I have a lot of ideas for blog posts – so many that they’ve begun getting lost in my notes. I figured I’d put them up on here. I’ll be very happy if you steal these ideas, I likely won’t get around to writing many of these.
Summary of the Power Broker. I loved this book and I would love to write a great summary since I know many people who would enjoy it but don’t have the time for so long a book. This would be a great candidate for an “expandable” style, where certain themes could be expanded by the reader, leaving the core summary fairly short, but with additional and optional detail for areas of interest. I’m thinking of making it theme based rather than a narrative style. See below for Dominic Cummings’ request as well.
The Power Broker, Robert Caro. About Robert Moses’s grip on NYC. Someone should run a prize for the best 10,000 word essay summarising the fundamental lessons of this book (which I haven’t read in full, just skimmed, because of time not a judgement). Ditto for the Johnson volumes (I’ve not read) when Caro publishes the last. While some lessons are specific to time/place (e.g how the Senate works in 1950) the most important lessons from all such books are quite abstract and common and I assume this will be true of these classics.
A Reading Guide to Shannon’s “A Mathematical Theory of Communication”
Issues with the Double Loaded Corrider – how it ruins American apartment buildings. There are a few articles online but they’re all relatively architect focused and not for the layman.
Guide to Healthy Work From Home. I’ve been working on improving my health a lot recently, mostly related to my posture, but not exclusively, and I’d love to do a write up of what I’ve learned. I’ll quote my links post here.
I’ve been considering my remote work setup a lot recently. I think I’ve diverged somewhat from societal consensus on this, which is interesting, but it means I should probably post my thinking publicly to ensure my contrarianism isn’t bullshit. I’d like to write something more comprehensive, but for now –
You shouldn’t sit on a chair
You need to be active very frequently, with eye breaks, every 20 minutes or so
Stretching doesn’t work, neither does actively correcting your posture
Posture has mental components which need to be addressed
To fix posture, strengthen your body in the correct way
Varied motion and sensory input is key
Associated content – Nutritious Movement, The book Deskbound by Kelly Starrett (some parts), Kneesovertoesguy
Summary of Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin. I haven’t seen much mention of this guy’s work on twitter but I’ve found it useful in my own pursuits. The value comes through in reading someone who’s at the top of two athletic fields who is also in the top 20% percentile of both introspection and writing. Uniquely, he can both do, and explain what he’s doing.
Updated 2024/08/26
The issues with Double Loaded Corridors in American buildings
The economics of Japanese konbini (convenience stores)
What went right in the Meiji Restoration?
What prevents small bars and restaurants in NYC?
Intro to Flight Simming
How to read a 10k – inspired by patio11 and Matt Levine saying that it’s a useful skill
Recent thought loops – posture, VR, health, agency
I’ve been considering my remote work setup a lot recently. I think I’ve diverged somewhat from societal consensus on this, which is interesting, but it means I should probably post my thinking publicly to ensure my contrarianism isn’t bullshit. I’d like to write something more comprehensive, but for now –
You shouldn’t sit on a chair
You need to be active very frequently, with eye breaks, every 20 minutes or so
Stretching doesn’t work, neither does actively correcting your posture
Posture has mental components which need to be addressed
To fix posture, strengthen your body in the correct way
During college I had a major software upgrade to my thought process regarding money / life / career. I hadn’t found a great way to explain it in words though, until I found this patio11 article which gets about 80% of they way there for me! It’s about how running a business changes the way your brain works, but specifically it’s about how increasing agency through running a business changes your brain.
I really liked this post which lists 20 modern heresies. It’s great because it’s difficult to see past the water in which we all swim – reading this shakes the mind in a good way.
Once, a man walked for five hours to get to Nemoto’s temple. The walk was a heroic journey for this man, because he had been living as a hikikomori, and now suddenly he was outside in the sun, sweating and feeling his body move. As he walked, he thought about what he was going to say. It had been so long since he had really spoken to anyone, and now he was going to be expected to explain his most intimate feelings to a stranger. He sweated and thought as he walked, and when at last, after five hours, he arrived at the temple he announced that he had achieved understanding and no longer needed Nemoto’s help. He turned around and walked back home.
