Comment by atodorov99 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by atodorov99 | Hacker News Reader

I was the type that played a lot of competitive games when growing up - mostly League of Legends and some CS GO. I got quite good at at LoL and over the years have noticed that feeling of being good at something is so surreal. In LoL I developed game sense and just knew stuff before it happened - I could forsee something that would happen in a game where theoretically every game is different.

After I learned to program I noticed that feeling of "game" sense can be developed for programming as well. When I am debugging something or looking at some code, I just "feel" stuff about the code, like the feeling of being reading through a function that is obviously doing that X thing. You just know without reading it whole. And you know where and how it is used without seeing it before hand. This is really enchanced for code that is written in a style that you are used to.

I believe all skills develop such an extra sense and the satisfaction from using it is really high. I think a lot of people refer to this as intuition but to me particularly it feels like something that is part of the sensations of my body.

> to me particularly it feels like something that is part of the sensations of my body.

I promise I am being completely serious: This is a point in the mis-judged sci-fi story about being an attack helicopter - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Sexually_Identify_as_an_Atta...

> My gender networks have been reassigned to make me a better AH-70 Apache Mystic pilot. ... Look at a diagram of an attack helicopter’s airframe and components. Tell me how much of it you grasp at once. Now look at a person near you, their clothes, their hair, their makeup and expression, the way they meet or avoid your eyes. Tell me which was richer with information about danger and capability. Tell me which was easier to access and interpret. The gender networks are old and well-connected. They work.

There was supposedly a study where scientists saw that when monkeys used tools, their brains treated the tools as extended body parts. If you get good enough at something, your brain wraps around it and it becomes as obvious to you as your own gender and social status.

In the past, it used to be called Intuition, and was looked down on as feminine and unreliable. But intuition is quite similar to making use of a highly-trained neural network that's not amenable to introspection because it's an advanced filter rather than a discrete chain of syllogisms, and we have suddenly developed a lot more respect for those.

I’m not sure what shaped your view of “the past”, but gut instinct is a very visceral and touted drive inherent in most people in most of history and isn’t more-so described as an unreliable feminine trait.

> intuition ... was looked down on as feminine and unreliable

Hate to be that guy, but, citation?

This strikes me as the casual reframing through the eyes of an imagined arch-misogynist that has become so commonplace when reflecting on the past (which was a very different time than the present, but which enabled the present [despite the also-popular idea that we've come to our present place in spite of the past]).

Happy to be shown to be incorrect.

I think you are just describing having expectations? You have done x enough times in certain situations that you expect x to be the answer or to happen again when you are in similar situations.

It can be useful but it can also be unhelpful. If you are looking for x and it turns out the answer is y you might get knifed in the back, er, or miss the non obvious error in your code.

Yes, but it is more nuanced than that. Not that great at LoL, but in rocket league, I have sort of a 6th sense for how people will play up to a certain level. Badminton as well actually. Sometimes it feels like I can read the future when I simply calculated 3-4 hits ahead of time, and like the GP, it is supremely satisfying.

You have to calculate the probability of them hitting, also account for misses, and explore your reaction to each possibility in this tree, it sounds easy but only comes after 1000 hours or so of play..

In the code example, with that level of exp you would also foresee the possibility of failure and account for that. The more times you get knifed, the less often it happens.

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