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Comment by wantsanagent | Hacker News Reader

I don't care about learning Mandarin, I want to find out how this guy's motivation system works and then download it into my brain.

Doing a PhD and learning Mandarin as a side project?! Doing hours of Anki practice and new note taking, some of it while running on a treadmill? There's just a crazy amount of drive (and what sounds like an epic memory) here.

I don't think people consider base motivation enough when thinking about processes and this guy won some kind of biological and/or upbringing lottery.

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Do not underestimate the urge to procrastinate (by still doing productive things, like learning Mandarin) while pursuing a PhD.

I am not sure if this will be the author's experience too, but pursuing a PhD will often leave you exhausted without any hope of ever finding "the final missing ingredient" to solve the problem you are currently tackling. So turning to entirely unrelated problems, however productive they may seem to outsides, suddenly becomes an attractive alternative in order to procrastinate.

I am currently learning to color grade, am an active bedroom musician, enjoy cooking and learning about food science, and am training for my first half marathon alongside my PhD. The side project thing is definitely real.

Having something to procrastinate on is half the reason I’m going to grad school while working full time.

It truly is an excellent hack.

Same here. I don't know how to fix my PhD, so let me just make my sponsor's code run faster and make a hundreds of open source PRs...

I wrote my own dynamic keyboard layout to optimize typing speed while procrastinating on my dissertation.

15 years later I'm still using it. My dissertation not so much.

Procrastination is (sometimes) awesome.

Dynamic keyboard layout?

What is that? The keys change place?

Probably using a QMK firmware-based keyboard where you can access different layers and shortcuts.

I'm using one right now (though mine runs off ZMK which is similar but wireless) which is a split with just 42 keys. The rest--numbers, symbols, function keys, etc. are all under layers. The layout is dynamic because holding down different keys makes the layout 'change' as you do so. Holding down the left spacebar and pressing 'Z' sends 'F1' to the computer while holding down another key on the right half turns my WER/SDF/XCV keys into a Numpad, etc.

Side effect, no one knows your passwords, even if they watch you type!

I have never heard of "left spacebar" before. Sounds very interesting. So there can be two different spacebars on your keyboard?

Some ergonomic keyboards are split between to the two hands (usually attached, but not always) and have a spacebar key for each hand.

But I always thought both keys sent the same signal to the computer.

Yes, both keys send the same key code to the computer, however, pabloescobyte said they’re using ZMK, so the left/right space bar distinction is happening on the level of the keyboard controller.

Structured procrastination is highly underrated.

It is so underrated, that I have been led to put off doing more structured procrastination until I have more time. If more people had told me how great it could be, I would be doing it now!

Sounds like custom hot-keys in a video game

>I find that when someone's taking time to do something right in the present, they're a perfectionist with no ability to prioritize, whereas when someone took time to do something right in the past, they're a master artisan of great foresight.

-xkcd 974

Can you share this keyboard layout with us? Sounds amazing

haha, so true. I had the same experience while in graduate school.

I’m not sure it’s procrastination. Years ago, when struggling with maths , I learned juggling ( 5 balls, tricks etc ) and ended up spending quite a bit of time on it every single day.

In practice, it made me feel very good, more relaxed, because I was able to learn something new and make progress rapidly - self confidence was back. The maths soon got unstuck and life became good.

I think an increasingly big difference isn't so much drive as it is sort of the inverse, lack of distraction. A lot of people's attention is just permanently dispersed. What's very effective is just cut all low quality or non necessary media or apps out of your life or limit them to say 15 minutes a day.

Then when you have inevitably nothing to do you can either throw in 10 minutes of doing anki flash cards or doing nothing, and that'll lower the bar to learn immensely. If I had to guess one thing that Isaak doesn't do is scroll for hours through newsfeeds or TikTok. With myself and most people I know that's by far the biggest thing to eat time.

Absolutely - I'm vouching for this comment.

> Doing hours of Anki practice and new note taking, some of it while running on a treadmill?

I studied with Anki on long 1hr walks and it worked incredibly well for me. I’d definitely recommend trying it!

