Non cogito, ergo sum
1843magazine.com
1843magazine.com
A friend once rhetorically asked me what trying to be funny meant, and of course it means being not funny, yet when we want to achieve some other end we approach it by trying. Yoda summed it up well, but we don't really get a chance to understand what it really means. Trying to drive on a highway is farcically dangerous, but simply driving on one is among the safest ways to drive.
There is a mental change that comes from physical competence where you no longer fear failure, and I'd argue its that lack of fear that makes the difference at elite levels where skills are largely equal. It also makes the difference in the rate at which you learn. The try/humiliate style of teaching is a way to produce industrial scale mediocrity, and so few can appreciate the difference that there is often no reason to change.
And no, it won't be obsolete soon. And by "soon" I mean what I wrote earlier, 10+ years.
FF to 2018 (that's 15 years I haven't had any sort of driving license) and lo and behold, I am a certified tractor operator. Turns out I can manage all that signage and other drivers bullshit, provided it all doesn't move too fast. And mostly doesn't come up in my work.
"Offline" activities are different, there you have enough time to evaluate different decisions and their possible outcomes.
That is, "When I'm funny/socially-adept, I'm [so unconsciously competent that I'm] not spending any effort to think about it. Therefore, if you spend no effort and relax, you will show the same skill. If you can't, you just weren't listening to my advice."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mushin_(mental_state) "Once mushin is attained through the practice or study of martial arts (although it can be accomplished through other arts or practices that refine the mind and body), the objective is to then attain this same level of complete awareness in other aspects of the practitioner's life. "
http://budobum.blogspot.com/2015/02/states-of-mind-mushin.ht...
I recently went through some deep study of my guitar picking technique. My playing nearly fell apart while I was doing it. Thinking about the angle at which the pick strikes the strings is really painful.
Specifically, thinking after the fact. If you play a chord, what do you remember about the angle the pick strikes the strings. Play it again, what do you notice afterwards. etc.
I have a strong hunch that its as much about developing the introspective ability/bridge to the skill as it is about bridging the write/edit flow gap (ie in writing its said to be better to write without reading, then edit in a separate session).
In my homecountry, Italy, there was an ancient theathral novel named "Re Travicello" (King little beam, literally) that say having thinking subjects it's a big problem: they contest, protest, convince other, they develop working solutions against throne interest etc. So he invented two concept: "trust the system" and "use your instinct" to stop people thinking...
Zen, in China, chan, is a mixture of Buddhism and Taoism, with Taoism originating in the 4th century BC during the warring states period along with most other influential Chinese philosophies (and, weirdly, much of Greek philosophy).
One rival was Mohism, sort of a mix of logic and sophism (logic has origins in rhetoric); Zhuangzi has some points about "disputation" that make me feel more kindly to modern analytic philosophy.
https://www.iep.utm.edu/zhuangzi/
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zhuangzi/
See also Arthur Whateley (?) and especially Angus Graham.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjvSx0ipO0k&feature=youtu.be...
That’s the theory behind the article. Federer is 37, Dokovic is 31. Just saying.
Anyway Federer seems to have lifted himself well.
You mean that both of them were considered to be in their prime.
(The ages of the women in the top twenty currently is much more how it used to be in the men's game.)
I wonder if that has anything to do with modern sport science keeping people at peak longer or even to do with steroids.
Could also be that they're just all exceptional, but I've been burned by optimism about sport personalities before.
Or maybe it's just drugs, though they get tested regularly and punished very severely (but you could say the same about cycling...).
> 25/31 < 31/37.
> 25/31 < 31/37
Also quasi-related, a while back there was an article on HN about the human brain's Bayesian like processes[2], which again seem to form the basis of intuitive decision making.
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/321621803_The_Intri...
[2] https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1740-...?
I can't find the reference, but I have also read there is evidence that "gut" or intuitive decision making is also informed by information that the conscious mind does not have access to.
I've had what seems like my greatest awakening this past week. Practice gets you somewhere, but I can't authoritatively say "where" is. Like some other commenter mentioned, I've found myself in an intentioned mushin [0] state.
This morning I was off the wagon a bit, but now I'm back. Can't wait to see what I accomplish with this focus ;)
Whereas when I played more 'happy go lucky' I could coordinate my actions much better.
There's probably other factors at play here, but overthinking really does have a downside on my ability to play well.
Another interesting datapoint is a friend of mine, who overthinks when gaming except when he was slightly intoxicated. Maybe like the Ballmer peak for gaming! :D
I have one other qualm:
>But baseball players do so by instinctively following simple rules: run in the right general direction, and adjust your speed to keep a constant angle between eye and ball.
