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Comment by ChrisRackauckas | Hacker News Reader

When teaching mathematics I like to always mention that the greats like Ramanujan, while it seems like they just knew everything from pure thought, they all actually did a ton of work by hand. Ramanujan in particular is known for his fastidious notebooks calculating thousands of digits numbers like pi. From writing out the calculations for hours and days, he'd come up with simplification formulas and develop new insights. These days, we have a tendency to just look at the formula and go "wow, how the heck did the think of that?" Well, what we would call "busy work".

Do the busy work. Do the calculations. Write it all out. Nobody is better than the busy work: it pays off and it's how you learn.

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Agreed 1000%! I think ‘do the busy work’ can even be applied more broadly:

Years ago I ran a small business in my mid-20s, and one of the critical mistakes I made was getting hopelessly behind in our bookkeeping (and by hopelessly behind I mean it - things were going well and the bank account kept going up, so I kinda just piled the sales receipts on top of each other for close to a year).

When the company started to grow up, we had to get properly reconciled financial statements in order for our bank loans to be renewed. I hired what felt like an endless stream of contract bookkeepers and financial consultants who all had their own way of “doing it more simply” to try and avoid what at that point was probably 100 hours of busywork to reconcile all the credit card transactions.

They all failed. We just kept falling more and more behind and lost resolution on how the business was doing.

In the end, the ONLY thing that worked was when I found someone who understood this and just rolled his sleeves up and did the work. There simply was no way around it. No shortcuts. No way to intuit how your business was doing without knowing exactly how much each customer spent. And no way to do that without matching up each credit card transaction.

Do the work. Don’t try to find ways around doing it because it’s hard or rote or mind numbing. Do the work.

This. And it's often not even that much work after all, given the amount of energy that went into procrastination and finding easier solutions. I've know this professionally for a long time now, but only recently "found out" that this applies to my personal/family bookkeeping process too. I've always been looking for easy automated solutions for importing and categorising my transactions until I read an article here on hn about bookkeeping with gnucash. I now enter all transactions by hand, for a few months now, and it has given me more control and insight than ever before.

Quick plug for ledger-cli (and hledger, and beancount). It is a command line tool for double entry bookkeeping in plain text files. All your transactions get recorded in a human readable file, and then you can run pretty complex queries over it. I currently have an envelope budget system set up in it, and even track my mortgage, including compounding the interest.

That's great! By the way, on a similar vein - I finally ditched QuickBooks / Quicken / all that crap and moved everything personally & for my consulting company over to hledger (which is just a slightly fancy version of ledger).

Turns out, everything I hated about QuickBooks for all these years centered around its inability to bulk-edit transactions or categorize/recategorize things en masse, leading to countless hours wasted clicking or, worse, those bulk journal entires to move things from one place to another (which forces you to follow a breadcrumb path of asset movements, which is a nightmare).

But when everything is just a list of things in a text file, you get the power of every great text editor on earth (vi, emacs, or whatever) and can make mass changes trivially. Life's much much much much better this way.

I’m pretty sure this is right.

However the kind of work you’re discussing doesn’t match my understanding of “busywork”. Busywork means unnecessary work done to give the appearance of actual work. Busywork doesn’t produce much value beyond appearances.

The work you’re discussing is “the work”. It’s the underpinnings, the research, the practice, the artist’s sketchbook, the exploration, the learning. None of that is “busywork”. If anything, it’s the opposite. Much of it will look like busywork (i.e. bringing little value), yet actually producing the highest value in the long run.

The problem is distinguishing "busywork" from "the work". Often times, they look very similar, especially to outside viewers.

When I think busywork, I think work given to me to occupy my time by someone (probably a teacher or a manager) that has no actual use other than timewasting. Theres this thread of being an externally administered task to my understanding of the word which helps me distinguish the two - im curious if similar connotations exist for others

> When I think busywork, I think work given to me to occupy my time by someone (probably a teacher or a manager) that has no actual use other than timewasting.

That is one source. The time wasting can have several (non-exclusive) motivations, however:

* Punishment

* Important but not urgent work

* Creating the appearance of insufficient resources to prevent allocation of labor elsewhere

That last motivation also applies to self-assigning busywork, of course.

pg referred to this as a necessary schlep

http://paulgraham.com/schlep.html

Absolutely this! Another way I express this to my colleagues is to consider that Einstein (and others) took fifteen years to develop the relativity theories that did not require any new theoretical or experimental input. All of that is typically taught in a semester's graduate level course today.

The "genius" perception hides all the hard work, false turns, recoveries, retries, .. busy work as you put it .. that's behind the core insights and discoveries.

> Einstein (and others) took fifteen years to develop the relativity theories that did not require any new theoretical or experimental input.

Further to that, when Einstein worked in the patent office, it's likely that applications related to railroad time synchronization crossed his desk, inspiring his work on relativity.

