Posts
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The Default Position Problem
CommentsThe ideas here are all old news, but some anvils need to be dropped.
Many arguments, especially political ones, fail because both parties argue from a default position. The implicit logic goes roughly like this.
- I believe X.
- The other person believes Y.
- X is the right belief.
- If I can show that the other person’s reasons for believing Y are wrong, they’ll believe X instead.
The first two are prerequisites to an argument. The third is a matter of debate. The fourth is where everything goes to shit.
Stop me if you’ve heard this story before. Two people on the Internet are arguing. One believes X, the other believes Y. The X believer comes up with a reason someone would believe Y, then writes a scathing comment attacking it. The Y believer comes up with a reason someone would believe X, and attacks that too. Meanwhile, neither has addressed the actual reason one believes X and the other believes Y.
Y supporters read all the stupid rebuttals made against X supporters. “Wow, Y supporters think we believe X because of that?” X supporters read all the stupid rebuttals made against Y supporters. “Wow, X supporters think we believe Y because of that?”
Both, at least, agree on one thing. “Why should I listen to this people? Their reasoning is garbage, and whenever you try to point it out they hurl garbage back.”
But the real problem is that you think their reasoning is garbage, and they think your reasoning is garbage, when neither may be true.
Your position is not the default position. No one’s is. Pointing out problems in other people’s arguments only shows there are problems in those arguments. It doesn’t make your argument any more valid. Besides, who says your argument would stand up to the same level of scrutiny? All you’ve really shown is that the people you’re talking to don’t have strong counterarguments. How do you know no strong counterarguments exist? And if they do exist, why should people believe you’re any more right?
Okay, look. I’ll be blunt. Some people do believe in things for stupid reasons. The harm comes when you generalize the stupidity of some arguments to justify ignoring all arguments. If you’re an X thinker, and want to understand how anyone could believe Y, you should assume that at some point, somebody came up with an intellectually consistent argument for Y. (If no good argument for Y exists, how did anyone start believing Y in the first place?) As belief in Y spread from person to person, the original argument got muddled, like a game of ideological telephone. By the time it got to your filter bubble, it’s been distorted into something weaker than it was. So don’t generalize the distorted argument that reaches your eyes and ears. Look harder.
Or, if you don’t have time to look? Take things slowly. Recognize that problems are complicated, and there’s more than meets the eye. Recognize the diversity of belief.
(And yes, I notice the irony of me dictating all these ideas, of arguing against the default position problem from my own default position. Far be it from me to expect people to believe my ideas about epistemology without question. Just please, keep these ideas in mind. Remember it’s hard to argue well, and that it’s worth thinking about problems like this. Something tells me we’re going to need good epistemology a lot in the upcoming years.)
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Research Communication is Hard
CommentsI’ve been working on my current research project for around four to six months. The results haven’t been that good. I have a meeting about it tomorrow, and I’d say there’s about a 50-50 chance we decide I should stop working on the project and switch to another one. If it ends that way, well, that sucks. But after reflecting on it for a while, I think I’m mentally prepared for that outcome.
In preparation for that meeting, my manager recommended I write a document describing what the project is, how it got to where it is now, and all the things I tried along the way. I agreed this was a good idea, although I was starting to get sick of explaining my project. In the past, I wrote a doc when I proposed the project, then made a presentation after it got refined, then wrote another doc when I pivoted. Ironically, all that documentation made it hard to figure out where the project was, because each doc built on the previous ones.
From a naive viewpoint, writing a summary shouldn’t have taken that long. I’ve been living and breathing this project for months, and I had already written several documents on the project. How long could writing one more take?
Well, turns out it took me about a day. That’s actually not too long, all things considered, but why did it have to take that long at all? It was only summarizing things I’d already written.
The tricky part of research is that the author is trying to take these grand ideas, that have never been arranged the way the author’s arranged them, and then he or she needs to convert them into text that gets the point across.
Yasha Berchenko-Kogan (who I actually kinda know in real life) has a great quote about communicating research.
Communicating these ideas is a bit like trying to explain a vacuum cleaner to someone who has never seen one, except you’re only allowed to use words that are four letters long or shorter.
A lot of the metaphorical four letter words I used weren’t useful anymore, and filtering it to just the key points was most of the work.
When I got comments back, I had a shocking revelation: the only one who fully understood my project was me.