Some things I learned were DS/algos, Greek alphabet pronunciation (so that I could read math symbols), the periodic table/chemical properties, and misc LeetCode interviewing stuff.

> DS/algos

How do you study that on Anki?

I started with these decks:

https://github.com/teivah/algodeck

https://github.com/teivah/designdeck

Essentially I'd have a question like "invert a binary tree", "implement union-find", or "structure of a topological sort". All of these are small enough that I can keep them in my head.

For small algorithms I would just regurgitate the code line-for-line in my head. For more complex ones I would just go over the structure (not actual code), e.g. I know that topological sort can use a stack or queue, you need to track indegree, add nodes to the stack/queue when their indegree == 1, and so on.

I also used this to help learn (and really understand) common runtimes which helped me when deriving the runtimes of my own algorithms.

Since I started with premade decks I had to look at lot of things up during my walks, but that slowed down as towards the end of my studying.

I did all this to prep for interview (which I wrote about on my blog: https://sjer.red/blog/2024/job-hunt/) -- I would say it worked fairly well for me though you definitely need to pair it with LeetCode or similar.

That blog post is unbelievable. It looks very/eerily similar to men dating online in the 2020s.

I emigrated twice within ten years (move, learn the language, find a job, than find a job, move, learn the language). I sometimes wonder how does it feel not having to run and push all the time just not to fall behind.

The price for the motivation could be higher you're willing to pay.

I'm guessing for someone learning a new language is relaxing and therefore helps recharging the person after hours of intense PhD work - things like enjoying daily progress, discovery of foreign culture, the euphoria of being able to read and watch new stuff...

Exactly this.

Unlike the PhD, they make daily progress on the language. Success is visible.

(Edit: ok, the truth is they were not doing this at the same time as the PhD. I still like my comment.)

Learning a new language is a stressful grind. I've studied CJK at a similar pace as this article, and it's equal parts exhaustion as it is elation. Not for the feint of heart.

https://structuredprocrastination.com

See also "The Art of Procrastination" (2012).

Thanks, that was a great read and resonates a lot with me. Looking back, most of my learning new languages, getting in shape, playing the guitar, and making new friends was structured procrastination.

He wasn't doing a PhD at the time he was learning Mandarin (he's just started his PhD).

For what it's worth I've been through periods of this multiple times with different things and it never really feels like discipline is required (aside from on some _really_ busy days), you just want to do it if you're actually interested.

I likely couldn't force myself to learn, say, Spanish, if I tried despite it being technically far easier. It's just not interesting to me in the same way.

It’s interesting that you mention motivation/drive on a post like this. I have similar thoughts whenever there are posts about personalized learning technology or improving public education.

> Doing a PhD and learning Mandarin as a side project?!

his matriculation year is 2024 (and fall classes haven't even started) so he's doing a PhD like the pre-med kids were "doing" med school freshman year. people that brag like this don't finish - there were a few in my cohort too that washed out after quals.

as someone with lots of impressively credentialed braggart friends.. that's not always the case.

although w.r.t. myself? absolutely agree with the sentiment. I would wash out in half a week with that kind of workload.

Author also graduated high school from Austria early, and finished a Berkeley math degree in 2 years. I’d say author is gifted.

That said, technical PhDs often require a combination of raw mental horsepower, persistence and luck. (Working for the right advisor in a promising area)

I brought about the same smarts as my peers but they graduated in 5 years whereas I did 8 years because I didn’t have the most promising area of research plus I got unlucky.

Not really - I’d say he just really wants to. Just like when you meet someone and want to spend time with them, are binge watching a show, playing a video game, reading a book, writing code : you want to do that thing again, here learn mandarin.

I’m a lot more familiar with Japanese than with mandarin (and use srs), and it’s worth noting than srs essentially turns anything into an extremely satisfying game : you learn quickly, you really wonder how far you can go, so you keep playing.

I believe that’s the killer combo : really wanting to do something, and having that something turned into a game to avoid giving up.

I use ChatGPT/Claude in bed...

>download it into my brain

"it" is the youth. The guy looks to be mid-20ies. Back then in those years i could go for 3 days without sleep while working, studying, drinking, etc. and many of my friends and classmates at the University were similar.

