In chess there's an idiom for this. "Long think, wrong think" because it's a quite common phenomenon that very good players will ruin positions by rather than playing with their good instinct, over-analyzing a position, there's a related situation of the hardest games to win being already won positions because there's so many ways to win that people will on occasion start doing something really stupid akin to the exa…
> all the people in the rationalist cult never seem to actually be successful at anything other than rationalism do you have a link? would love to read this, and it probably applies to me :)
Thinking too much can be bad for you (2012)
171–180 of 257 posts
Re: Thinking too much can be bad for you (2012)
#172Thinking keeps me awake. It's getting worse as I get older. Maybe it's anxiety or something related, and sometimes it's worried thoughts, but often it's just running through scenarios. Video games, media plots, what I need to do next week. My brain is far more active after 10pm, and I am personally more motivated. I get a burst of energy but it's not really the right time to clean the house so lying in bed has it all…
I assume you have already considered and observed the effect of alcohol and/or caffeine intake.
One thing that definitely helps me is to have a routine for bedtime. A hot shower, bed preheated in winter (heated underblanket), keeping the room cold and reading a book while lying in bed. I typically pick technical material as it's less likely to keep me up all night with an engrossing story. At some point, I notice that the mind is tired and I am able to gather words from the page but not comprehend the material. I then set the book aside, turn off the bedlamp and try to sleep. Usually, this is sufficient and I fall asleep in no time. Some people just fall asleep while reading. For me, it's reading. For a friend of mine, it's watching a TV show. He has something playing on the computer or TV and falls asleep while watching it.
The idea is to get the body relaxed (hot shower in my case) and then do something (devoid of stress) that keeps ones mind off the hustle and bustle of one's day.
Also, going to bed and rising at (roughly) the same time everyday will also get the body and the mind trained to be sleepy at that time and it'll get easier to fall asleep.
EDIT: I naturally tend to drift to a nocturnal routine if left to my own inclinations. The hardest part of what I wrote above is just pulling myself away from the day to go to bed at what most would consider a reasonable hour. If you can not convince yourself that sleep is important and commit to maintaining discipline in your sleep/wake routine, no "technique", "advice" or "substance" will be effective on the long run.
Re: Thinking too much can be bad for you (2012)
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like to believe that experience will eventually drive people towards using scientific parsimony when creating solutions to engineering problems. I don't think over-engineering is the only problem: shiny-new. Shiny-new syndrome wherein the typically junior programmer cannot help but jump from one new thing to the next, advocating that some new system must use the new tech that they recently discovered. While the ent…
> Another problem: we are facebook too! In the sense that small companies heartily believe that they actually have problems at the scale of a company like facebook (or will ever get to that level). Precisely! It's tiresome how many people setup Kubernetes for a network of 2-6 computers.
I was with you once, but last year's I got tired when people set up networks of 2-6 computers with daemons that run in a wildly different ways, and it's not clear how to fix their failures, where configs and metrics and logs are. I'd honestly prefer overengineered kubernetes setup nkw, only for some more standard way of doing things between projects.
Re: Thinking too much can be bad for you (2012)
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
Aside from (mostly) practicing normal sleep hygiene recommendations, I listen to a sitcom that I've already watched many times using wireless earbuds as I fall asleep. Sometimes I do both ears, somtimes one ear, depending on whether I feel like sleeping with my head turned. I'm normally a back sleeper. Because I've already seen the episodes, they don't stimulate any thinking. They're comedy, so all happy and lighthea…
Thanks for the earbud recommendation. I was talking to my mother about the Sleep With Me podcast (she hates it but she's extremely picky) and I realised I need something wireless if I'll ever listen to something like that in bed.
Under-pillow speakers are decent if you are a side sleeper. It’s nice not having something in your ears all night.
Re: Thinking too much can be bad for you (2012)
#175Being already known by my friends and family to be an "overthinker" and prone to "analysis paralysis", I sometimes wonder why I'm still a SWE. I've slowly started to realize over time that my profession is filled with overthinking and over-engineering, and that our interview process can even select for it. IMO its hard to be the person that aces the technical interview gauntlet then walks out of the building and turn…
As someone who's been programming for years, one of my biggest complaints in software is over-engineering. It's so universally prevalent, I literally expect to get downvoted for even making this comment. I strongly advocate for simplicity in software implementation, allowing for maintainability and flexibility... the cleanest solution that reaches the goal and doesn't lock us too far into a narrow approach that may b…
"I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time."