On the surface, that’s not so surprising, so let me clarify. I’ve been talking to most of these people about my project for months. They’ve received and read every doc I wrote about my project, from start to finish. I’ve had weekly meetings with several of these people, to explain issues I ran into and get tips on how to get past them.
And the whole time, I was the only one who understood everything that was going on?
What the hell?
I used to think good writing was important because nobody wants to extend research that’s hard to understand.
But now I’ve realized there’s another big benefit. If you want people to give useful feedback, it’s very important they actually understand what the problem is.
I’m about to describe one of those ideas that’s obviously true. Are you ready? Okay, good.
When people say “That sounds good to me”, they’re implicitly saying “Based on my understanding of the problem, that sounds good to me.” Worryingly, if they missed a few details you tried to convey, their brains will fill in the details by themselves. And the details they fill in will be ones that make sense to them, which likely differs from the details you were trying to convey in the first place.
The relevant point: if you ask for help from your advisor, and your problem is in one of those details you failed to convey, you’re not going to get good advice.
If you yourself are a researcher, and this was a new idea for you, read over it a few times. I think it’s worth knowing.
In hindsight, the biggest shifts in my research didn’t happen when I had a new idea. They happened when experienced researchers finally grasped a detail I thought they’d already understood. They would then immediately make an obvious argument for why doing it that way was dumb, and then I’d feel like an idiot.
If everyone’s busy climbing your chain of reasoning, they won’t notice the weak links, because they’ll assume all the links make sense.
That suggests two things:
- Prefer simple solutions over complicated ones. Complicated solutions are hard to explain, meaning it’s harder to get good feedback, and complicated solutions are the ones that need feedback the most.
- If you do need to use a complicated solution, be very, very careful that you understand why you’re doing everything you’re doing, and that the reasons you made up four months ago still make sense in the present.
If I had explained my research project better, I could have saved a few weeks of work, because I could have avoided a lot of silly ideas that weren’t worth doing in retrospect.
Research miscommunication is inevitable. It takes a long time to explain things properly, and usually people don’t have the time for that. I suspect that’s the main reason research takes so long - it’s the blind leading the blind. Sometimes the blind one is you. Sometimes it’s someone else. It’s hard to tell the difference.
If the pattern holds, people aren’t going to understand everything I wanted them to understand from this post. Oh well. I tried.
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MIT Mystery Hunt 2017
CommentsWhen ✈✈✈ Galactic Trendsetters ✈✈✈ did introductions this year, I realized with some surprise that this was my 5th time solving Mystery Hunt. Only my 2nd time flying in for Hunt though. Now that I’m a Real Adult with a Real Job, it’s harder to justify taking a few days off, but after five years I’ve hit a critical mass of MIT people I know and puzzle people I know.
If you want to avoid spoilers, you should stop reading now.
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Let’s get some elephants out of the room first.
Was Hunt fun? Yes, absolutely. I loved the theme. The opening skit was great, the flavor was baked in all over the place, and overall it’s one of my favorite Hunts.
Was Hunt shorter than Setec Astronomy expected? Yes, absolutely.
Was having a short Hunt a bad thing? I’m not so sure. WHOOSH Galactic Trendsetters NIERRRRR got 4th this year, which is a lot better than before. From what I heard, the team got bigger, people got better at looking at metas early, and the metas were easier to solve than previous years. Combined, that meant we finished by midday Saturday. Turns out you can do things on MLK weekend besides solve puzzles. I played some board games and party games, had a nice dinner, and got to work on Facebook Hacker Cup Round 1 at a reasonable time, instead of 4 AM.
The aforementioned nice dinner, at Thelonious Monkfish.
A game from Jackbox Party Pack 3
Yes, I can see how a short Hunt could be disappointing. Some people on our team arrived Saturday morning, and by that point we only had two metapuzzles left. On the flip side, running out of puzzles is a competitive team problem. There were several teams who got to finish Hunt for the first time, and that’s really awesome.
Look, time estimation is hard. I should know, I contributed to the Sages hunt. I place no blame at all on Setec for a short Hunt. Setec wrote good puzzles. In fact, in some ways they were almost too good. To me, getting good at puzzles is less about noticing the trick, and more about learning how to solve from 60% of the data, 10% of which might be wrong. I can’t do it, but some people are eerily good at solving past errors.
Neo: What are you trying to tell me? That I can identify extractions?
