How to Think
farnamstreetblog.com
farnamstreetblog.com
- The ability to think creatively
- The ability to substitute initially attractive moves with well thought out log-term effective ones.
However on the other side of the coin is what we hackers face more often - Analysis Paralysis.
Once you fall into the Analytical Mindset, there is such a thing as being too analytical. Sometimes if it feels right you just go ahead and F*ing do it.
Otherwise the fear of making a wrong decision will paralyze you into inaction - which is worse than a screw-up (usually). So it is a balancing act - think enough but not too much. Analyze but not to the point of paralysis.
Edit: Spelling
This really resonated with me. I personally struggle with this on and off. I just call it the programmer's curse. I sometimes wonder where this "fear" originally came from. Did I pick it up from other developers? Did it evolve over time from seeing the mistakes of others? Somehow I came to associate this fear as something good developers are suppose to feel. Indeed I probably need a little bit of this or I might make some really dumb mistakes. But sometimes it really is paralyzing. It can be really hard at times to let go and convince myself that I don't have to find the perfect solution for every challenge. More specifically, I get hung up trying to predict future problems and solve them. Sometimes you just won't know what will be thrown at you and your code later. It probably goes along with what you described as wasting work. I really don't like the idea of solving very similar problems with duplicated or redundant solutions/code. In end though we often have time constraints and failures beyond on control.
I feel like I had a better grasp on this when I worked for others. But now that I work full-time on my own startup I tend to be even harder on myself.
(Completely unrelated, but I just wanted to say ciao. I saw you're based in Sicily :) My mother is from Milano. I lived there for a couple of years as well. Oh how I miss the blood oranges...)
I hate it, and I've found personally using the techniques like Pomodoro[1] has helped immensely with just doing something! along with TDD coupled with exploratory programming.
How does everyone else deal with it?
Neither can an airline pilot, and they work in situations where both making the decision correctly and arriving at the decision quickly is extremely important - and here it's not just the fate of a chess game, but the lives of several hundred people.
Underlying analysis paralysis is often tunnel vision or lack of flexibility with regard to figuring out cost/benefit. Taking a piece without realizing there was a better move is not being flexible with the cost/benefit analysis. So is interminably spending time getting the optimal solution in 12 different dimensions.
When my wife was learning to play the piano, her teacher used to say "if you're going to make a mistake, make it loud so we can hear it and fix it." I make my students do math in pen for the same reason -- instead of silently making the same mistake over and over again, it gets made once, analyzed (by the students), and fixed. This bothered the students at first, but they've come around and become much more thoughtful about what they write.
> “Teaching chess is really about teaching the habits that go along with thinking,” Spiegel explained to me one morning when I visited her classroom. “Like how to understand your mistakes and how to be more aware of your thought processes.” > " I saw Spiegel trying to teach her students grit, curiosity, self-control, and optimism."
Which is really what teaching is about. I think most teachers know this, and we get a fairly healthy dose of it in professional development every week. I'm a math teacher, but the training I get during the school year isn't in math, it's in things like "accountable talk". It sounds like the teacher in this article is particularly gifted and practiced.
This isn't just for classroom teachers. The same concepts matter for parenting and in the workplace.
Similar to people with scarce computing resources[1], they had to learn slowly, properly enough to know what they do clearly to avoid high costs.
[1] cultures of once-a-week-compiling
And I really believe that's why we seem to win girls' nationals sections pretty easily every year: most people won’t tell teenage girls (especially the together, articulate ones) that they are lazy and the quality of their work is unacceptable. And sometimes kids need to hear that, or they have no reason to step up.
This could apply to boys as well as girls, and indeed to anyone at just about any age; sometimes we need to be told that we're not measuring up. I am reminded of Philip Greenspun's story about the venture capitalists who wrecked ArsDigita, the company he had built (from http://waxy.org/random/arsdigita/):
[F]or most of this year Chip, Peter, and Allen [the VC Board members and CEO] didn't want to listen to me. They even developed a theory for why they didn't have to listen to me: I'd hurt their feelings by criticizing their performance and capabilities; self-esteem was the most important thing in running a business; ergo, because I was injuring their self-esteem it was better if they just turned a deaf ear. I'm not sure how much time these three guys had ever spent with engineers. Chuck Vest, the president of MIT, in a private communication to some faculty, once described MIT as "a no-praise zone". My first week as an electrical engineering and computer science graduate student I asked a professor for help with a problem. He talked to me for a bit and then said "You're having trouble with this problem because you don't know anything and you're not working very hard."