In my experience, you often start with a somewhat over engineered solution. Then you take the (long) process of really understanding it and slowly distill it down. This is true for a new feature and also the whole codebase.
Re: Thinking too much can be bad for you (2012)
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ubuntu the operating system takes its name from the concept that you talk about here. That is also why the logo of Ubuntu the operating system is three people holding hands, which kind of blew my mind when I first heard about it. Prior to that I thought the logo was just some lines and circles in a pretty pattern with no specific meaning.
Ubuntu is the distribution. GNU is the operating system. Linux is the kernel.
"GNU is the operating system" only makes sense when speaking about GNU Hurd or Linux-libre. The kernel is part of the OS, so in the case of ubuntu GNU can't be the operating system. But if Linux is the kernel, and GNU is part of the operating system because the OS is more than the kernel, then why is the OS GNU/Linux and not Systemd/GNU/Linux? And on Ubuntu you install most stuff with apt instead of using gcc, and use most software with X.org instead of bash, so the OS is really apt/X.org/systemd/GNU/Linux. Of course that name quickly becomes silly, it's much more practical to just call the OS Ubuntu (as that expresses a specific package selection that includes GNU, linux, and a large number of equally indispensable parts, as well as their update cadence and methodology)
Re: Thinking too much can be bad for you (2012)
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a weird term, "over engineering". Think about over-engineering a bridge. What does it look like? Huge and bulky, way too expensive, able to hold much more weight than it should, lots of walkways and access points and design features that nobody really wants? But wait: "any fool can build a bridge that doesn't fall down. It takes an engineer to build a bridge that just barely doesn't fall down." The whole point o…
When I say "over-engineering" I mean stuff like this: https://github.com/MarkSFrancis/enterprise-fizz-buzz Building a whole ton of stuff, just to do something fairly trivial.
In this example, it's black and white obviously over engineered. The reality is, in an application of moderate complexity, whether or not it is indeed over-engineered is a far more subjective calculation.
E.g., >90% of engineers would agree enterprise-fizz-buzz is over-engineered.
But perhaps ~50% of engineers agree my SaaS app is over-engineered.
Re: Thinking too much can be bad for you (2012)
#178After only skimming and searching, it seems a bit weird to open an article on this topic with an example from tennis and _not_ reference The Inner Game of Tennis. It's a pretty good book that can be applied to lots of things; conscious thought and verbalizing can make you worse at learning and executing a task.
Was going to make the same comment. Gallwey does a better and more thorough job of articulating what is going on here.
Re: Thinking too much can be bad for you (2012)
#179Being already known by my friends and family to be an "overthinker" and prone to "analysis paralysis", I sometimes wonder why I'm still a SWE. I've slowly started to realize over time that my profession is filled with overthinking and over-engineering, and that our interview process can even select for it. IMO its hard to be the person that aces the technical interview gauntlet then walks out of the building and turn…
As someone who's been programming for years, one of my biggest complaints in software is over-engineering. It's so universally prevalent, I literally expect to get downvoted for even making this comment. I strongly advocate for simplicity in software implementation, allowing for maintainability and flexibility... the cleanest solution that reaches the goal and doesn't lock us too far into a narrow approach that may b…
Largely agree, but I've found distilling complex requirements down to a simple implementation takes effort, and sometimes longer than the more circuitous route.
A coarse rule of thumb from a few decades of my own experience in software development is that version 1 will be quick, dirty and (in retrospect) naive. Version 2 will improve it with what you learned the first time around. And version 3 tends to be the clean, solid, polished winner. I've learned to expect and encourage refactoring to arrive at this point.
Re: Thinking too much can be bad for you (2012)
#180In chess there's an idiom for this. "Long think, wrong think" because it's a quite common phenomenon that very good players will ruin positions by rather than playing with their good instinct, over-analyzing a position, there's a related situation of the hardest games to win being already won positions because there's so many ways to win that people will on occasion start doing something really stupid akin to the exa…
In Dominoes the term is “study long study wrong”
Or in Korea we call this “long time wrong move (장고 뒤에 악수)”