Breaking Projects into Parts

[Elliot]

This follows my article Learning and the Subconscious Bullet Points, in which I made the following claim (paraphrasing):

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This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://criticalfallibilism.com/breaking-projects-into-parts/

[Dface]

@Elliot

Most learning activities should be finished and judged in under a day, but a week provides a reasonable upper limit.

Judging activities sounds good, cuz it’s not just learning a bunch of random things at once and leaving it up to chance to get good at something.

Something tells me if I can evaluate the success or failure of a project or part, i’ll be able to get somewhere with my learning. Like, it’ll be more measurable and not hit or miss.

@Elliot

But it’s OK if some sub-projects take longer and you try to get further along before judging.

Having a long sub project like that is hard for me cuz i dont know what I really want and where the project should go. I think it has to do with thinking about my goals tho.

@Elliot

Going near the limit should be uncommon.

Oh ok so it should be uncommon that subprojects get close to finishing in a week.

@Elliot

This is similar to how businesses have targets and deliverables within a project, and keep track of whether the project is going well during the middle of the project.

Oh i’ve seen stuff like that. It seems like business try to make sure they’re reaching their goals.

@Elliot

In other word, for any larger learning projects, you need to find milestones along the way rather than waiting until the very end to figure out if the project is working.

Oh i see. When I think of milestones i just think of ways to pat oneself on the back. Milestones actually seem important to know how a project is going.

@Elliot

If your overall goal is to learn from a book, you can evaluate whether you learned anything from each chapter (or other sub-part).

Learned anything? Like learn stuff that has to do with your goal? It would be good to evaluate that stuff cuz it makes learning more concrete.

@Elliot

Enjoying a book is the type of project where you could fail at a few sub-goals (there could be a few boring, unenjoyable parts) but still have a successful project overall.

That makes sense even if there were a few boring parts, I could still say it was an enjoyable book. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing.

@Elliot

Want to learn to touch type? You can divide that into sub-goals like learning the home row, top row and bottom row. Those projects can be divided into sub-sub-goals of learning each individual letter. You can also divide typing into parts by hand, by finger, or by a section of several adjacent keys. You could also divide it up by vowels and consonants. Or you could practice typing a limited set of words.

Dividing goals like that looks so useful. Like you could learn anything if you’re able to divide the goals like that.

[ActiveMind]

Learning projects should generally be broken into parts which take at most a week to complete.

When I first started here I thought I would start off with short projects and then gradually do longer and longer projects. I didn’t think about making evaluations often. I just thought about larger projects having higher output. But you can just connect the small projects together, so you don’t have to make a mega project.

@Elliot, the project template in Projects is designed to take at most a week to complete? Or that’s your recommendation right?

You could also divide it up by vowels and consonants.

keybr.com makes you only practice on a subset of keys, and only adds new keys until you reach a high enough score for the newest keys. So they make the sub-goals for you.

Sub-projects can be chunks to automatize.

I’ll remember to check out these examples when I don’t know what to practice. They seem like helpful examples.

If you work on a project for 5 days and fail, that doesn’t mean it took more than a week. If you reach an evaluation of success or failure within a week, that’s on time. At least you didn’t spend months before realizing you failed.

Good points. You don’t want to waste time on project because you didn’t realize it was already doomed.

[Elliot]

@ActiveMind

@Elliot, the project template in Projects is designed to take at most a week to complete? Or that’s your recommendation right?

IIRC it’s unspecified: you can have subprojects/milestones within a project or not.

[ActiveMind]

This:

you should try to improve your numbers by doing smaller, easier sub-projects that you can have a high success rate at.

and:

Your success rate on whole, big projects, involving many sub-projects, should also be high.

Imply that medium sized projects should generally have the lowest success rate. I think that makes sense. You want large projects to be safe, because you’re risking more. The larger the project gets, the more unknown there is, so they’re harder to predict the difficulty of. Therefore for shorter projects we can have higher confidence that we’ll succeed. So medium sized projects are harder to predict than small projects and also not as risky as large projects.