Examine the frames that give structure (but also bias) to your thinking.
Predict, on the basis of #1, where you’re likely to have blind spots.
Start groping around in those areas.
If you can do this with the very deepest frames — those that constrain not just your own thinking, but your entire civilization’s — you can potentially unearth a treasure trove of insight. You may not find anything 100% original (ideas that literally no one else has ever seen), but whatever you find is almost guaranteed to be underappreciated.
I went through college with almost nothing outside of class work to show for it. Two years later I have a system which I used to get a job in tech without a CS degree, and grow a 1 inch stack of (unedited) writing on my desk. I had been killing my creativity with guilt and pushing myself to no effect.
Non Coercion is about negotiating with your natural desires without guilt. It’s not a magical productivity hack, it’s an emotional hack that can help you be more productive. It’s getting out of your own way, as Michael Ashcroft beautifully puts it.
The way to achieve non coercive productivity is to figure out what you want to do and then do it. This sounds easy, but it’s really hard to distinguish between “want” and “should”. The introspection needed to figure out your actual desires is tough and requires you to take your actions seriously. Read the following thread for more detail.
Working on what you want to work on is essential because otherwise it won’t be good. Learning to live with your feelings and appreciating what the other parts of your brain are telling you can make your work better. Creating while playing at the same time is excellent. On the other hand, forcing and guilting yourself into doing things your soul is opposed to won’t bring results.
“But what about the stuff that I need to do but I don’t like? We can’t all do what we want all the time?” I agree with that, but it’s more about shifting the balance towards fun. It’s about not feeling guilty for not wanting to do things you don’t want to do. Consider what you need to do, it may not be as necessary as you think.
“If I don’t force myself nothing will get done.” I understand this because while making the switch from coercive productivity to non coercive productivity I had a gap where I did almost nothing. It took me a while to begin trusting my instincts. When I realized I needed to do personal projects to get a software job, I made a point to only work on projects I actually wanted to do. This was hard, since I kept feeling the draw towards doing projects that “looked good on the resume,” but I couldn’t get done since they were soul sucking. In that gap, it does feel nerve wracking to have nothing to show for “being lazy”. If you honestly want to do it, it’ll get done. If you don’t, then guiltlessly let it go.
“The work I want to do isn’t considered productive or socially useful.” Judging the usefulness of work is an exceptionally difficult problem. Too many important discoveries have happened by accident or were underappreciated for me to believe that your judgment of your work is correct. Doing something that appeals to you is better than doing something you “should be” doing since it’s more likely to be incredible.
“I’ll just do Hedonic Activity forever.” You can do that, but you’ll get bored pretty quick I bet. At least for most people doing real things which are difficult and multifaceted are more engaging over the long run. In my experience, get the hedonism out, get sick of it, and get back to work. See below tweet.
Non coercion is a concept that’s popular on my corner of twitter, but I think in reading and talking about it a lot, I’ve come up with my own head canon on what it means. This is my interpretation of the principles of non coercion as they’ve best worked for me.
I’ve decided to take tutoring more seriously – between Bloom’s Two Sigma problem, DARPA digital tutor, and now this post by Erik Hoel. Now the only question is what to get tutored in… I’m interested in economic history so maybe that. If you have any leads on someone who’d be willing to tutor me in that, hit me up.
The most important thing I read last year was this thread by Venkatesh Rao. I’ve been realizing that the bottleneck on a whole lot of stuff is just caring a lot. So much is downstream of caring – non coercion, deliberate practice, agency.
Been getting into buying antiquarian stuff. I have a 1899 map of the Baltic, 1888 copy of The History of the Peloponnesian War, and two newspapers from the 19th century. Each of these were under $30 which to me is a steal. Super awesome, I have photos on my twitter.
Inspired by Matt Might’s article on crippling your technology I bought a typewriter last year and a dumb phone a few weeks ago. The typewriter has been great – you can’t start browsing the internet and procrastinating is difficult with a 20lb hunk of steel on your lap. The dumb phone has been fine? It’s somewhat useful but not as game changing as the typewriter was for my writing output. I usually take it on walks so I can avoid being distracted.