IMO the criticism was deserved; but your argument is basically that if the company flounders, it doesn't matter whether the criticism was deserved or not, since the bottom line is what happens to the company. I agree with that in principle, but only if the coworkers in question would have been capable of recognizing the deservedness of the criticism if it had been delivered more tactfully. I'm not sure that was true in the ArsDigita case, because it doesn't seem like the coworkers in question--"coworkers" is a weird term here since we're talking about a Board member talking to other Board members--understood the business they were in in the first place.
(Btw, the fact that it was a Board member talking to other Board members also gives the point about tactfulness less force, IMO. People who can't separate valid criticism from the way in which it's delivered, IMO should not be Board members in the first place.)
It's only when said engineer/visionary learns to act more tactfully that the company flourishes.
It looks like that never happened in the ArsDigita case. Can you give some examples where it has happened?
I'm biased because I've been around boards where some guy says "you never listen to me!" and it's not just because we are all precious snowflakes.
The article doesn't say explicitly, but I strongly suspect (having read a lot of Greenspun's online writing) that when he says "they developed a theory", he's basing that on things they said and did.
Also, of course, the objective data (plenty of which is given in the article) made it clear that Greenspun's criticisms were valid, so clearly the other Board members should have listened to him.
There's another side to that story, of course.[1] They were in the middle the dot-com implosion and all their customers were dot-com businesses. It's not hard to convince me that the professional managers were bozos (and the games they play to maintain board control should be required reading), but that boat was sinking no matter who was in charge.
[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20061015135632/http://michael.yoo...
There is another side to Ars Digita
Couldn't do anything because there was nothing that could possibly have been done, or couldn't do anything because they were the wrong people to be running the company? Certainly the dot-com bust didn't help, but you appear to agree that the "professional managers" brought in by the VCs were not up to the task, which leaves open the question of what managers that were up to the task would or could have done. Unfortunately we can't re-run the experiment to see what would happen if ArsDigita had not taken the VC investment and the original management had remained in charge.
There is another side to Ars Digita
True, and Michael Yoon's story is a good counterpoint to Greenspun's.
Assess the position. Identify the variations to consider. Evaluate each variation for a roughly equivalent period of time. Choose the strongest. Sanity check you haven't missed something. Move.
Repeat, exhaustively, without losing focus, for a multiple of hours.
Edit: the parallel with startups is clear. In chess, you can only think so far ahead. This may be one or two moves, or for a strong player it may be five or six. Either way, you have a visibility horizon but you have to move.
Instead and this is common to all chess players, most good moves are just immediately obvious. (see Gladwell's Blink, which is true for chess at least).
It has been said, that in a regular chess game, GM might have to have a think 2-3 times a game(see Anand in top form), IM 5 times, an FM 10 times.
As an FM I have to concur with this. When playing a GM, I invariably make a mistake when I start running out of time, as my store of "obvious" moves is much smaller than GMs.
Perhaps I have only 10k positions stored in my RAM, and GM has 100k.
On the other hand when playing say a candidate master, I see them think long and make a mistake, which seems obvious to me immediately.
Still there are players who are more of a calculating type(see Shirov, Kasparov), and some who are less(say Botvinnik, Karpov).
For high level play, there's also issue of deception that do not apply to chess, but will apply to Netrunner. Still, no good player will put deception first in his analysis. If anything, it's the equivalent of Magnus Carlsen's care for giving his opponent as many chances as possible of making a terrible mistake, while still playing very good lines.
"I don't think like a tree - do you think like a tree?"
I believe John Nunn touched on the problems with Kotov's method as well in Secrets of Practical Chess.
The biggest thing to take away from him is the need for a thought process, not necessarily the actual method he describes.
It's a less popular, but probably more suitable game than chess. The individual rules are far simpler than chess, but the game play is way more complex, with lots of edge cases.
It also has a built-in handicap system that makes it possible for players of different ranks to play fair games, and the game board size can be scaled down for beginners while they learn the basics.
Coincidentally the BBC ran a series this week 'The Value of Failure.' http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03xl7ff
The series is well worth a listen - 5 x 15 minutes.
I would welcome approaches like this when combined with something like the kind of educational freedom given at a montessori school. In this case, we're looking at a chess team. So maybe the children are participating voluntarily or maybe they aren't.
The essential point is to set clear expectations for performance, and enforce them consistently. There is quite a bit of research along these lines in parenting, coaching, and business management, although I don't have links handy.
It can be hard to stick to this plan in the face of childhood emotional distress. There's a school of thought that the goal of childhood is to relentlessly build up self-esteem so that kids feel good about themselves, and are better equipped to handle hard coaching later. This gives permission to relax performance standards in favor of making kids feel good--e.g. "participation trophies" and "as long as you tried your best."
