Sure, no big deal.
alkjash
Karma: 5,064
You can’t fight fire with fire, getting out of a tightly wound x-risk trauma spiral involves grounding and building trust in yourself, not being scared into applying the same rigidity in the opposite direction.
The comment is generally illuminating but this particular sentence seems too snappy and fake-wisdomy to be convincing. Would you mind elaborating?
Thanks for sharing this, it puts into relief a problem I’ve noticed about academic research: the real research happens behind closed doors and in private communications that the young people don’t have access to. Young people end up only learning about the finished theorems much later on in polished form.
That’s great to hear, I’ve been slowly working on this myself in recent years. E.g., it’s greatly improved my gaming experience—from being a total lurker to engaging with Discords, posting bugs and suggestions, occasionally writing Steam guides—it’s enriching for sure.
I don’t know about skills plural, but the game definitely drilled in that particular skill of aiming to falsify one’s hypotheses instead of just confirming them. That’s a skill well worth a dozen hours of deliberate practice in my opinion.
Fantastic game, thanks for recommendation!
I reimplemented the game in vanilla Python and managed to simulate it several hundred times with ~10k random species for a total of hundreds of thousands of generations.
Unfortunately, I didn’t read Hylang documentation carefully and thought foragers could simultaneously eat one of every food available, instead of just the most nutritious one...
Only my throwaway locust clone survived under the real rules. :’(
Nice!
Haven’t played Osu! for many years now unfortunately. I only got into it briefly to practice mouse accuracy for FPS games, but that motivation has dried up. I suspect Osu! would still be damn good fun without it, so I’ll let you know if it gets to the top of my gaming queue. :)
Here are two recentish papers I really enjoyed reading, which I think are fairly reasonable to approach. Some of the serious technical details might be out of reach.
I tried Touhou Perfect Cherry Blossom at one point and never got past any difficulty, so I defer to your expertise here. There’s a general skill of getting better at focusing one’s attention in tandem with getting better at execution and this post is only a first approximation.
Yea, I think there’s some general pattern of the form:
Research is weird and mysterious.
Instead of studying research, why don’t we study the minds that do research?
But minds are equally weird and mysterious!
Ah yes, but you are yourself possessed of a mind, which, weirdly enough, can imitate other minds at a mysteriously deep level without consciously understanding what they’re doing.
Profit.
I love the film study post, thanks for linking! This all reminds me of a “fishbowl exercise” they used to run at the MIRI Summer Fellows program, where everyone crowded around for half an hour and watched two researchers do research. I suppose the main worry about transporting such exercises to research is that you end up watching something like this.
Where do your eyes go?
But then he encounters the rigamarole of the whole process you describe in your post and it stops him from doing what he originally dreamed. He needs to get published. He needs to do original research. He needs to help his advisor and other professors do their research. He needs to do all of that because otherwise he won’t be respected enough to actually have a career in physics research. But doing that kind of work isn’t why he got into physics in the first place!
I’m confused about the claim that the academic process is at all misaligned with his original dream. Isn’t doing original research and getting published the clearest path—though perhaps not the only one—on the way to the goal of restructuring quantum mechanics? Isn’t helping his advisor and other professors do their research one of the best ways of learning the ropes in the meantime? Isn’t acquiring the respect of your colleagues exactly the path to having a whole community and field at your back to effect those paradigm-shifting breakthroughs, instead of going it alone?
We are using the word “coast” differently—what I meant by coasting is that many of the professors I know would have to actively sabotage their own research groups and collaborators to not produce ~five nice papers a year (genuine though perhaps not newsworthy contributions to the state of knowledge).
Of course, the state of affairs seriously varies with the quality of the institution.
Gravity Turn
Right, the structure is quite simple. The only thing that came to mind about finite factored sets as combinatorial objects was studying the L-function of the number of them, which surely has some nice Euler product. Maybe you can write it as a product of standard zeta functions or something?
Are there any interesting pure combinatorics problems about finite factored sets that you’re interested in?
Very strongly agree with the part of this post outlining the problem, your definition of “addiction” captures how most people I know spend time (including myself). But I think you’re missing an important piece of the picture. One path (and the path most likely to succeed in my experience) out of these traps is to shimmy towards addictive avoidance behaviors which optimize you out of the hole in a roundabout way. E.g. addictively work out to avoid dealing with relationship issues ⇒ accidentally improve energy levels, confidence, and mood, creating slack to solve relationship issues. E.g. obsessively work on proving theorems to procrastinate on grant applications ⇒ accidentally solve famous problem that renders grant applications trivial.
This paragraph raised my alarm bells. There’s a common and “pyramid-schemey” move on LW to say that my particular consideration is upstream and dominant over all other considerations: “AGI ruin is the only bit that matters, drop everything else,” “If you can write Haskell, earning-to-give overwhelms your ability to do good in any other way, forget altruism,” “Persuading other people of important things overwhelms your own ability to do anything, drop your career and learn rhetoric,” and so on ad nauseum.
To be fair, I agree to a limited extent with all of the statements above, but over the years I’ve acquired so many skills and perspectives (many from yourself Val) that are synergistic and force-multiplying that I’m suspicious any time anyone presents an argument “you must prioritize this particular force-multiplier to the exclusion of all else.”