I tried a bunch of hacks to edit my writing, like rewriting my blog posts by hand, or rephrasing one paragraph at a time, but what worked well was just leaving my writing alone for 6 months. How shit it is really jumped out at me immediately. I should start posting again soon.
Knees Over Toes Guy is a big hit on youtube and his videos have been seriously helpful. Stretching never worked for me, but his focus on developing strength through full range of motion have actually led me to making great flexibility gains. I can’t recommend a single video – instead just search whatever body part is bothering you + “kneesovertoes”.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the origins of psychosomatic pain. I’ve had minor brushes with it, just about enough to convince me to take it seriously. I understand that psychosomatic stuff can be insert adjective but I’m convinced there’s at least a grain of truth in it both 1) existing in more cases than people think and 2) being resolvable through emotional healing.
Asking what you would do if you didn’t have a constraint is clarifying because you often realize it isn’t a constraint. Money can limit your scale, but probably not keep you from the attempt.
An interesting story about watermelons, but one part stood out to me –
In 1924, a National Geographic Magazine writer chronicled his adventures in Sudan from 1916 to 1920, in which watermelons played a key role. He enjoyed watermelon tea the locals made—after punching the fruit open and squeezing the flesh to press the juice out—and, in brutal 110-120F heat, endured a six-week journey on which watermelons were his sole source of water. The writer, Major Edward Keith-Roach, complained about being unable to shave during that trip but couldn’t praise watermelons enough for saving his life and making the trek possible.
Marketing comes very unnaturally to me, been reading @visakanv’s marketing blog recently.
This guy is selling a book on how to get a 4 day workweek. I haven’t read the book, but I find myself referencing his blog a lot to people who don’t realize you can just negotiate a shorter workweek.
This is a cool set of comments about soil usage and climate. It’s sad seeing people blame meat production for climate change, since it can absolutely be transformed to be beneficial to the planet. Also, modern factory farming is terrible for the soil in more ways than I realized.
Interesting progress in the field of tinnitus. If there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s that knowledge in the field of medicine is poorly distributed. Hopefully this can help someone.
The Dungeons & Dragons Economy system is bad. The economy is made up and the prices don’t matter. Prices are information, they should incentivize player actions, allocate scarce items, and provide another facet of immersion and interaction with the game world. D&D 5e is meant to be more accessible than the previous versions, which is great, but clearly a lot of detail is lost in just looking at the price chart in the back of the player’s handbook . The price of a health potion wouldn’t reasonably cost the same in a ransacked village as it does in the imperial capital. Moreover, what about those of us who want to know how much goblin armor is really worth? If a party comes through a farming village, how big is the demand for looted weapons, especially if you just sold them some last week? If you sneak into the King’s treasury, how much money will you find? This level of detail is obviously left out of the official release because it is rather difficult to keep track of a large and ever dynamic world for a tabletop game. The goal of this project is to provide a program that will open this new dimension of gameplay for dungeon masters with minimum bookkeeping.
Ideally, the first version of our program will tell you realistic prices in various parts of your world. Events that you can create will affect the market, as will player actions. A mockup of the UI is below. The ideal use case of this is to have the DM update the program with player actions between sessions and then print off a price list for the next session. This is probably a good trade off between usability and having the dynamic price functionality.
We’re going into this project blind. The idea is to create a reasonable simulation of the economy, and then compare that to other models. Our preliminary idea is to have an individual based simulation, with grain production heavily influencing the prices of all other goods. This is because grain is a good proxy for labor costs during this era. We’ll be using this blog post at Bret Devereaux’s blog, as well as Fernand Braudel’s works as inspiration. The historical setting closest to D&D in our estimation is 16th Century Europe, so we’ll be using that as a base. Magic is assumed to be uncommon enough to not have an influence on general prices, so that will be handled through events.
Grain prices are difficult to model because the market is illiquid and inefficient. Grain spoils, it doesn’t travel well, and is essential for human life. Sounds like an interesting combination! The way we began to model it is by considering the mechanism of price discovery. A merchant travels around various towns, carrying grain. Merchants will always purchase grain when a town provides a lower price and always sell to towns providing a higher price. In essence merchants will buy low and sell high depending on how much they have in their current inventory.
