Examples of people doing CF-type or CF-contradicting things.
Jurors from Elizabeth Holmes trial break silence after guilty verdicts l GMA - YouTube
The jury explicitly used weighted factors not decisive judgments (and they got it wrong, only finding her guilty of financial stuff not medical malpractice stuff. sheâs going to get a much lighter sentence than she should. there were multiple reasons for getting it wrong and epistemology is one).
From Academic Epistemology - #34 by Max (I expected a special cross-reference link to show up here when I linked to this thread, but it didnât so Iâll quote what I wrote here)
Lots in here about the lack of Paths Forward in the world.
This is a bunch of combining weighted factors from different dimensions. (These factors might all be assigned equal weights. I havenât looked at the details.)
I was actually interested in what seafood to get or not get, but itâs hard to find useful information. There are a bunch of biased blog post kinda things, many of which are from people who sell seafood. Some have a content farm vibe. None that I saw had much detail or good explanations. Then I looked at this Monterey Bay Aquarium info (theyâre aggressive/trendy environmentalists, which mixes together some good points and some bad points) and itâs a lot like college rankings and other refuted stuff Multi-Factor Decision Making Math
Multiple comments advise practicing, and treating some actions like skills to work on, even though they could seem simple/easy and not necessary to practice (hence âI know it sounds stupidâ). E.g.
Practice saying these things. I know it sounds stupid, but you need to get used to saying them. If you have a friend or family member who can help, practice with them doing the thing he does.
- Please donât touch me
- Please leave me alone
- Let go of my hand
- Youâre too close to me (while leaning or stepping back)
Silicon Valley Bank failed recently. Itâs a big deal thatâs in the news. The basic reason they failed is they bet big on interest rates staying low. They got invested in long duration stuff with low interest rates (but higher interest rates than short duration stuff). Then interest rates went up and they were locked in to the low interest rates.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-03-14/svb-took-the-wrong-risks
âin late 2020, the firmâs asset-liability committee received an internal recommendation to buy shorter-term bonds as more deposits flowed in,â to reduce its duration risk, but that would have reduced earnings, and so âexecutives balkedâ and âcontinued to plow cash into higher-yielding assets.â They took imprudent duration risk, ignored objections, and it blew them up.
So they went out of biz b/c executives refused to listen to advice and instead did higher risk thing with more short term profits.
one way to view this is it wouldnât happen at a company with internal paths forward b/c then reducing this risk would have won the debate
the lack of effective, productive debate â and instead having authoritarian decision making â is the problem. (Plus problematic short term incentives for execs are a widespread and well known problem in ~every industry. Which itself is related to the lack of paths forward or other productive debate methods in politics, so people know about the problem and have various conflicting ideas about it and those conflicts of ideas do not get resolved. We get years of bickering without solutions or conclusions.)
From The Sunlit Man by Brandon Sanderson (my bold):
âWhen I was first given a spear,â he said, âI didnât know how to hold it. I didnât even know how to stand. Each time I sparred, I had to dedicate all my thoughts to standing correctly. The more I did it, the more natural that stance became. Itâs likeâŚI didnât just learn the lesson, I internalized it. That left my conscious mind free to think about something else. Since my body now stood properly on its own, I could wonder about how I held the spear.
âThen that grip became natural, so I could focus on thrusting with precision. I could learn to change my grip, resetting my stance so that I was oriented toward the enemy. Each of these things slowly became instinct. Through deliberate practiceâto learn that specific thing. And each time, once internalized, that left my mind free to try something else. [âŚ]â
4 Likes
Most people do superficial, local-optima style problem solving instead of focusing on root causes. Itâs a recurring problem that this home inspector sees:
Neither the mold remediation nor the sealing the inside basement walls addressed the root cause at all.
Similarly, doctors also commonly treat symptoms not causes. Some of that is actually counter-productive, because some symptoms of illness (e.g. fever) are our bodiesâ own defense mechanisms, not something the illness itself causes.
Doing fixes for non-root-issues also can hide problems and remove visibility from problems so they can get worse.
Related to not overreaching:
Because context is so helpful to figure out the meaning of new words that you encounter, most people would benefit from watching lower level videos than what they think they should. If you are losing track of whatâs being said, then we advise you to try watching easier content. In this case, challenging yourself with harder content is counter-productive most of the time.
2 Likes
Disclaimer: I have a lot more to learn about CF and consider myself a beginner.
This guitar learning resource emphasises aspects of learning methods that I believe CF also emphasises. In some cases it uses the same terminology as CF (e.g âbottleneckâ). The emphasis on the philosophy of learning is rare amongst music related resources Iâve encountered.
Some examples:
Prioritising prerequisites and bottlenecks:
The biggest bottleneck to your progress will always be how well you know the notes on the fretboard.
I think itâs so important that (if you donât have a lot of time and want to get good) I would prioritise learning the notes on the fretboard over everything else.
Mental bandwidth is the idea that you only have so much attention to spread across different things you need to focus on while you are playing the guitar.
