Posts
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The Blogging Gauntlet: May 3 - Asynchronous Research and You
CommentsThis is part of The Blogging Gauntlet of May 2016, where I try to write 500 words every day. See the May 1st post for full details.
Last Sunday, I did Berkeley Mystery Hunt. I can’t talk about the puzzles publicly because this puzzle hunt gets run twice: once during the school year for Berkeley students, and once during the summer for people in the Bay Area.
In every puzzle hunt, I run into the same scenario. A new puzzle comes out, and I take a look at it. I’ll solve it, or I’ll get stuck and move to another puzzle. Either way, I run into a problem. Either I need other people to explain what they’ve figured out, or other people need to understand my progress based on my work so far.
For smaller puzzle hunts, this is fine. Usually you’re all in the same room, so you can ask each other in person. However, when you scale up to massive teams like MIT Mystery Hunt, this becomes a huge concern. They might be sleeping, or be on the other side of the country, and you have to figure out the partial progress from only the notes they’ve written down. If those notes don’t explain the motivation behind all the data collected, they’re practically useless. How am I supposed to know why you removed all the vowels, or where this random column of numbers came from?
I didn’t know what to call this, until I read qntm’s series on antimemetics. If you haven’t read them, I highly, highly recommend checking them out. Start at We Need To Talk About Fifty-Five and follow the links from there.
If you don’t want to, here’s the quick version. Memes are ideas that want to be known, spreading from mind to mind. Antimemes are ideas that want to be forgotten. They are self-censoring. When you stop looking at an antimemetic object, your brain erases your memory and you forget it even exists.
The Antimemetics Division studies antimemes, and they have a devil of a time doing so. It’s hard to study things that everyone rediscovers on a daily basis, and it’s even harder when malicious antimemes erase the lives of coworkers so thoroughly that any evidence of their existence disappears. It’s one of the more horrifying ways to go. You can’t prove your existence to the world if the world doesn’t listen to you…
(from Crisis on Infinite Earths, discovered through TVTropes)
Nightmare fuel aside, there’s a quote about antimemetics research that resonated with me, which is applicable outside the realm of fiction.
Still lost for a logical entry point to the data, Wheeler curses all of her predecessors. Asynchronous research — whereby the research topic is forgotten entirely between iterations, and rediscovered over and over — is a perfectly standard practice in the Antimemetics Division, and her people ought to be better trained than this. There should be an obvious single document to read first which makes sense of the rest. A primer—
(qntm, CASE COLOURLESS GREEN)
The idea of asynchronous research is something I’ve thought about before, but this is the first time I’ve seen someone describe it. And I love the description, it’s perfect.
When I take notes on something, whether it’s for puzzle hunts or lecture, I emphasize writing down motivations, writing down questions people ask about the material, and writing down the answers to those questions. If I don’t follow the lecture, I write what the lecturer is saying anyways, and pepper the margins with question marks to indicate my confusion.
The reason I do this is simple: if I understand the material, I’m not going to read my old notes. In the worlds where I’m reading my notes, I don’t understand what’s going on, so I write my notes towards a more confused version of myself. If my notes spend too long explaining a topic I already get, that’s fine, I’ll just skip ahead. But if my notes don’t explain something in enough detail, I have to struggle through them, and that takes a lot longer.
Understanding something in the now doesn’t mean you’ll remember it in the future, so it’s best to leave notes for your forgetful future selves. Comment your code to explain your awful hack. Mark key ideas to give your future self something to start at, and mark when you’re confused to let your future self know where your notes are dodgy.
If you’re confused about an idea, then get it after a few minutes, write down why you were confused and why it makes sense, because there’s a good chance that if you get confused again, you’ll get confused in the same way. (Writing it down also makes it stick better and decreases the chance you get confused in the first place.)
Here are some examples. Below are my notes on backprop from neural nets. I make sure to annotate the intuition behind the gradient.
(Click for full size.)
Here’s another example from theoretical crypto. I don’t follow the intuition said in lecture, but I write it down anyways, and note my confusion appropriately.
(Click for full size.)
There are downsides to this approach. I’ve filled notebooks with notes that I’ve never read again, and it’s tricky to take detailed notes while keeping up with lecture. However, I overall think it’s worth it. This may not be the best way to take notes, but it’s what my note taking strategy evolved into. So far, it’s been working for me.
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The Blogging Gauntlet: May 2 - Too Tired To Play
CommentsThis is part of The Blogging Gauntlet of May 2016, where I try to write 500 words every day. See the May 1st post for full details.
Let’s talk about work and play.
This is a theme that people absolutely love to bring up when talking about productivity. Here’s how the argument goes. People who do lots of work do because they like their work. They find ways to make work fun. The average employee goes to work to earn a paycheck, using that money to fund their play elsewhere. They work to live, instead of living to work. The mythical employee who treats their work as play lives for their work, because their work isn’t work; it’s play! That self-satisfaction drives them to work on side project after side project.
I’ll fully admit I’m strawmanning the argument by a bit. It’s not as though it’s unfounded. People who like their job will do more at their job. It’s obvious. People with big hobbies will spend time outside of work on those hobbies. They’ll take salsa lessons, or practice playing the piano. Maybe they’ll try organizing a roleplaying campaign.