Or maybe we should just adjust our ambition to a certain expected success rate that’s the same for all sized projects.

Actually the quotes don’t necessarily imply anything about medium sized projects. Elliot just say didn’t anything about them specifically. I don’t think the exclusion actually implies anything.

One thing that reduces risk is valuing the journey more than the destination. Then if you don’t reach the destination, the project could still be a success. You might have no regrets and still think it was worth doing.

What about valuing sub-goals in and of themselves? Like maybe your big goal is to end aging, but you’ll also be happy if you cure cancer, extend healthy lifespan by 10 years, or cure some other smaller diseases.

On the other hand, if you said the destination was your goal but you’re still happy to stop short and you found the journey really valuable, then that’s success.

I didn’t do this here:

@ActiveMind

Anyway, according to the success criteria I failed. I’m still quite satisfied with my progress and how it turned out.

I was concerned about being unaccountable. I was worried about something like:

to pretend you didn’t fail by moving the goalposts,

But I agree with:

It’s your actual, internal goals that matter most.

Samo Burja sometimes brings up how the Chinese imperial examination had to be revamped many times because over time people figured out how to learn skills specific to the test, and so it stopped being a good measure of real world merit. That’s an example of achievement of goals not being matched with real success. You ought to chase real success and not only success on paper.

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I think the stuff I didn’t cover was good. I think this article will be helpful for my future projects.

[ActiveMind]

With the book you’re reading would you make a forum project for the entire book then make evaluations for each chapter within the project?

[anonymous108]

@ActiveMind

Samo Burja sometimes brings up how the Chinese imperial examination had to be revamped many times because over time people figured out how to learn skills specific to the test, and so it stopped being a good measure of real world merit.

Have you checked whether that’s true with any other sources? Although that sounds plausible, many stories people spread on the internet are false, even the ones that reasonably could have been true, and I don’t trust Burja.

[ActiveMind]

No. I’ve just heard him say it in many different podcasts. I don’t know which podcasts either. It sounds very plausible to me, but I’m also skeptical of it because I haven’t researched it at all. Was it irresponsible of me to use it and report how I got it the way I did? I worried about it but ultimately thought this would be OK.

[Elliot]

If you’re concerned about something, you should at least do minimal research, not just post it anyway with no research. Why avoid doing any research? Minimal research, like a google search, a wikipedia check and an AI query, is fast and easy (I mean doing all 3, not just 1).

Also if you have concerns about something, you should add a disclaimer. If you do minimal research and don’t find it super convincing and think more research is needed, you can at least say that. If you share an idea with no disclaimers, you’re giving people the impression that you believe it and endorse it.

[ActiveMind]

@Elliot

Minimal research, like a google search, a wikipedia check and an AI query, is fast and easy (I mean doing all 3, not just 1).

I’m sorry, I did spend ~15 minutes on google search and wikipedia. I thought it was so insignificant it was practically nothing, but that’s just logically wrong.

The AI query was certainly helpful, what I looked at didn’t say anything about revamping, just what the imperial examinations were generally. It didn’t move my belief on the matter either way. Or maybe it did because periodical revamps seem like a logical consequence of what little I learned about the exams.

I’m not really comfortable with using AI for historical purposes because of “hallucinations”. As I understand it the AIs are still just predicting the next most likely word.

[Dface]

@Elliot

If you’re trying to automatize finding the verbs in a sentence, you could break that into a sub-project of only finding different forms of “be” (like “is” and “are”). If you actually practice that with dozens of practice sentences, you could get good at it in under a week. If you find that hard, you could split it into sub-projects like only doing “is”, or maybe you should first do a separate project to research what a “verb” is.

It sounds cooI to break down projects like that. You can learn a lot of things that way. I wanna find some sub-projects to do that are relevant to me.

@Elliot

You can look at each typing motion and see if it fits your goals for how you think typing should work (you might find some pictures or videos of correct typing motions and hand positions).