This is a reasonable heuristic for bootstrapping the rest of the market characteristics. Meanwhile the seller has a minimum price to sell for determined by the labor cost. They will never sell below that and always sell if above that.
Using this, we can generate prices for grain at various locations based on what price the merchant last purchased at. These prices are, of course, naively calculated but they give some indication of what prices in various locations are.
In terms of simulating something like trade between merchants, the current algorithm is somewhat of a placeholder, as I need to consider how to implement my thoughts on pricing. The merchant currently does make money through selling food. The chart below shows the amount of money a merchant has. In this case, the merchant buys the food from one manor at week 30, then sells it to another at week 40 for a profit.
We’ll be documenting this through blog posts as well as releasing our source code on Github.
General background
In researching the pre Industrial production of grain, I realized that this would be a case where Reality Has A Surprising Amount of Detail. In very broad strokes — Peasants would grow various kinds of grain. There is a seasonal pattern to growing the grain, in which there is plowing, sowing, and harvesting. The harvest happens once a year, but the family needs to eat constantly.
All resulting complexity results from this. Storing grain, for example, was incredibly difficult and non obvious. Trying to bank grain was almost impossible. Hence, a lot of a peasant family’s thinking was geared towards avoiding hunger, rather than trying to achieve any sort of excess.
Large landowners would have a symbiotic, if somewhat parasitic , relationship with the peasant farmers. They would provide capital in the form of manure and plow teams, while the peasant farmers would provide extra labor. Large landowners also were the last line of defence against starvation, as they would offer loans to the farmers, which were usually predatory.
Accurate reenactment of peasants being opressed.
Thoughts on pricing
A pricing formula can consist of a function in two terms as shown below
Price = demand value + supply cost
Which is unimaginative but seems to have a few nice properties in describing prices. Developing further, the function can be expanded to the following.
Price = (social value + personal value) + (cost to produce)
The influence the supplier has on the price is the cost to produce an item. In a simplified world (ignore friction, assume cow is spherical), he is unwilling to sell under that price and infinitely willing to sell above that price. Costs include transportation, profit margin, actual product cost, etc.
The other method by which the supplier can influence the price is through the number and availability of a product. If you’re the only seller in town, you can charge more. If there’s another seller right next door, without colluding, you won’t be able to charge as much.
Put into words, the value a product has to someone is based on the value it has to them personally, meaning in relation to their needs, as well as the value it has socially, in relation to others’ needs.
Another aspect that affects the value of a product is the time there is to use it, the expiration date. Expiring products can be interpreted as having a change in the quantity of usable time. The time you get to use and store a product has value. If you buy mushrooms that’ll go bad in a day, they’re worth less than if they expire in a week. You’re paying for the option to use mushrooms farther into the future.
Quantity of time value can be explained as the value of having a certain quantity of item for a certain time. What characteristics does this have?
If there is no time left to use an item, clearly it has no value.
If you have very little time, the value will be very close to zero regardless since you can’t do much with it in the meantime.
If you have a lot of time, the value is quite high to you, but it’s asymptotic — the difference between having mushrooms that expire in 14 days and 15 days is minimal.
In the middle, we can expect a somewhat linear increase in value with increasing time.
Putting this together, we get the below function.
An intuitive explanation of this is that time value doesn’t stack. 7 mushrooms expiring in 1 day is not the same as 1 mushroom expiring in 7 days.
Applying this concept to grain prices — Price = (quantity of time value)*(social value + personal value + cost to produce + supply constraint)
Of these terms, the two likely largest and most difficult to determine will be the social value and supply constraint.
Social value will require disentangling the web of relationships between the large landlord and the farmers living near them. The landlord is usually the one who will be purchasing grain for hungry farmers during a famine. How badly do the farmers need the grain and how willing is the large landlord to part with his money to provide it? Are they willing to ration grain or will they buy as much as it takes?
Supply constraint goes hand in hand with the difficulty in modeling this inefficient market. How likely is it that another merchant will stop by soon? How far can grain travel? Is the grain shortage local?
The pricing algorithm I’m currently using is based on the following.
Quantity of time value: The previously shown distribution
Social value: I’m assigning a random normal scaling factor to represent the benevolence of a lord to their peasant farmers. I then multiply by an exponential factor based on how close the farmers are to starving.