What this article (and many others recently) argues is that kids are plenty capable of dealing with performance standards, so long as they are perceived as fair and consistent. Kids who learn to persevere and improve are better equipped to continue doing that later in life.
The specific language this coach uses is just window dressing. The important thing is that she does not let her kids off the hook if they fail to meet the standard of performance.
There's a ton of research on how to motivate in the teaching environment. Some basics:
There's a big difference between extrinsic motivation and intrinsic motivation. Extrinsic means you are doing something because someone if rewarding you for doing it/punishing you for not doing it. Intrinsic means you are doing it because you, yourself, want to do it. In a classroom, grades are extrinsic motivation, interest in the subject is intrinsic. Both motivations work while they are present. But studies show that when extrinsic motivation stops, so does learning. That is, someone may do very well in a class to get good grades, but when they are done with the class they will stop learning the subject (if all they were in it for were the grades.) In the military, boot-camp motivation works while the soldier is being yelled at, but as soon as the sergeant goes away, so does discipline. (Deci, Edward L. and Richard M. Ryan, _Intrinsic Motivation and Self-Determination in Human Behavior_.) The key to getting motivation right is how the person being motivated views the reward or punishment. Or, in systems terms, you get what you measure.
This reflects on the method in the article. If the kids were learning chess to impress the teacher, they would lose motivation when they are criticised. But if the kids are learning chess because they want to win, they gain motivation when they learn ways to make that happen. Motivation is important.
Generally, it's better to be non-judgemental when offering a critique of students' work. I think she fails here a bit. But offering a critique is very important. If the critique is important, and the student wants to learn, then they focus on the content of the critique. The critique, also, has to be fair. If the critique is viewed as punishment, then the students might start attempting to please the teacher with theater. So if she called them lazy and they saw that as punishment for making moves too fast, they might engage in business-theater, making moves slower without thinking; this would allow them to avoid the punishment of being called lazy. But if she is correct in noting that they were, in fact, lazy, then they will recognize it as fair criticism and respond. (Kids are world-class judges of fairness, as all parents know.)
Also, students do much better (and are happier with) classes that demand high performance but allow them to work their way to success. (Clinchy, Blythe, "Issues of Gender in Teaching and Learning", Jrnl of Excellence in College Teaching 1 (1990):52-67.) The important thing is that the students feel some control over their ability to do better. (Also why you should never tell your kid "you are smart", this makes it sound like it's something they are, not something they do; i.e. something they have no control over.)
I think if you read any decent book on pedagogy (my favorite is "What the Best College Teachers Do", by Ken Bain) you'll see that there is a huge amount of research on how kids learn and how they are motivated to learn. That most of this research seems mainly ignored in the real world is unfortunate.
Yes. If a male teacher, for example, were to 'rampage' around female pupils, he'd be sacked.
I know in practice he should have used the available time, but I wanted to underline the one flaw of the article; the rest is pretty good.
Then the storm passed. Spiegel resumed moving pieces and examining the game. She pointed out his good moves. “Very clever,” she said when he took the knight. As the game progressed, Spiegel praised his good ideas and asked him to come up with alternatives to others. “You were playing in some ways an excellent game,” she told him, “and then once in a while you moved superfast and you did something really stupid. If you can stop doing that, you’re going to do very, very well.”
I see a lot of teachers/parents/bosses doing one or the other. They demand more of a kid, but fail to properly assess where the kid is, and therefore ask a little bit too much, setting the kid up for failure. Or they acknowledge where the kid is but fail to really push them to take the next step, leading to complacency. Both ultimately lead to fear.
In practice doing it right requires immense knowledge of both the subject and the student, which is what makes it hard. But when done right, people respond by growing very fast. And the experience, while sometimes exhausting, feels humane and healthy.
At my school in the UK, we didn't have a chess teacher. I'm presuming that not every school in the US has a chess teacher.
Coincidentally, Ms Spiegel reminds me of an old English teacher of mine.
> Before she was a a full-time chess teacher, Spiegel taught an eighth-grade honors English class. She taught them the same way she taught Sebastian: ruthlessly analyzing everything.
I would consider it a shame if she had actually stopped teaching English (especially the comprehension). I often notice how my sentences are elaborated by others, even occasionally on HN.
By taking each component separately, by developing and iterating each little bit at the time, like a chess move, a good program can be made.
Perhaps those genius programmers who don't need to write tests do this process automatically.
