Syntonicles

I have no quarrel with the assertion that reading is important. I'm suspicious of the need for pre-reading (letters)

If a child shows great initiative with letters, they'll do well with reading. But why not just start with reading?

Russian children don't start with letters on an IPad. They start later, immediately tackling classic literature.

She's talking about delaying the fundamental concept of a function, and using the absence of the function syntax in order to motivate the need for it.

Do you have kids? My nephew has been learning math. He won't be told about f(x) until he reaches algebra. Until then the presence of parentheses would just be arbitrary added complexity. In fact he hasn't even been shown parentheses in the context of application order yet.

I agree with you that you could start with that syntax. I also think you could start with = instead of "is". In both of those cases though we've introduced distinct concepts - function application and operators - and her entire approach is based on introducing one concept per learning step.

Take him to a soaring glider club and get him a discovery flight. It's like sailing in the sky. It's non physical, usually full of older men who do more socializing than flying, and it offers both a sense of excitement and a new perspective on the world. It might be that after a life long sedentary career, floating above the earth in tranquility will be a nice change.

It's like $100, and even if he doesn't want to continue flying sail planes it might awaken an interest in aerodynamics, and lead to model airplanes or RC planes or kite gliding or quadcopters. The last one could even lead to coding, but doesn't have to.

Hacker news is pretty bare bones - I don't even seen reply notifications. I've temporarily added some contact info to my "bio" if you'd like to discuss in more depth.

We have had similar experiences. I discovered meditation and flow state accidentally - at first I thought it required intensity, and so I would ride my motorcycle in increasingly dangerous situations and down mountain trails in order to trigger it. This led me to take up skydiving (angle tracking, wing-suiting) and BASE jumping as I believed it was merely adrenaline that I was seeking.

I discovered I could trigger the state reliably without risk during high-level matched competitive video-game play. (Smash Bros) I had nearly 10 years of low-skilled competitive practice but with infinite online matched games I found I could reach a flow-like state on a nightly basis, so long as I played long enough. (I played for approximately 4 hours per night over a two-year period). I was also able to achieve a flow-like state with near certainty using a very simple piano tile tapping game, given long enough sessions. I had simply been using the game to train my thumbs for speed.

Eventually I left my career in software to pursue flow in Skydiving, which I now consider to be a mistake. After studying meditation and Yoga, it has become clear to me that the state is not triggered by external factors at all, and that it is itself a skill.

Admittedly far fewer of these states stand out as truly peak, quasi-religious experiences. I suspect there is a continuum and the binary classification is a judgement we place on the experience "retroactively". It comes from having enough space in your attention to notice the contrasting state of the body and the mind, the level of current performance, and then to notice the noticing itself. The rush of pleasure and excitement is not pre-existing, it is the result of a positive judgement you place on the situation. Despite its appeal this is undesirable, and tends toward interrupting flow in the precisely the same way as one loses control of a lucid dream after just having reached it. IMHO focusing on the subjective threshold for isolated study is misguided.

My current work focuses on creating an abstract framework which adapts to the athlete in order to create the external conditions which allow the athlete to most easily find the flow state. Rather than teach them how directly I hope to trigger it unexpectedly and allow for it to be sustained indefinitely during training. Of course, I'm not foolish enough to admit this to my benefactors.

Do you suppose I might be able to get a grant for this sort of work?

Have you read about the Fosbury Flop? This is an example of changing the model in order to push the boundaries of what was considered possible. Also, I agree that there is likely a talent component to establishing the best models for training - but it's also a skill. Imparting these models is what world class coaches do, after all.

You are totally right that well-exploited sports have established models that are probably optimal, especially at the elite level.

I find these circumstances boring, personally. My interest lies in learning unfamiliar or complex tasks for which no optimal model is known, and also in maximizing the rate of skill acquisition by iterating on the model generation in an abstract way.

I don't know what you're arguing against, exactly. If you take two athletes with similar physical qualities, and one receives appropriate training while the other does not, the former will outcompete the latter. I'm assuming that everyone in the far right tail of elite performance has the biological advantages you mentioned.

Let's simplify the model to two distributions to make it easier to see: well-trained vs. poorly-trained individuals, where the variance of each distribution is largely accounted for by physical differences. So long as these two distributions overlap, it is a mathematical certainty that some poorly-trained individuals will outperform some well-trained individuals, due to physical and genetic markers. So far so good.