Noone goes without sleep for three days and doesnt pay a severe heavy price for it. Stop it with that dumb sleep machismo...

Man, have you ever been 20smth years old? Do you really remember it as the time when you were thinking about "heavy price" beforehand and were suppressing your "machismo"?

The point you’re making is ridiculous though, because what Isaak has done is clearly an unusual accomplishment. You’re actually just making excuses for yourself, being too old to have the motivation. It’s a less helpful explanation than just plain curiosity - and that’s available to all age groups.

Yes, yes, and yes? People use youth to excuse all sorts of unhealthy behavior. Some of my friends smoked cigarettes but most of us didn't because why would we harm ourselves on purpose like that?

>all sorts of unhealthy behavior

How we know of that unhealthiness? Because some people have explored those options, and we learned the result. One can say those people did public service for our species.

>People use youth to excuse

You're either doing strawman by substituting excuse for explanation, or you're arguing against evolution and natural selection which placed the peak of exploration/exploitation behaviors ratio at the youth time, be it our species or say wolves or cats, etc. I think there are a lot of good reasons why that peak is at the youth time.

>Some of my friends smoked cigarettes but most of us didn't because why would we harm ourselves on purpose like that?

Well, cigarettes is established harm. Took decades of years and millions of people, and as result we call it an obvious harm today. It looks though to me that there are greater harm out there which can be observed these days - the more and more suppressed exploration instinct which over the generations will result in tremendous negative impact on our civilization, and bringing it back wouldn't be so easy as say quiting smoking (did it myself 22 years ago after a decade of pack-a-day smoking)

> How we know of that unhealthiness? Because some people have explored those options, and we learned the result. One can say those people did public service for our species.

We've known cigarettes are unhealthy for a very long time. We'd know sooner if it weren't for cigarette company lobbying. And we didn't need to wait for people to die of cancer, a look at the label is enough lol.

> or you're arguing against evolution and natural selection which placed the peak of exploration/exploitation behaviors ratio at the youth time

This is at least as fallacious if not more so. I don't have a name for this odd "because of evolution" argument but I hear it a lot when discussing sociology. "Kids smoke cigarettes because cavemen wanted to explore the horizon" isn't a coherent causal explanation at all.

> Well, cigarettes is established harm.

Exactly, and very well established by the time I was a teenager in the 2010s.

> . It looks though to me that there are greater harm out there which can be observed these days - the more and more suppressed exploration instinct which over the generations will result in tremendous negative impact on our civilization

Ok so what I'm getting is that you have a pet theory that kids not smoking these days is a symptom of an overall rejection of some form of naturalism that you believe is overall harming our society somehow. Is that the case?

>I don't have a name for this odd "because of evolution" argument but I hear it a lot when discussing sociology

sociology without evolution/natural selection is like physics without Newton's laws - a religion.

> "Kids smoke cigarettes because cavemen wanted to explore the horizon" isn't a coherent causal explanation at all.

both have the same major component - they are different manifestations of the drive to disobey authority and the established order of things. There are 2 ways of dealing with such things - 1. to convince against and to explain harm, etc vs. 2. to suppress, to force into submission.

>Ok so what I'm getting is that you have a pet theory that kids not smoking these days is a symptom of an overall rejection of some form of naturalism that you believe is overall harming our society somehow.

You picked an easy example (borderline strawman) - smoking (well, it is easy today, after 300+ years it took to establish the harm of tobacco smoking) where the 1. is easy. In many situations the 1. isn't that easy and it requires approach specific to the issue at hands, and the society more and more it seems drives toward applying the 2. as a general solution for all the issues, be it cigarettes or horizon exploration. That general drive of widespread application of the 2. is, i think, very harmful for our civilization.

I didn't take it as machismo, more like "you can do that when you're young"

But you can't. It's like saying "we used to have to bike uphill through a storm to get to school! Both ways!"

You're doing classic strawman. The other 2 guys arguing against me are also doing strawman. I can only wonder why that my lighthearted recall of my youth struck so much nerve in you and those other 2 guys.

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