Chimpanzees' performance on computer tasks changes when people watching them
cell.com
cell.com
Yet for some of us the stress of being observed and scrutinized is crippling regardless of the task difficulty. I've bombed so many interviews because of this. :(
It was also only 6 chimps and the experiments were run over many years. I bet replication is going to be troublesome.
But when I was a beginner at it, the stress was indeed crippling.
The cure for that kind of stress is to keep doing it, the stress will go away. Like if your throat freezes up when stepping behind the podium, just take every opportunity you can to public speak.
P.S. I don't get any adrenaline from a zoom presentation. As a result, they aren't near as good as the live ones.
But that was because humans were watching you. I imagine it would be notably less stressful if you were being watched by an increasingly large population of chimpanzees instead of people.
Personally I imagine that the larger that group of chimpanzees got, the more relaxed I would feel. Just think about solving a problem in a room with 1,000 chimpanzees just chilling out and watching without a single other human in the room.
Likewise I suspect chimpanzees would perform different if watched other chimpanzees.
Obviously a chimpanze recognizes humans as something like itself, and that the humans opinions matter. At the very least a chimp knows that the humans totally control it's life.
You have a very different understanding of the relationship between yourself and any group of chimps.
I feel your pain.
I had a fourth-round interview recently where I was expected to write code while narrating my thoughts to two people sitting either side of me - and while perched on a wobbly office stool at a standing desk. Couldn't think. Totally bombed it.
I can’t imagine adding two people, an unfamiliar desk setup, an unfamiliar keyboard even, all while talking about what I’m doing.
Of course, silicon valley has taught that people who can speak and code at the same time are like best things, but if a team is not happy to accept other people’s shortcomings, am probably fine not working with them.
yeah but maybe these people are just as good when they aren’t in front of huge audiences..
It’s like there’s a little bit of my social brain I have to keep on if there’s anyone who could potentially talk to me and when I can switch that off I can use my whole brain for the task at hand and it’s much easier.
It’s not like I’m bad at concentrating. I am that guy who can sit in a noisy open plan office and concentrate on one thing while everyone is talking and trying to get attention. But the lack of all people still really helps.
Does anyone else experience this?
I remember hearing a story about a guitarist who was trying to play his scales as fast as possible, and an observer described it as the guitarist being so focused “he forgot to breathe”. That resonates with me.
But if I’m sitting around in the evening with the family, I can’t achieve anything like this level of focus. I’ve come to think of it like an airplane or rocket. It uses most of its energy to get off the ground, but once in motion high above the earth, it can stay in motion using a fraction of that energy.
Being around other people who might interrupt is like launching a rocket, and 3 minutes into the flight we have to land because someone wants a snack.
Sometimes when I try to think about something challenging in these circumstances, in a matter of 20 minutes I feel exhausted to the point it’s hard to keep my eyes open, as if I’ve tried to launch a rocket every 2 minutes and have no fuel left, even though I haven’t gone anywhere.
Also random manager, “dude!! How do you even read those texts? So tiny” when passing by behind me. (I use “More Space” resolution on macbook as I prefer to have many things on single screen instead of constantly becoming a bobbing head looking at much neglected monitors on my desk).
Take a football match. The presence of your own fans has a big positive effect (usually). Presence of the other teams fans has a negative effect (usually).
I would expect that the belief of the person doing the task about the audience and whether they make them feel supported or nervous or angry or whatever other complex emotion would all change the effect
Man, I read that book to my kids so many times I can probably still recite it in it's entirety.
I miss having little kids.
To anyone with little kids; no amount of money is worth the time you have with them. Literally none. You can never get that time back, and every experience for them is important.
Subsequently, I think I understand why parents are almost always better grandparents. They get it.
Those of you in the rat race, when you get home after a hard day and an hour of sitting in traffic, please, just sit in your car for a minute or two. Shed all of that. Pick a tree in your front yard and name it your worry tree. Before you go in, leave your stress/worries/frustrations with it. It won't stay gone but the intention will make it so those first five minutes when you walk into the door you can be present and enjoy your kids, instead of just bringing in a ball of intensity they won't understand.
Those memories of 'mommy's home' or 'daddy's home' shouts of joy when you go inside are pure gold for the rest of your life.
I don’t consider myself totally stupid but it took me many years to figure this out. I took major salary cuts to find work with real balance. And to do work I could be proud of as well. I could have started much sooner but I felt this force pushing me to earn a bit more. Vacations could be a little longer (though I’d have to put out fires while I’m on them). We could afford a home (though kids don’t actually care all that much if you rent or own, anyway). I could afford more convenient food to save time (though my kids prefer when I take time to cook nice food from scratch for them). Ultimately it’s like… Your kids will be happy because you are, and you’re spending time with them. It’s that simple. If you can pay the bills, that’s good enough.
The balance is tough to find. I think this is especially true if you grow up poor, or come from a family with very high expectations. Both seem to be poison for the mind when it comes to finances and perception of success. In both cases there’s never enough.
My post doc mentor gave me that book to read, and didn't really tell me why. The first half is socialite nonsense. But then there's a deep dive into finding joy in life that isn't related to work.
He could see that my very poor background was making me look to move up to high pay, high stress jobs and was politely trying to intervene.
Finding balance is hard, but worth it. I'm making less than I should at a job that's okay. But I have 45 days of PTO, and another 18-20 holidays. I can take two full months off every year and nobody complains.
That all sounds great to me. I can say with certainty that it would have sounded terrible 10 years ago. How can you waste all that time not advancing your career? The irony is that the PTO and holidays absolutely do advance your career in the sense that they make you a more complete, fulfilled person who can keep cracking away at their career in a steady and consistent fashion for the decades to come. When you’re 25 you have no idea how badly you’ll need that, and how soon.
I will be adding this to my list of demo failure excuses.
Opening HN because brain is bored is not an option.
At a co-working space (or in an office) I have to work, or I'd feel embarrassed whenever someone else was nearby (which is almost all the time).
It could also be explained as the researches accidentally recreating "Clever Hans."
I feel like regardless of confirmation behind how high the intellect of the horse was, this is no way him to go out. Hans truly loved him. This may sound dramatic but it feels like if my pet cat were to get killed in war and possibly eaten after i died
There's a federal ban on marijuana but it's legal in many states.
Sounds like machine learning
(No, that's not how quantum mechanics work)
Monkey Seen, Monkey Do
I don't think they see any value in computer tasks other than getting treats.
Stuck in the same day over and over again. Yep, sounds about right.
The chimpanzees seemed like a big cost saving at first but when you factor in the wages of the human supervisors, it's hardly worth the legal issues it causes.
I haven't been able to replicate this during coding interviews
and Difficult Task + increasing audience = improved performance
which makes sense to me. 1 person is a distraction. a group of people is an audience.
I hope everyone realizes what this means, just look at those scaling laws: if we can just fund a company that gets money to pay potentially millions of people to watch a chimpanzee performing a difficult task, we could potentially get super human intelligence.
If we can get, and I know this sounds wild, trillions of dollars in funding we might be able to pay billions of people to watch a single chimp and that will potentially lead us to singularity, saving us from climate change.