Hardly. Special relativity was a collaborative effort that was underway before Einstein gave his contribution. It was general relativity which was 100% Einstein's idea.

To improve, busy work is not enough - some kind of quality control is needed to provide feedback, like mentioned in the "Share your Work" paragraph.

I have been playing guitar for 28 years and barely improved in the past 15 years - after a teenage burst of disciplined, daily drills with metronome and recording a lot of music, I still regularly doodle and learn new songs, but it is just not enough to give me escape velocity from the current plateau.

FWIW, I agree w your point.

As for guitar playing plateaus, I highly recommend embracing alternate tunings as a shortcut / forcing function for adopting "beginner's mind", re-engaging your ear and your curiosity, and discovering new peaks to ascend.

A few of my favorites: - DADGAD (Black Mountain Side) - DADF#AD (Little Martha) - DGDGBE (Open G6) - CACGCE (Bron Yr Aur) - CGCGCD (Rain Song)

I've used EBEEBE before and it's a gorgeous tuning, using for the song 'Gold' from the film/musical Once. Also the variation EADGBF# is super interesting with open cords, though you do have to be very careful with tuning the top E string that high, easy to snap if you're not careful.

Thanks!! Looking fwd to playing w this one for the 1st time tonight! :)

I remember that film; Glen Hansard's absurdly beat-up guitar (with effectively a second, larger soundhole) even featured in Fretboard Journal. "Falling Slowly" is the song that got all the attention (which IMHO it deserved; gorgeous song and harmonies) but I'll go dig up "Gold" and give it a listen... thanks again! :)

I forgot that the F# tuning is used in Come Alive by the Foo Fighters. Cracking song and where I originally learned it.

Need an accountability partner? I know how it is. While I'm not looking for improving my guitar skills, if you need a strict drill sergeant (that doesn't shout :P), I'm available and for free.

For the first month ;-)

Consider it an experiment, for science ^^

Newton's notebook was published here a while ago. http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-04000/40

There's a ton of work behind the genius. There's no "apple on the head" story, almost never.

Newton was just incredible. The man polished his own lenses for his experiments. This, although there were already professional lens makers in England at the time, and they were better than him. Today, these antics would be dismissed as "bad practice", "reinventing the wheel", "losing two weeks rewriting a stupid lens" or some other corporate bullshit. But his great insights on the nature of light came from the very act of polishing a glass, using finer and finer sand until it becomes transparent when the grain of the sand is half the wavelength of the light.

> it becomes transparent when the grain of the sand is half the wavelength of the light

That seemed to have intriguing potential as an educational story.

But it felt odd. Briefly googling suggests optical polishing compound grains are almost all 1+ um.[1] But maybe that <1 um tail is key? This[2] shows larger grains, with a tail growing over hours. But lens roughness is already at ~1 nm without the tail, and the growing tail only slightly improves that. On the other hand, perhaps sub-um fragments from the hydrated damaged surface are being entrained by the lap pitch or wax or slurry? Don't know. But it seems a half-lambda grain-size story has difficulties.

Oh well. :) Thank you for this. I wish I could find an online community interested in crafting improved stories for teaching science and engineering. My in-person ones... covided. :/

[1] eg, for plastic lenses, https://secureservercdn.net/45.40.144.200/i1r.357.myftpuploa... from http://www.gkci.com/opthalmic/ready-to-use-plastic-lens-poli... . [2] page 7 of https://www.osapublishing.org/oe/fulltext.cfm?uri=oe-16-14-1...

Sorry, I don't recall the specific details of glass polishing in this story; probably the datum I said does not make sense.

You can find this inspiring story, and many, many others, on Feynman lectures on physics. I'm sure the stories as written by Feynman will be exact and true.

He was the ultimate "do it for somethings own sake" type of guy. He had a ton of curiosity, and just spent most of his life indulging it to the fullest. I mean, we in the modern world are so boxed in with our notions of right and wrong (most of which come from "authority"), newton wasn't like that, the man was equally comfortable studying about the bible, alchemy, as we was studying the natural world, building telescopes and as you said polishing his own lenses.

Newton was the pinnacle of this kind of personality, but frankly this was the common mindset until the 19th century. Science was not a profession, people who did it were on their own dime and their work was basically an expensive hobby. Things change a lot when you have to "publish or perish".

It's the same thing as today, you learn best when you implement systems yourself. For example, I didn't learn web animations until I built my own (internal) library to do it well rather than relying on a third party one.

I agree absolutely.

I would also say that this applies more broadly - that busy work is required in all parts of one's life. Deconstruct everything. Accept nothing. You will still learn, but you will recognise the assumptions and beliefs that you hold, and having recognised them you will also test for their truth.

I see 'busy work' as the root to a more valid personal epistemology; one that is based on personal use of the scientific method.

perfectly said

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