From Freeman Dyson:
Economic forecasting is useful for predicting the future up to about ten years ahead. Beyond ten years the quantitative changes which the forecast accesses are usually sidetracked or made irrelevant by qualitative changes in the rules of the game. Qualitative changes are produced by human cleverness … or by human stupidity … Neither cleverness nor stupidity are predictable.
Source: Infinite in All Directions, Chapter 10, Engineers’ Dreams.
Zig Ziglar said that if you increase your confidence, you increase your competence. I think that’s generally true. Of course you could be an idiot and become a more confident idiot. In that case confidence just makes things worse [1]. But otherwise when you have more confidence, you explore more options, and in effect become more competent.
There are some things you may need to learn not for the content itself but for the confidence boost. Maybe you need to learn them so you can confidently say you didn’t need to. Also, some things you need to learn before you can see uses for them. (More on that theme here.)
I’ve learned several things backward in the sense of learning the advanced material before the elementary. For example, I studied PDEs in graduate school before having mastered the typical undergraduate differential equation curriculum. That nagged at me. I kept thinking I might find some use for the undergrad tricks. When I had a chance to teach the undergrad course a couple times, I increased my confidence. I also convinced myself that I didn’t need that material after all.
My experience with statistics was similar. I was writing research articles in statistics before I learned some of the introductory material. Once again the opportunity to teach the introductory material increased my confidence. The material wasn’t particularly useful, but the experience of having taught it was.
Related post: Psychological encapsulation
[1] See Yeats’ poem The Second Coming:
…
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
…
The other day I was driving by our veterinarian’s office and saw that the marquee said something like “Prevention is less expensive than treatment.” That’s sometimes true, but certainly not always.
This evening I ran across a couple lines from Ed Catmull that are more accurate than the vet’s quote.
Do not fall for the illusion that by preventing errors, you won’t have errors to fix. The truth is, the cost of preventing errors is often far greater than the cost of fixing them.
From Creativity, Inc.
I’ve seen exhortations to think like Leonardo da Vinci or Albert Einstein, but these leave me cold. I can’t imagine thinking like either of these men. But here are a few famous people I could imagine emulating when trying to solve a problem
What would Donald Knuth do? Do a depth-first search on all technologies that might be relevant, and write a series of large, beautiful, well-written books about it all.
What would Alexander Grothendieck do? Develop a new field of mathematics that solves the problem as a trivial special case.
What would Richard Stallman do? Create a text editor so powerful that, although it doesn’t solve your problem, it does allow you to solve your problem by writing a macro and a few lines of Lisp.
What would Larry Wall do? Bang randomly on the keyboard and save the results to a file. Then write a language in which the file is a program that solves your problem.
What would you add to the list?
This morning my daughter told me that she did well on a spelling test, but she got the easiest words wrong. Of course that’s not exactly true. The words that are hardest for her to spell are the ones she in fact did not spell correctly. She probably meant that she missed the words she felt should have been easy. Maybe they were short words. Children can be intimidated by long words, even though long words tend to be more regular and thus easier to spell.
Our perceptions of what is easy are often upside-down. We feel that some things should be easy even though our experience tells us otherwise.
Sometimes the trickiest parts of a subject come first, but we think that because they come first they should be easy. For example, force-body diagrams come at the beginning of an introductory physics class, but they can be hard to get right. Newton didn’t always get them right. More advanced physics, say celestial mechanics, is in some ways easier, or at least less error-prone.
“Elementary” and “easy” are not the same. Sometimes they’re opposites. Getting off the ground, so to speak, may be a lot harder than flying.
Whenever you remove noise, you also remove at least some signal. Ideally you can remove a large portion of the noise and a small portion of the signal, but there’s always a trade-off between the two. Averaging things makes them more average.
Statistics has the related idea of bias-variance trade-off. An unfiltered signal has low bias but high variance. Filtering reduces the variance but introduces bias.
If you have a crackly recording, you want to remove the crackling and leave the music. If you do it well, you can remove most of the crackling effect and reveal the music, but the music signal will be slightly diminished. If you filter too aggressively, you’ll get rid of more noise, but create a dull version of the music. In the extreme, you get a single hum that’s the average of the entire recording.
This is a metaphor for life. If you only value your own opinion, you’re an idiot in the oldest sense of the word, someone in his or her own world. Your work may have a strong signal, but it also has a lot of noise. Getting even one outside opinion greatly cuts down on the noise. But it also cuts down on the signal to some extent. If you get too many opinions, the noise may be gone and the signal with it. Trying to please too many people leads to work that is offensively bland.
Related post: The cult of average
From “The Inheritance of Tools” by Scott Russell Sanders:
I had botched a great many pieces of wood before I mastered the right angle with a saw, botched even more before I learned to miter a joint. The knowledge of these things resides in my hands and eyes and the webwork of muscles, not in the tools. There are machines for sale—powered miter boxes and radial arm saws, for instance—that will enable any casual soul to cut proper angles in boards. The skill is invested in the gadget instead of the person who uses it, and this is what distinguishes a machine from a tool.
Related post: Software exoskeletons
Pierre Cartier describing Alexander Grothendieck’s approach to mathematics:
Grothendieck’s favorite method is not unlike Joshua’s method for conquering Jericho. The thing was to patiently encircle the solid walls without actually doing anything: at a certain point, the walls fall flat without a fight. This was also the method used by the Romans when they conquered the natural desert fortress Masada, the last stronghold of the Jewish revolt, after spending months patiently building a ramp. Grothendieck was convinced that if one has a sufficiently unifying vision of mathematics, if one can sufficiently penetrate the essence of mathematics and the strategies of its concepts, then particular problems are nothing but a test; they do not need to be solved for their own sake.
Related post: The great reformulation of algebraic geometry
From Edwin Land, inventor of the Polaroid camera:
… applied science, purposeful and determined, and pure science, playful and freely curious, continuously support and stimulate each other. The great nation of the future will be the one which protects the freedom of pure science as much as it encourages applied science.
From Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing by Neal Stephenson:
Writing novels is hard, and requires vast, unbroken slabs of time. Four quiet hours is a resource I can put to good use. Two slabs of time, each two hours long, might add up to the same four hours, but are not nearly as productive as an unbroken four. … Likewise, several consecutive days with four-hour time-slabs in them give me a stretch of time in which I can write a decent book chapter, but the same number of hours spread out across a few weeks, with interruptions in between them, are nearly useless.
I haven’t written a novel, and probably never will, but Stephenson’s remarks describe my experience doing math and especially developing software. I can do simple, routine work in short blocks of time, but I need larger blocks of time to work on complex projects or to be more creative.
Related post: Four hours of concentration