I'm suggesting that there are several overlapping distributions, and that it's impossible to know with certainty whether you've lost to someone due to their physical advantage or their superior cognitive approach & training - if you are only considering the two of you in isolation. The question must be asked of populations, not of individuals.

Anyone who has experienced breaking through plateaus after a decade of training knows this is true. Whatever seem absurd to you must be due to some other miscommunication. I specifically exempted the top elite performers from consideration because in that restricted case my argument no longer holds. I thought that was clear.

You are basing this assertion on what, precisely? Attention, posture, pattern memory and state-estimation all strongly impact every level of athletic performance. This has been studied extensively. If I had a better term to describe these aspects of neural organization I would use it. I like mental representation because a coach on the ground can impact development of an athlete by providing a picture of what to focus on during performance, and this representative picture directly improves the signal to noise ratio for the athlete.

At a surface level, this may seem like a counter-example. However you are making a very strong statement about the particular quality you've identified as being critical to your success. You're also discounting the possibility that there is some other quality "B", which you may not possess, that would allow another player who lacks your chess memory to be competitive with you. You may be right, but your hypothesis is both clear and testable.

The best models I've seen proposed to explain the correlation of chess memory and chess knowledge/performance attribute the memory strength to the results of experience, rather than the other way around. The aspect of your abilities that led to increased motivation is not direct evidence for the direction of causality. In fact, studies on chess grandmasters suggest that they perform no better than novices on memory for randomized board positions. (Unlikely to be encountered in a game)

Here is an interesting study discussing the recent state of the literature which lends some credence to your ideas.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13421-017-0768-2

I have a very deep interest in this topic and nearly went into neuroscience for similar reasons but instead ended up blazing my own trail at the intersection of machine learning and sports training. I am very cognizant of my own strong bias toward these conclusions and want to avoid confirmation seeking. Have you encountered any research, literature or reputable programs that I could investigate further?

For my purposes the extreme end of elite competition is less interesting. My intuition tells me that the distribution of all athletes is multimodal, and that whatever attributes contribute the most to ending up in the normally distributed pool of elite individuals are present in all of them, and so I would expect a lower variance as you've indicated.

I would like to allow for the possibility that mindset and internal mental models which are learnable rather than innate could account for the particular distribution an athlete belongs to.

For instance someone prepping for Olympic tryouts may be in either the right tail of a lower mode of the distribution, or the left tail of the higher mode of the distribution.

The 14-year old that smokes you may have developed a mental model or learning approach which places him in an entirely different class at the outset. Talent is a label you've placed on him retroactively, but what assurance do you really have that those differences are explained biologically/genetically rather than resulting different mental representations of the sport and training process?

I think you are indicating by example that initial differences normally attribute to "talent" or "biological advantage" are greatly diminished at the level of peak performance, which results from dedication and practice. This is in line with the literature that I've read.

However I'm not familiar enough with boxing to understand the example and so you might be saying something else. Can you elaborate on why you chose Ali and Spinks as exemplars, and what you perceive to be their differences?

I have worked on similar projects to this game in the past (at scale) so it's close to my heart.

To me the benefit of the default redundant arguments error is pedagogical. It forces me to think more closely about what it means to set nullable, assuming I was coming to the game with a limited understanding of Django code. Just glimpsing a note in the docs doesn't register nearly as quickly interactive play does.

I would love to see this format used more extensively. When I'm learning an API I tend to fire up a REPL and explore it by poking. I do it even with basic mathematics that have fallen out of my brain.

Very much enjoyed and it served as a quick refresher!

As a full-time skydiver & coach, I would say that's exactly who needs a GoPro the most. When we jump everybody wears at least one camera and often someone jumps outside to get a better angle. The video is not taken to capture an epic moment, it's to review and improve. After every jump the group breaks down every part of the skydive and tries to take a lesson from it.

I have to wade through thousands of videos before I find something interesting enough to post online, but each of those videos has value. The worse the performance the higher the value.

I'm trying to understand your numbers and I'm hung up on what may just be a coincidence. You say if 70% of people get it, you have a baseline risk of 30% of getting it.

Is that the normal way of phrasing risk? My expectation would be that there is a 30% chance of not getting it. Am I misreading your comment or is my definition of risk somehow backward?

That's a fascinating idea. That virtual worlds are good test-beds for AI is obvious, but I never considered that we will have thousands of hours for every person to tell us how they approach any given physical task. That's a gold mine for robotics research.