>>Spiegel’s face tensed. “We did not bring you here so that you could spend two seconds on a move,” she said with an edge in her voice
>>“This is pathetic. If you continue to play like this, I’m going to withdraw you from the tournament,
>> I’m very, very, very upset to be seeing such a careless and thoughtless game.
I call it bullying. Why not just focus on the thought process and try to detach emotions from it, that's what the kid needs to learn in the first place:
-"How much time did you spend here?"
-"Two seconds"
-"You see, spending two seconds here led to a blunder which you suffered from for rest of the game, we need to work on your thinking habits. There is not much time for that now and as I screw up as your teacher not teaching it to you before for now I only suggest that once you decide on a move, look away from the board, try to reset your mind, sit on your hands and look at the board as freshly as possible for 15 seconds to see if you are not blundering anything".
Then you add: "Thinking habits in chess are everything, a lot of brilliant players never make progress because occasional slips and a lot of not-so-brilliant ones enjoy success because they avoid simple mistake thanks to good habits". "We are going to work on this after the tournament, there are many ways. Rest assured it's main problem chess players have, you are not alone. How well people improve in that area is going to be a difference between winning and losing so it's exciting area to focus on". Then you discuss ego, how not willing to admit your own mistakes is major road block and how it's perfectly ok to discuss mistakes but it's not ok to be happy about them or comfortable with them! You need healthy dose of ambition you need to be disappointed... but optimistic and believing you can get better. Feeling guilty won't lead there. Feeling like you are disappointing other people won't lead there (even if it won't be long term, it's dependence on external motivator - disappointing someone. At one time this someone won't be there). If you act like the woman from the article people will avoid you - nobody wants to feel guilty after all. They want to improve, work on their thinking, compete and have fun.
Her way shows characteristics of bad teachers and bad parent. I've encountered both and I think it's the best way to kill natural joy and passion quickly even if you get some quick results - it won't be long term and it won't be to maximum potential.
I don't think "comfortable" is the right word here. People who feel comfortable with failure will continue to fail. It's important for people to understand that they will make mistakes, yes, and that they should not be stopped by it--they should try to do better next time. But to me that's the exact opposite of feeling "comfortable" with making mistakes; making mistakes should make you feel uncomfortable until you've figured out how to not make those mistakes again.
Her way is to inflict guilt
I don't think "guilt" is the right word here either. She is expressing disappointment, but it's disappointment with what the person did, not with who the person is. "Guilt" implies that she is saying they're a bad person, and she's not; she's saying they could have done better.
Why not just focus on the thought process and try to detach emotions from it
Because the emotions are what motivate a person to do better.
At one time this someone won't be there
True; and what happens then will depend on how well the person has internalized the emotional drive to do better. That won't happen if the only coaching they've gotten is dispassionate commentary on their thought processes. If nobody expresses disappointment when they make mistakes, they won't learn to be disappointed with themselves when they make mistakes, so they won't care about doing better.
If you act like the woman from the article people will avoid you
But that doesn't seem to be happening; the woman's students don't seem to be avoiding her, they seem to be taking her criticisms seriously and improving their game.
And while she's doing that, she's implicitly expressing the expectation that her students can do better. That's actually a far cry from the way lots of parents use guilt in traditional societies, where the implicit message is, "You did bad, again, just like I expected you to!" and the aim is to elicit effort through neurotic self-hatred.
If I may add _one_ suggestion to both, it is to say "Elizabeth" or "Spiegel" instead of "the woman from the article" or something like that. It makes the reference more human.
Good point.
[1]Correct me if am wrong but sport coaches usually are stern with their athletes, no?
There's also an aspect of knowing the high end of expectations. It's easy for smart kids to advance just beyond their peers and then start to coast. A skilled and strict coach can help them understand how much farther they can really go.
If a natural joy or passion cannot withstand some critical coaching then it's not very strong joy or passion. If a kid needs constant support and praise just to stick with something, it might not be the best activity for them.
Feel like an abusive jerk? -She is one. She's behaving like one of those Chinese "Tiger Moms".
>> But then in round four everyone took more than an hour and started playing well.
But then, her bullying started getting results, and she let out a sigh of relief. She wouldn't "need" to tone it down and fake niceness after all.
Fear is an efficient motivator. The kids work hard to avoid the psychological pain she'll inflict on them for not performing up to her expectations.
As the name suggest, it's just as important to strongly praise to correct moves as it is important to strongly scorn the bad moves.
We don't have emotions as some quirk of our evolutionary paths. Emotions are a tool. Like any tool, when used correctly, it produces amazing results.