Humans definitely do calculate "complex" differential equations to estimate the trajectory of a ball. If not, they literally wouldn't know which direction the ball is traveling in, as you'd only have the position of the ball on the eye's optic plane. Just because processes are subconscious or effortless doesn't mean they aren't happening.
The brain calculating differential equations doesn’t seem very plausible given the fact it has no access to data to perform those calculations. Perhaps it’s more about past observations or a priori knowledge? I think it’s worth noticing that catching things is an ancient predatory skill and is not exclusive to humans.
That's not at all how the brain works. It's a pattern matching neural net, so it trains a set of neurons to estimate the trajectory through trial and error, based on continually updating visual input, but the equations are nowhere in that implementation.
And if you choose simple and less obtuse language stacks, e.g. Clojure(script) - that will allow you to stop thinking about "mechanics" and concentrate your focus on solving the problem (instead of fighting the ecosystem, dependency management, language idioms, style guide, etc.).
His examples of people losing focus (ie. thinking about a movement) are right, but not because thinking is bad, but because one was focused on the wrong faucet of one's consciousness. Conscience doesn’t exist only in the intellect. Animals are not unconscious.
I also used to notice brain states that I'd call "fast meditation", completely calm and meditative, almost just observing the body doing it's work, but at speed. Happens even more in sportscar racing, i think because there's more time to get into a "flow state". Turns out there's a connection -- meditating monks generally slow down their sympathetic ('flight-or-flight") system and the parasympathetic (slow maint) system becomes primary, except when they achieve an exceptional meditative state they seek for years, when both systems kick into high gear. I suspect the same thing is happening from the opposite direction.
It is endlessly amazing . . .
Put simply, you can't learn the fundamentals of everything that affects your life.
There are consequences, of course. It is important to learn to balance between when you should learn something and when it really doesn't matter. This is easier said than done and up for constant debate.
This is why neural nets are so powerful. They're encoding generalized heuristics, likely similar to those humans use.
Currently the state of the art is some sort of ad hoc correlation between behavior and explanations.
The topological ANN explanation makes their thinking seem vastly different from what logical heuristics would be...
You can get there fairly simply by playing any extremely fast-paced video game, like Tetris or Tempest 2000.
When I was djing regularly, I could get to that state, too. Given how introverted I was, it would have been impossible for me to actually get up in the DJ booth in front of hundreds or thousands of people and think about what I was doing. I had to lose myself in the activity. I often walked out after two hours not really remembering anything I did.
As to not noticing passage of time consciously, it is because conscious though likely it's more energy intensive, so to save it when subconscious processes are sufficient it gets throttled down. Of course this is a "just so" explanation and we do not actually know how exactly this works. Perhaps the consciousness related to sensing time and rhythm gets relegated to something else.
It's interesting that when the body is happy and relaxed the mind is not aware of it. So there seems to be a continuous struggle between the ordering mind and instinctive body. Or the mind and the animal side.
When we're content, nothing has to be changed, right? The trouble is, our "contentment sensor" has been evolved a long time ago for a different environment and is probably hard to train being so ancient and we do not know how to do it...
Of course this is another "just so" explanation. There's not enough science on contentment and discontent related to intellectual performance.
Currently I found this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/6846034/
However, really successful tilt this balance unnaturally (see above).
“Unthinking is not the same as ignorance; you can’t unthink if you haven’t already thought.”
Put simply, unthinking requires extensive experience and training. This isn’t some magical monk super power everyone can reach for, it is only available to those who have devoted enough time and effort to the task that it almost becomes an instinct.
Driving is an example of this everyone can relate to. Imagine a newbie “unthinking”. Ouch!
In my view, you really master something if you have conscious control over it. Perhaps that is what Federer was trying to do.
Mastery involves training the unconscious parts well enough to be able to offload work onto them.
Quite the opposite - you master something when you can do it automatically, i.e. without conciously controlling it. The conscious mind has many limitations, one is that it's way too slow to handle real-time events - you can't consciously think about what actions to perform when you suddenly skid your car in a curve, or when you're performing the high jump on a sports field. The other main problem with the conscious mind is that it can't multi-task. So you use your conscious mind to practice, carefully, slowly at first, one part at the time, until, finally, your unconscious (or automated) trained sections of your brain can do it for you, and all the conscious mind has to do is to sit back, relax, and be the conductor. Or just watching.
It's not mindless, it's higher level.
Maybe I've just never attained mastery.
The problem with training a neural net (or part of your brain) is that it is fuzzy. You don't know why it works, just that by trying hard enough, it often works. I'm saying that this is from a certain perspective unsatisfying. Also, talented people often do things automatically, without understanding why, and they have a hard time explaining things to a beginner.