Oh your goals will help you learn how to type?

@Elliot

When reading books, if you want to use their content in your life, you need to find practicable skills.

I know the forum or CF articles aren’t a book, but I like that you can use their content too and turn their ideas into relevant actions

[Dface]

@Elliot

Having multiple failures in a row is exponentially bad. Two is much worse than one.

I dont why i make myself panic while reading this. When I read “exponentially bad” I thought there was like no way to recover. Like it’s permanent if you mess up. I think “bad” tho has to do with goals, like if something is bad then you’re not getting enough of the goal u want.

Edit: “I dont know why…”

[Elliot]

I meant “exponentially” literally not figuratively.

[Dface]

@Elliot

I meant “exponentially” literally not figuratively.

Oh ok i think i get intuitively wat “exponentially” means. Like it has to do with numbers and idk wat else.

@Elliot

Having multiple failures in a row is exponentially bad.

If failing multiple projects is “exponentially bad”, then something about that “bad” is increasing by a lot. Idk what it is but i think the point of the article is that lots of failures in a row means one is overestimating the kinds of projects they can do and should start smaller.

[Elliot]

Exponential badness increases doesn’t mean the increases or amount of badness are “a lot”. It means each increase in badness is bigger than the previous increase. For example here is an exponential series where each thing is 10% more than the previous. The gaps between numbers get larger every time.

irb(main):008> 0.upto(10) {|n| puts (1.1**n).round(2)}

1.0

1.1

1.21

1.33

1.46

1.61

1.77

1.95

2.14

2.36

2.59

[Dface]

@Elliot

It means each increase in badness is bigger than the previous increase.

Ahh i was trying to write something like that but it just didnt make as much sense.

So every next increase in badness is going to be bigger than the last increase.

@Elliot

For example here is an exponential series where each thing is 10% more than the previous. The gaps between numbers get larger every time.

Thats a cool example. I see how the increases are getting bigger for the next number. The first increase is +0.1, and the next isnt +0.1 again, it’s +0.11.

@Elliot

Having multiple failures in a row is exponentially bad. Two is much worse than one.

When I read, “Two is much worse than one.” I see it as one failure is a +1 increase and two failures in a row is a +2 increase. I guess if i list the increases in numbers they’ll be: 1, 3, 6, 10. 10 means one failed 1 project, then 2 projects in a row, then failed 3 projects in a row, then failed 4 projects in a row. The first few in a row failures dont go away they add up

[Elliot]

@Dface

@Elliot

Having multiple failures in a row is exponentially bad. Two is much worse than one.

When I read, “Two is much worse than one.” I see it as one failure is a +1 increase and two failures in a row is a +2 increase. I guess if i list the increases in numbers they’ll be: 1, 3, 6, 10. 10 means one failed 1 project, then 2 projects in a row, then failed 3 projects in a row, then failed 4 projects in a row. The first few in a row failures dont go away they add up

Yeah 1/3/6/10/etc is a reasonable pattern to think of for consecutive failures. 10% was an illustration for exponential but I do think it’s worse than 10% for repeatedly failing with no successes.

[Dface]

@Elliot

Yeah 1/3/6/10/etc is a reasonable pattern to think of for consecutive failures.

Yeah? Ok. Also putting etc. at the end of the pattern makes more sense.

@Elliot

10% was an illustration for exponential but I do think it’s worse than 10% for repeatedly failing with no successes.

Oh ok it’s gotta be higher than 10% then

[Dface]

@Elliot

1.95

2.14

In the exponential series example I notice these two numbers are less than 10% apart.

If I use the percent change formula:
(V2-V1)/V1

(2.14-1.95)/1.95=~0.0974

It looks like the exponential series is coded. Is it on purpose that it doesnt show a digit in the thousandths place? I dont think it makes much difference cuz i see this point still stands:

@Elliot

The gaps between numbers get larger every time.

Edit: i used a calculator to find my answer btw