Benja have a ‘gwern filter’ in his head which says ‘the article has a direct quote from G89, gwern would try searching a direct quote, so I should too’?
WRT the shannon example… well, yes and no.
I suppose something similar is going on: Shannon has been invited to step out of the frame that he’s in and step into a new one, where he is identifying with his brother, who knows something important about how to get to a solution to the puzzle from where Shannon is now, and that reframing helps encourage creativity. But also, and significantly, Shannon’s brother has given him a new datum: there is a discrete thing-to-be-told which would significantly help. (This is, admittedly, implicit. But if I don’t assume it, the story makes no sense to me.)
So no, I don’t think it’s the only thing going on, or necessarily the most important thing.
And I disagree with “you can always give it to yourself,” actually. Or, rather, with the implicit statement that doing so is necessarily useful. For some puzzles his brother might have instead said “Huh. You probably want to rethink your whole approach.” Which is also a hint I can always give myself, but it’s a different hint that leads me in different directions.
There’s probably a huge number of hints like that I can give myself for any given problem, but picking them at random is perhaps not the best problem solving strategy.
Still, if I’m stuck, trying a few is better than nothing.
WRT the Benja search… I suspect that was more of a case of trying harder by virtue of being motivated by the knowledge that success is possible/likely, and to some extent breaking out of transient mental sets.
But even if it were a case of temporarily reconfiguring more persistent unhelpful filters like I describe, it wouldn’t follow that Benja has a “gwern filter”, merely that Benja, like gwern, has some learned techniques for finding stuff on Google, which includes ‘search for direct quotes’ along with a million other things, and that the default Benja filter for whatever reason excludes that technique when it searches for techniques to suggest for this kind of problem, and the role-playing exercise encourages disabling the default Benja filter, making that technique easier to access. The “gwernyness” of that reconfiguration, much like the “markiness” in my example, is rather tangential; the importance of being gwern, in this hypothetical, would be that it entails not being Benja.
But he’s solving a puzzle, there’s always a thing-to-be-told!
(shrug) Indeed. More generally, he’s a bounded agent, there’s always a thing-to-be-told, which may or may not have anything to do with solving jigsaw puzzles.
For example, “there’s a piece that fits with another piece somewhere in this puzzle box” is certainly a thing to be told, and is always true of non-pathological jigsaw puzzles. And “There are no sharks on Mars” is also a thing his brother could have told him.
But, yes, if the Shannons didn’t have an implicit shared context that strongly suggested that there was a less generic thing-to-be-told in his brother’s mind than those examples, then most of what I said about the Shannon example is simply false.
What you said out loud wasn’t wrong. There are likely cases which are much like the one that you did find, except that you would not be able to find them.
True, though it’s less clear that Mark would probably notice them.
Still, that’s probably true as well.
The other question is whether it’s helpful to quickly look for obvious answers when there isn’t one. The information content of “there is a solution” is actually not only one bit (yes vs no), because the fact that that person told it to you means that they solved it quickly using techniques that they already know about. This usually helps you because you either share much of their knowledge, or have an idea of what things they are knowledgeable about. The correct advice in some other cases might have been “you need to learn something else completely new before you’ll get it” or “just stop trying because this problem is really of no value and has no easy answer”.