Morpheus: No, Neo. I’m trying to tell you that when you’re ready, you won’t have to. [Because you’ll solve metas by pulling random letters out of the puzzle answers.]
Hunts get longer when you have to figure out incredibly obtuse extraction mechanisms, and we didn’t hit as many of those this year.
I’ll sum it up like this. The metas were clued through tons of flavortext, which made them easier to solve. That led to more backsolving constraints, which made it easier to solve puzzles. That sped up the unlocking process, and it all cascades from there. At some point we had three Quest rounds open with zero solves in each, just because we’d been solving metas and Character puzzles so quickly. The Chemist meta and Cleric meta were especially open to backsolving, and because character levels were the main unlock mechanism, we backsolved those very aggressively. (A bit too aggressively in fact. HQ got mad at us and stopped confirming our Cleric backsolves for an hour. We’re sorry!)
I did like how clear the character level unlock mechanism was. It made it easy to decide which puzzles to prioritize. We never would have done the scavenger hunt if people hadn’t insisted we unlock Wizard level 6 already. I didn’t work on it myself, but it led to a scroll of the Bee Movie script, which was a glorious sight.
I think it comes down to how much you were here for puzzles, and how much you were here for hanging out with people for puzzles. I came for a bit of both, and I got a bit of both, so I’m satisfied.
On to puzzle stories!
The first puzzle I was around all the way for was CHINA KILNS. The trick was really cute. We derped on assigning clues to answers properly, then we derped on solving the clue phrase, then we solved it.
By the time I looked at A Message From Our Sponsors, everything was IDed. Someone else got the aha. My main contribution was verifying the Poinsettia Bowl was indeed a thing.
When Pentoku came out, I loudly announced I wanted to work on a logic puzzle and people were free to join me. Then I left because about seven people started crowding around a blackboard, and I’m secretly not good at logic puzzles. Between the entire team, I’m pretty sure we solved each Pentoku twice, just because of communication issues between different rooms and the remote solvers.
I helped arrange the clues for A Lengthy Journey. This was shortly after we solved CHINA KILNS, so I was thinking we needed to make the answers form a cycle (each answer disambiguates a different clue, forming a cycle among clues.) We never realized that wasn’t what we were supposed to do. We ended Hunt with 9 puzzles unsolved, and this was one of them.
Fashionable Friends looked like fashion and so I skipped it. Someone pinged me about it later, saying it was a My Little Pony puzzle. I showed up and immediately identified the extraction mechanism, because of course cutie marks are going to be important in an MLP puzzle. I mean, duh! (It helps that last year’s MLP puzzle also used cutie mark extraction.)
I worked on Hamiltonian Path with a few other people. I let other people figure out the path constraints, and kept myself busy with identifying songs, because god damnit when else am I going to get to use my knowledge of Hamilton. I was very, very surprised that I could ID about 80% of the songs by memory, and only needed to look up lyrics for a few of them. Who knew 2-3 second snippets could be so distinctive? They were so distinctive that I didn’t even realize each clip had a number in it, which was really important for extraction. Oops. Anyways, after a very long time we got to GIVE US A VERSE, then got back a CD…and I realized I actually needed to make a team request for a laptop that had a CD player. Oh technology, you get obsoleted so quickly.
Mentally Stimulating Diversion was in fact a mentally stimulating diversion. It was a short one though, me and another person only spent about 40 minutes on it.
I did a dramatic reading of The Puzzle At The End of This Book around midnight on Friday. That was fun. We noticed all the encoded information during the dramatic reading, except for the encoding that gave SPECTER. I’m really disappointed we missed that mechanism, because it’s clearly the best one. (We did catch QALUPALIK, but it took us a while to believe that was a word.)
That was the last normal puzzle I looked at. After that I stared at metas for the rest of Hunt.
I don’t have much to say on endgame that wasn’t said at wrap-up. After solving all the metas, we scheduled a solo version of the Hungry Hungry Hippogriffs event (which didn’t look as fun as the full version), and a solo version of the Quizardry event.
The one cute thing that happened was that we asked to hear only the category on the final round of Quizardry, then tried to figure out the correct answer purely from knowing it needed to be transformable into another valid answer in that category. I suppose we unintentionally spoiled the endgame gimmick for ourselves, because endgame worked exactly the safe way - identify something in a category whose phrase satisfies a constraint we learned from before.
So long, and thanks for all the puzzles!