Monthly Archives: July 2013

Leveling Up

I've been thinking about two different dramatic approaches to leveling up, and how to apply them to real life. (This post came out of a conversation with a friend, a lot of it was copied from my comments, but I wanted to give myself "credit" for doing the writing, since it is in fact actual writing.)

One is the training montage, which I think is basically equivalent to grinding for levels. You have a skill you want to work on, so you practice that skill, and then you get better. Wax-on wax-off is a related trope. Everyone theoretically knows how to do that, at least when you've already successfully decomposed whatever you want to accomplish into a bunch of discrete, simple skills.

The other is "breaking stronger", when an impossible task motivates you to learn the skills you need to do it on the fly. It seems like the latter requires less willpower, or at least less sustained willpower, so I should be thinking about which skills I want to develop, that would be well-developed by it.

Examples of "breaking stronger":

In real life, a math professor at Georgetown assigned me very computationally intensive problems, so that I just plain couldn't get them done by the deadline unless I thought really carefully about how to solve them efficiently. It didn't feel like the practice or working hard. What it felt like was just being really terrible at something for a long time and desperately flailing for solutions, until I looked back at some past problems and realized they all seemed really easy now.

In fiction, when Frodo and Sam get back to the Shire, all of the sudden they are tremendous badasses by comparison to everyone else, even though they never explicitly tried to become badass. But even barely surviving Mordor, they had to build those skills.

To be fair to explicit practice, there are techniques like "deliberate practice" that make it somewhat better. I'm practicing "deliberate practice" by practicing piano, where I can tell very easily if I'm doing it wrong and need more work on something. And there are probably a bunch of skills I could get a lot better at if I could just decompose them into simple practiceable skills, and then apply deliberate practice to one at a time.

For example, to get better at social interaction with strangers, I could break that down into approaches, probing for a topic of mutual interest, reading body language and other nonverbal cues, sending body language and other nonverbal cues, etc., and practice one at a time - but it's not clear how to do that. The best concentrated practice I've had so far was a few consecutive hours of rejection therapy at the first CFAR Minicamp. I highly, highly recommend it. I am not a particularly smooth or charming person to strangers, but I came up with some "reach" requests that would have actually been quite cool, like getting a random passerby to do a dramatic reading from the book he was carrying (he turned out to be a literature professor and was happy to oblige), and getting a stranger to go have tea with me (the conversation turned out to be quite nice).

But on the other hand, I have finite willpower, and if I can set myself up to break stronger, that would be a low-willpower-cost dramatic improvement. Some workouts, for example, are like that, and it's for this reason that I'm going to invest in a personal trainer or some kind of intense fitness classes like CrossFit - so someone can push me to the outside of my limits - without pushing me in a way that's likely to injure me.

The trick is finding a task that's not literally impossible, but seems like it. And to ratchet up the intensity of what's required from you, not to raise the stakes. What are some things like that, that I can do to improve ordinary life skills?

Last night I dreamt I lost a tooth.










The whole ordeal reminded me of this SMBC comic:

SMBC Caterpillar Land

Bad at Math

Over at Slate Star Codex, YVain has a post about being bad at math. Being YVain, he keeps coming up with gems like this one:

It’s not that I don’t recognize that math is awesome. If there were “Pray the lack-of-interest-in-math away” camps, I would totally go to one.

It's things like this that make me glad I went to St. John's, which basically is "Pray the lack-of-interest-in-math away" camp (among other things).

Read the whole thing of course, but I'd like to respond directly to Deiseach's comment:

I don’t know how best to describe this; the only time I have ever shed tears in school (and this is not a metaphor or a fanciful example or hyperbole; I mean real tears running down my face and dripping on my copybook) was when I was aged eight, in Second Class, and trying to understand the maths problem we had just been given – and failing miserably.

The teacher was sympathetic but baffled; no matter how she tried to explain it, it Just. Did. Not. Click. With. Me.

Other subjects, I could feel my mind “wrapping around” them (think of an enzyme binding to a substrate) – it was like my brain ‘reached out’ and took hold of the concept.

Maths – no. It was like trying to jam a key into a lock where you couldn’t even get it in the hole, never mind force it to turn.

It still functions like that – I get so far and then – jammed up. No shape. No way this will fit. You may as well tell me “Just flip your left hand over and you’ll have two right hands!” when it comes to getting my head round maths.

Now, of course, I have to believe that Deiseach is telling the truth about her experience - that she just gets permanently stuck after a while and can't wrap her mind around something.

But if I were teaching a math class, and I had a student cry because she didn't understand the material - not because she couldn't get the right answer on the test, or because she couldn't perform the calculations, or memorize something, but because she didn't understand - then I would identify that student as special, and worth cultivating, and possibly unusually talented at math - because she knows the difference between getting the right answer and understanding the math!

Math is big and it has lots of parts. There are lots of different ways to get stuck. You can be stuck because you're just not familiar enough with some common identities or ways of solving equations, in which case the solution seems to be slogging through a bunch of problem sets or flashcards until you get it. But then there is another type of stuck, where even if you can follow each step, the whole thing makes no sense to you. Some people never even know that it's supposed to make sense. Others are bad at telling the difference between a proof they can recite, and one they really grasp intuitively. But knowing the difference - that's gold.

When you're stuck on a concept, you can't just slog through the way you can when you're stuck on vocabulary. You have to take a break. Sometimes your brain is tired. Sometimes you need to see something used in a few different ways. And sometimes you've gotten stuck because you're trying to understand it one way, and that doesn't work, and your mind needs time to reset before trying another approach.

And then, of course, if there's something basic you've missed, it can be really hard to notice that too. Unfortunately there don't seem to be good, readily available checklists to go through to see whether you've missed some simple identity or definition that a proof relies on. I've had a weird mathematical education, so it's happened many times that I've been stuck on a problem forever, only to find out that there's a well-known, easy to prove mathematical identity that makes the problem trivial, that I would have recognized the application of immediately, if only I had ever heard of it.

Why Buy Flowers



You: "How are you?"

Them: "Okay."

You: "Did you see the new Superman movie?"

Them: "Yes."


Them: Silence


Them: Silence

You: "Looks like it might rain later."

Them: Silence.