Personal value: Ignored. I’m assuming that the lord has almost no chance of personally starving to death.
Cost to produce: Used as a minimum value, currently I’m just hardcoding it as a minimum, but I’ll change that in the future to be based on the labor cost and land productivity.
Supply constraint: I have no ideas on how to model this even semi realistically without looking at it globally. I’m modelling this as a linearly increasing factor based on time since the last merchant visit for now. This is an inefficient method because it disregards some important factors such as probability of merchants arriving or chance of local crop failures. This is a sticky mess to be addressed in future steps.
Thoughts on project structure
Currently our project is structured as a Java command line interface program, using Java 8 and JFreeChart for graphing. I would love to know how to make JFreeChart extensible, so I can reuse code for graphing various charts without needing to write a new custom class every time. Ideally I could simply feed in the data into a generic line graphing class. Unfortunately, the documentation isn’t clear on how to do this, so I’ll keep experimenting.
In a similar vein, we may switch to JavaFX. Considering that this program may need to run with a GUI at some point anyways, it may be worthwhile implementing graphing currently using JavaFX, rather than JFreeChart.
Currently, since the bulk of the work is in generating prices and writing the skeleton of the simulation, these concerns aren’t pressing, but it’s worth thinking about.
A big issue is considering how to convert these concepts such as grain production and merchants trading with each other into code. Abstracting these concepts in the right way where the important detail remains but we don’t overcomplicate is proving to be a challenge. We have abstracted grain production into giving each household a certain amount of grain based on land holdings, weather, and labor capacity. I’ve gotten a recommendation that learning about design patterns may help with this.
Going a bit more in depth into issue — the trading algorithm is currently a static method which takes the two trading participants as parameters. It’s then overridden for various participant types like merchant or lord. The function then directly modifies the member variables of each participant like the inventory. It also returns the price that the item was sold at. I’m unsure of whether this is the code architecture that is the most useful interpretation of this.
Thoughts on abstracting history
A big part of this project so far has been interpreting the history and determining how best to abstract it. I’ve of course been reading the ACOUP blog, as well as Fernand Braudel’s work on capitalism in that time. Unfortunately, while I think Braudel’s work is extremely useful and informative, it’s not exactly right for the stage of the project I’m currently on. His work seems to be exceptionally useful in understanding the general trends of global trade at the time, and not so much the in depth mechanics of trade between individuals. My hope is that The Peasants of Languedoc by Le Roy Ladurie is going to give a bit more down to earth mechanics of pre Industrial life and trade. Questions that have come up in the course of creating the simulation are
If there’s an insufficient amount of labor to complete the sowing in one week, what is the likely outcome? Would they take help from other households or just sow later?
How best to model the inefficiency in trade? Merchants visited infrequently and markets were small
What were large landowners likely to be farming? What population did the manor usually contain?
How did the process of plowing actually work? What downsides were there to plowing off peak? What if you plowed without a plow team?
Would 3 field crop rotation fields be equivalent size?
How much food would a lord have on hand vs wealth? How much would his household consume?
I had an urge to learn web development, except the sheer amount of stuff out there available to build a website with was incredibly disorientating. As I went around researching each technology/language/framework, I wrote one sentence definitions of them for myself. I’m putting it here and I will update it as I keep learning.
Frontend – Part of the website the user interacts with
Backend – Stuff on the server
HTML – Holds the content of the webpage
CSS – Makes the webpage have formatting and cool colors
Sass – Makes CSS better and allows you to have variables and logic
JavaScript – Allows your website to have dynamic stuff like animations or interactivity
EJS – Generates HTML from Javascript code, not to be confused with Express, Ext JS, ES6
JQuery – A library that allows you to do things that’d take a couple of lines of code in JS in a single line
Ajax – Not a technology but a technique that allows you to update part of a webpage without reloading the whole thing
Bootstrap – A library that allows you to make nice looking websites really fast by including HTML, CSS, and JS templates for things
Node JS – Allows you to have your server run JavaScript. Useful because now you only need to learn JS to do frontend and backend development
Express – Simplifies some tasks in Node JS
PHP – JavaScript but old and different. Used for backend
JSON – Data storage format
XML – JSON but worse
MongoDB – Fancy JSON database
SQL – A language for querying a database
TypeScript – A superset of Javascript which adds static typing
Flask – Python backend framework
Django – Flask but with more built in
Terraform – Create and manage a server on AWS / Azure using code rather than their website
Docker – Rather than use a virtual machine, let the apps share the OS without interfering with each other
Angular – A framework which allows you to create reusable components using Typescript for the front end
React – Angular but different
Redux – Instead of passing data around, put it somewhere central so it can be accessed from many places.