What this portrayal misses is that even if you like your work, it’s still work. Someone can both deeply enjoy their job and deeply desire a break from it. And similarly, some hobbies require lots of effort as well. Learning to play the piano requires focused practice. Running a roleplaying campaign requires crafting a plausible setting, and learning how to improvise against the insane actions of roleplayers themselves.
If there is work and there is play, then for me blogging is semi-play. It’s nice, but it requires effort, and sometimes I’m too tired for that. If I’ve just worked for 12 hours, the last thing my brain wants to do is do more. I’m too tired to work, and I’m too tired to play.
It doesn’t matter that blogging is more personally fulfilling than being a passive consumer of other people’s work. Entertainment is entertaining! It’s made that way! Zero effort for a small blip of amusement. Welcome, dear children, to the fire hose of information.
There is always a relevant xkcd
I don’t want to bash the entertainment industry that hard, because it would be hypocritical. This blog is a contributor to that fire hose, and I want people to drink from it.
I want to write more, but there’s this pressure to make the words I’m writing perfect and well-polished. To make every sentence a clean pearl, saying exactly what I mean in exactly as many words as I need. The issue is that it takes a long time to write in a polished way. The more polished I want something, the more effort that has to go into it. My standards for myself make blogging too daunting to do unless I have little else going on, and that’s not sustainable.
A few weeks ago, I had a conversation with somebody. She said it was nice to have a low effort writing outlet. That way, she could write down her passing thoughts, without worrying about making it perfect.
This challenge is a step towards making my blog take less effort. By requiring 500 words every day, I’m forced to lower my standards on what’s publishable and what isn’t. I won’t lie, that’s going to sting a bit. It doesn’t matter how many layers of self-deprecation I weave about myself, I care a lot about the quality of the things I produce. It’s natural to; in fact I’d say it’s incredibly strange not to. The end result of a well-edited most can be glorious to behold, but it’s a long journey to get there, and I find it less fun than the first step of turning my thoughts into words.
I’m treating this gauntlet as one small piece of my long term plan to get better at working towards long term plans. In the short term, my writing is going to be straight garbage. In the long term, I’ll be more articulate, and I’ll be better at understanding the power of taking small concrete steps towards lofty uncertain goals.
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The Blogging Gauntlet: May 1 - Introduction
CommentsRecently, I haven’t been updating this blog. The biggest factor was that right after spring break finished, all of my classes decided they could really get moving, and I’ve been swamped with final projects until today.
However, that shouldn’t be an excuse not to blog at all. In fact, for about the first two weeks after break, I found myself wanting to write blog posts about various silly observations I’d had. I knew I was busy, and that blogging had to take a backseat, but it was nagging me for a while. To quote Art & Fear yet again,
Artists don’t get down to work until the pain of working is exceeded by the pain of not working.
Yet as the weeks passed by, that motivation dwindled. I always had an excuse. This presentation is due the 14th. I need to fix my research code in time to run experiments. I have a paper to write. These were all indisputable facts, and the consequences were similarly unavoidable: my blogging habit slowly dissipated. Gaming and TVTropes rushed into the void, and soon I was back where I started.
Classes have finished at Berkeley, meaning I’m free for the first time in a long while. But in just over a month, I’ll be starting a full-time job, and I’m worried I’ll once again have reasons not to blog. I’ll be too tired, I’ll be too drained. Those are the words I’ll tell myself to justify not writing, and sometimes they will be true and sometimes they won’t, but the outcome will be the same either way.
With a new month comes a new start and a new opportunity. I’ve been planning this for a while, and I am proud to present: The Blogging Gauntlet of May 2016!
(Please clap.)
Here’s how it works.
- For every day of May, I will write and post at least 500 words.
- If I write more than 500 words for a day, that’s great! I still have to write 500 words the next day. There is no rollover, there is no surplus, and there is no buffer. Five hundred words per day, every day, all written between 12:00:00 AM and 11:59:59 PM local time.
- I am allowed to write on whatever I want. I am allowed to write as awfully as I want. Posts do not have to be well-edited, but I will try to edit them if I have the time.
- To make my brain take notice of this, every day I fail to write 500 words, I will donate $20 to charity. I plan to distribute any money donated based on GiveWell’s recommendations.
This gauntlet is a somewhat drastic measure, but I am very sure I can do this. Looking back, I was about as busy last semester as I was this semester, but I still managed to get posts out on a semi-regular basis.
The intention with this challenge is that 500 words is not that much. Yet, if I do 500 words every day, that’s 15,000 words this month, and that’s quite a bit. Think NaNoWriMo, but smaller scale and more personal. This should also help flush my queue of ideas I want to write down but haven’t yet. Based on reception, I can then narrow down which ideas I want to write about in more detail.
If I can’t do this when I don’t have work, there’s no way I do this when I do have work. If I can do this for an entire month, the habit may finally stick.
I’m pretty excited about this. I have more to say about why I’m doing this, but I’ll leave it for another time.
(Finally, a parting mark: yes, my brain models giving to charity as a punishment, not a reward. if you’re wondering about the ethical gymnastics going on behind that, stay tuned, because I will almost certainly write about it.)