You might have needed 100% of your attention to play your chords clearly. But as you start strumming you realise that you have to shift 80% of your attention to your right hand. You needed 100% for chords, but now they are only left with 20%! It makes sense that they are not going to sound as good.
As you get better at each thing, both will require less attention. Youâll get to the point where you only need 50% of your attention for each thing.
Practising requiring metrics of success and failure:
When youâre learning the guitar, itâs important to remember that your objectives change as you begin to practice different things. If youâre judging your performance based on what success looks like in one area, when it requires a different metric of success, you can easily get discouraged. Even if youâre actually making excellent progress!
Whenever you try to learn something new in music, ask yourself, what is the context of this information?
If you learn something and it doesnât have a context, itâs not helpful information.
1 Like
I think the causal evidence is very suggestive, but hardly conclusive.
The counterarguments are weak
These are examples of thinking in terms of indecisive arguments.
For context: Bill Evans is one the great jazz pianists of the 20th century and played on the most significant jazz album of all time: Kind of Blue by Miles Davis. In this 1966 documentary Bill talks about âthe creative process and self-teachingâ, and a lot of what he says seems to agree with CF. Interestingly the interviewer is Billâs brother, and a less accomplished pianist.
Disclaimer: I am a beginner at CF.
Some themes I see that agree with CF:
- criticism of people incorrectly approaching learning an advanced skill
- instead, approach learning advanced skills by learning basic, understandable, accurate, âelementaryâ, sub skills
- doing things too hard for you or approximating them in a âvagueâ way will mean you canât built on them and will lead to confusion (getting stuck)
- free up conscious space for learning more advanced skills by automatising sub skills.
All the quotes are transcribed by me from audio and there may be some mistakes.
@ 11:42:
I see this in a lot of people that come to me for advice.[âŚ]That they tend to approximate the product, rather than attacking it in a realistic, true way, at any elementary level - regardless of how elementary - but it must be entirely true, and entirely real, and entirely accurate. They would rather approximate the entire problem than to take a small part of it an be real and true about it. And I think this is a very important thing: that you must be satisfied, to be very clear and to be very real and to be very analytical at any level. You canât take the whole thing. And to approximate the whole thing in a vague way gives one a feeling that theyâve probably more or less touched the thing but in this way you just lead yourself toward confusion.
I think here Bill is saying that these people want to do advanced things and their incorrect approach is to try to approximate the advanced things, rather than seeing the advanced things as being built from smaller, understandable, elementary parts, and approaching those. And that the approach of trying to approximate advanced things vaguely just leads towards confusion.
@ 12:35:
It is true of any subject that the person that succeeds in anything has the realistic view point at the beginning and knowing that the problem is large and that he has to take it a step at a time and he has to enjoy the step by step learning procedure.
He says here that this learning procedure is general and is true of any subject. He also says that one has to enjoy the learning procedure.
@ 15:00:
It is better to do something simple which is real⌠it can still be satisfactory but itâs something you can build on because you know what youâre doing⌠Whereas if you try to approximate something which is very advanced and donât know what youâre doing, you canât advance, you canât build on it.
Do simple things you can succeed at because you can actually build on those.
@ 15:47:
You could be too cautious to the point where you never discover anything. I think you need to have a certain adventurous spirit. ButâŚover a long period of time, you need be really aware of what is accurate, and what is not. And when youâre adventurous you need to know when you succeed and when you donât succeed.
You need to be able to judge success and failure to learn.
Now the whole process of learning the facility of being able to play jazz is to take these problems from the outer level in, one by one, and to stay with it at a very intense conscious concentration level until that process becomes secondary and subconscious. Now when that becomes subconscious then you can begin concentrating on that next problem which will allow you to do a little bit more and so on and so on.
Automatisation. Freeing up conscious mental capacity for further problem solving.
1 Like
Thatâs great! I knew people often focused on advanced stuff but didnât want to work on the building blocks. But I hadnât had that specific thought that they prefer approximating the advanced thing over getting the building block right. I was thinking of them as trying to get the advanced thing right but failing.
I saw some of the psychological issues involved, like that they may want to work on impressive stuff not beginner stuff, and they may lack confidence in succeeding by any long series of steps that requires diligence over time. But it makes sense that part of the issue is also that they may underestimate the downsides of approximation.
I liked all the other Evans quotes too.
Awesome, Iâm glad this was of some value! I obviously donât understand CF enough to have seen that this had new ideas in it, but I guess I do understand it enough to recognise some of its principles in what Evans was saying.
Another relevant quote from the same video nearer the end:
âMost people just donât realize the immensity of the problem and either because they canât conquer [it] immediately they think they havenât got the ability, or theyâre so impatient to conquer it that they never do see it through. But if you do understand the problem, then I think you can enjoy your whole trip through.â
I like the emphasis on understanding the immensity of the problem, and how that relates to enjoying the process of solving it.
Also for anyone reading those Evans quotes Iâd recommend listening to Evans actually speaking them in the video, because I think the way he says them helps them make more sense than my transcriptions do.