This is going to be a guide by a beginner, but hopefully this will be useful to those with even less experience than me. When I decided to start building furniture, most of the internet basically said, “unless you have $5000 in tools and a large workshop you may as well just get Ikea furniture.” My aim is to clarify that if you want furniture perfect in every way and have a large budget then sure buy a ton of great tools, but if you’re cool with compromises there are ways to get it done on the cheap.
This is the guide I used to get started. For measuring, I just used a combination of paper that I cut, a pencil, and my old protractor from high school geometry. It was a kludge but the results were okay. I also recommend watching this video to understand a bit better how dovetails are cut. My only other advice is that you want to flatten the wood. I had the guy at the lumber yard do it for me but YMMV.
What motivated me to start making furniture was
I have lots of time and not a lot of money now that I’m unemployed
I need furniture
I absolutely hate furniture that doesn’t feel sturdy
I needed a hobby
I decided my first piece would be a table for my entryway. Since it’s super narrow I figured I’d make it 8 inches wide, with legs attached by dovetails. I wanted something that used wood joinery as opposed to just screws because it feels better. Joinery has the potential to be stronger and besides it felt like investing in developing new skills, as opposed to slapping something together.
Unfortunately, if you listen to the internet, you need at least 5 kinds of saws, 15 chisels, 3 planes, etc. I found this difficult to believe since people have been working with wood for millennia. Here’s what my minimum gear list looks like for creating serviceable dovetails
From what I remember the wood cost around $50. All in all, this came in way cheaper than if I bought it. If you factor in the time I spent on it though, I think unless you’re unemployed you should stick to just buying furniture. At least from a value perspective buying is better, although I will definitely make myself some chairs soon because I enjoyed working with wood.
You absolutely need the dovetail saw and at absolute minimum 2 chisels. I’d probably choose ¾ and ¼ inch chisels, although having the set of 4 was fantastic. The chisels are used for chipping away at the baselines of the dovetails.
The dovetail saw is essential because it allows you to cut the dovetails out. Don’t try to use a regular saw you got at Home Depot. The dovetail saw I used was a Dozuki, which I mainly chose because of price. There is a debate between Western vs Japanese saws, which is irrelevant to me mainly because the Japanese saw was so much cheaper.
There are two kinds of saw (mainly), crosscut and rip cut. The difference is that for rip cutting you go along the grain and crosscut goes across. You can try to use the wrong kind of saw for a cut. It seems to work, it’s just very slow and very ugly. Would not recommend it at all. The dovetail saw has rip teeth. I recommend getting a crosscut saw as well. I didn’t and I think that was a mistake. I used the coping saw for crosscutting tasks and didn’t turn out great.
The coping saw is mostly so you don’t spend forever chiselling away. It’s not essential, but seeing how I have been annoying my neighbors with chiselling, I figured I should at least minimize the noise by using the coping saw as much as I can. I used the coping saw to get in between the teeth to cut out the waste. It’s used mostly for making curved cuts, since the blade is so thin you can change direction very easily.
I used the sandpaper to sharpen the chisels. I recommend the (Scary Sharp method)[https://www.instructables.com/Scary-Sharp-on-a-Budget/]. This is essential since I could really feel when the chisels started getting dull.
These is what the second dovetail I ever made looked like. Overall not bad for the budget I had.
I think in general the bottleneck was my lack of a workbench. I mostly propped up the wood on various surfaces as required and was very gentle. I don’t think I’d recommend this, but if you’re careful enough it can be okay. I used a pocket knife and the chisels to get started on saw cuts so the blade wouldn’t slip. I also was very careful to never put my hands downstream of the chisels.
What I learned
You don’t need a ton of tools when starting a new hobby
Furniture is mostly expensive due to labor cost
You can usually get around budget and space limitations
I have a gut feeling that notation is more essential/central to learning than most presume.
In this stackoverflow question the idea is that changing the notation of logarithms and exponents can make learning it much more intuitive and easy.
In this github repo, there are links to notation making a difference in how people experience activities.
Similarly to these two links, there’s the idea that learning to read and write makes a difference in how you think. The language you speak can have an influence on how you think. This is sort of like an extended Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
Essential to this idea is taking what Feynmann said about his notes seriously.
“They aren’t a record of my thinking process. They are my thinking process. I actually did the work on the paper.” “Well,” Weiner said, “The work was done in your head, but the record of it is still here.” “No, it’s not a record, not really. It’s working. You have to work on paper and this is the paper. Okay?”, Feynman explained.
If we assume thinking actually happens on paper, this all makes a lot more sense. Externalizing thinking onto paper means that you no longer need to keep all information in your working memory. This frees up your mind to determine the next steps you need to take, without needing to remember what you just did.
Similarly, what if notation serves a similar function? Taking the idea of learning calculus as an example, the limit definition of a derivative is technically the same as writing d/dx. This simplification of notation implies an internalization of the principles of that operation. The derivative then becomes a “chunk” that becomes “brain sized”. Something along these lines is Yudkowsky’s Cached Thoughts.
Shouldn’t learning come first and notation simply be a consequence of that? Not necessarily, the idea that notation becomes brain sized is predicated on it being legible. You are constrained by the analysis that’s contained in the notation. For example, multiplying Roman numerals was possible, but due to notation was quite difficult. Roman numerals were fantastic for tallying. Arabic numerals, on the other hand, required 10 different numerals, which meant no more easy tallying. What you got in return though, was an incredibly powerful mechanical multiplication process.
That’s why, before the 14th century, everyone thought that multiplication was an incredibly difficult concept, and only for the mathematical elite. Then arabic numerals came along, with their nice place values, and we discovered that even seven-year-olds can handle multiplication just fine. There was nothing difficult about the concept of multiplication — the problem was that numbers, at the time, had a bad user interface. – Bret Victor
What happens, when you extend this idea? Could certain processes become easier with better notation? By simplifying or improving notation, you can simplify certain actions.
This is reminiscent of the concept of making smaller circles from Josh Waitzkin.
First, I practice the motion over and over in slow motion… By now the body mechanics of the punch have been condensed in my mind to a feeling. I don’t need to hear or see any effect—my body knows when it is operating correctly by an internal sense of harmony… Now I begin to slowly, incrementally, condense my movements while maintaining that feeling… Each little refinement is monitored by the feeling of the punch, which I gained from months or years of training with the large, traditional motion
He describes learning a motion and making it automatic, then refining it for maximum effect. This is the same thing as creating an internal notation for yourself for a physical action. The key is that you must build up a full understanding of what you’re doing before attempting to make it better. Using notation you don’t fully understand is useless, which is why I think transferring knowledge from one sort of problem to another is so difficult.
The implications of this are –
Memorization is not the enemy. Memorizing certain elements of an action, such as the quotient rule in calc, is the first step in being able to use that in higher level contexts.
Notation is important. How we make things legible to others has a big impact. Explaining physics is a whole different animal if you don’t use free body diagrams.
The way you develop higher levels of abstraction is by developing notation. Constructing a notation, however, is dangerous. Embedding the wrong analysis of a concept in notation can make it even tougher to think clearly. As an example, using Euler angles are intuitive when describing rotations. If you’re doing any sort of computation though, including trying to linearly interpolate between two angles, using quaternions is much more useful.
Understanding this gives you leverage over any topic you learn. The notation and what it implies is foundational to any field and it’s a sort of language you need to learn to speak in order to contribute.
Archery, Distance and ‘Kiting’. A good look into why archery is horribly misrepresented in games. If you’ve ever wondered how horse archers actually worked, this has a good answer.
The Gambler Who Cracked the Horse-Racing Code. I reread this article once a year. I’m not sure what’s so inspiring about it, but it’s nice to see brains triumph over what seems to be random.
Accurate reenactment of peasants being opressed.
