How to get better at painting without painting anything (2015) • Hacker News Board

Re: How to get better at painting without painting anything (2015)

#121

Post by dfxm12 » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 1:52 PM UTC

reikonomusha wrote: post #2

All of this advice is equally true with practicing a musical instrument. You will not get better if you just play songs/pieces fully over and over. You can, and often do, get worse. And it’s hard , because making music is what it’s all about. I don’t know who said this quote originally, but in the piano world, one says “practice doesn’t make perfect; practice makes permanent.”

"Practice makes permanent" is a perfectly reasonable goal for someone who needs to perform the same set of songs many nights out of the year.

Musicians don't always "make" music - that's not what it's all about. Musicians may only need to "play" music.

Re: How to get better at painting without painting anything (2015)

#122

Post by kiba » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 1:53 PM UTC

dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #73

diordiderot wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The science is wrong because I disagree" - ipaddr

They are not the only one, I see the same. Kids without math drills have problems in storing crucial bits of information in long-term memory and consequently fare worse at solving simple arithmetic problems than myself when I was much younger. I'm not talking about complex things but basic arithmetic, like multiplying digits, adding fractions or, more importantly, dealing with ratios. Drills give you a considerable a…

Sure, you can drill them. I am just saying you should intermix them with other problems.

I am not telling you to do multiplying digit only 1 times. That would be silly. I would be telling you should mix up multiplying digits with other previously learned concepts, say 10 addition and 10 subtraction questions, and the rest can be 80 multiplying digit problems. I don't know the optimal intermixing ratio here, but it shouldn't be a straight 100 multiplying digit problems which all use the same algorithm to solve it.

Drilling and repetition is good, but there's the danger of having illusory mastery because it's already there in short term memory. Your goal is to encode those skills into long term memory.

Re: How to get better at painting without painting anything (2015)

#123

Post by chris_st » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 2:03 PM UTC

temp234 wrote: post #52

brudgers wrote: post #25

The premise of Wooden's methods is that the players already have a lot of experience playing basketball. Many many games by the time they got to UCLA. Informal and formal. And that's my caveat for this as advice on painting. If a person doesn't already have a history of painting, by which I mean starting and completing paintings as paintings, no amount of drill is going turn them into a painter. The willingness to ex…

Does anybody have any reading recommendations or thoughts on the topic of how people _with_ drilled or otherwise refined skills can turn into people who come up with and complete mature creative projects? In creative contexts I know a lot of people who get stuck on just drilling their skills forever or who want to be mature creative project-completers but mysteriously aren't getting it done. I've read a lot about how…

This question came up in a guitar discussion group I'm part of. Someone who was really good at the drills wasn't happy, because they could kind of only do the drills. You have to perform eventually, which for painting is finishing paintings, musicians performing entire pieces, etc. And I think that's a beginning towards an answer to your question: find something in your hobby (or job!) you love and do that as a performance. Drills are there to serve the eventual performance, they're not an end in themselves.

Re: How to get better at painting without painting anything (2015)

#124

Post by smw » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 2:03 PM UTC

grecy wrote: post #76

TrispusAttucks wrote: post #5

> But drill isn’t popular. It’s widely seen as boring. Worse, there’s a body of opinion, especially in education, that considers it an ineffective way to practice. That’s a shame, because it’s the most effective way to build your skills. This resonated with me as I watch my kids go through school. Math used to be taught with more drill style. Now with common core every single problem is an epic quest of 10 frames and…

> But drill isn’t popular. It’s widely seen as boring. Worse, there’s a body of opinion, especially in education, that considers it an ineffective way to practice. That’s a shame, because it’s the most effective way to build your skills. When you sign up to become a snowboard instructor in Canada they basically say "You should already be able to snowboard. We're not going to teach you that. We're going to teach you h…

Any chance you know of a decent video showing how to teach someone to snowboard? (or ski?) I'd love to understand the best way to do that.

Re: How to get better at painting without painting anything (2015)

#125

Post by chris_st » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 2:04 PM UTC

brudgers wrote: post #55

temp234 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does anybody have any reading recommendations or thoughts on the topic of how people _with_ drilled or otherwise refined skills can turn into people who come up with and complete mature creative projects? In creative contexts I know a lot of people who get stuck on just drilling their skills forever or who want to be mature creative project-completers but mysteriously aren't getting it done. I've read a lot about how…

For art, it’s not skill or technique that makes someone an artist. It is simply the terrifying decision that what you make is art. Terrifying because the only gatekeeper to being an artist is you. Declare yourself an artist and you are. Call what you made art and it is.

Yup. When I was painting, I spent some time thinking about what it "meant" to be an artist. I finally decided that an artist is just executing a vision in some particular medium.

Re: How to get better at painting without painting anything (2015)

#126

Post by chris_st » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 2:07 PM UTC

As much as I agree with a lot in this article, I totally don't understand the "Code Kata" thing promoted by Uncle Bob Martin and others. I understand drilling a specific skill in the arts, but writing the same piece of code over and over just makes no sense at all (and yeah, his example was solving the "Bowling Score" problem every time).

So, anyone do code katas and like/recommend them? If so, what does it teach you? Do you do the same problem over and over, or tackle different problems?

Re: How to get better at painting without painting anything (2015)

#127

Post by eloisius » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 2:21 PM UTC

CorrectHorseBat wrote: post #117

eloisius wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can't imagine learning Chinese characters without any form of mnemonics. Username checks out :). Have you learned Chinese? I'm not convinced that my method is the best by a long shot, but I don't use mnemonics. I've tried memorizing other things with tricks like the memory palace, and either I don't know how to do it or my brain is busted, but I've never been able to create a "palace" much less store information…

>Have you learned Chinese? Yes, and still am. Not really active anymore since I'm busy with other things. I don't read much, but I can read a book, albeit slow and with much difficulty. Writing I do even less, and handwriting I never really did apart from tests and filling in forms. Speaking and listening I do every day. After a while I just decided to not focus really much on handwriting because it easily takes the…

Thanks a lot for the advice! I misused “radical” before but actually meant components, not the one arbitrary radical. Remembering characters as a block of components definitely helps. I think that would fall under the idea of “chunking” that memory experts talk about. Sometimes I remember a character on the first go because it’s a combination of components I’m very familiar with. I haven’t checked out the Outlier dictionary but I’m going to now. I often go looking at the character components to help me remember them, but better composition that Unicode data would but great.

I use Pleco flashcards to do spaced repetition. Not sure how it compares to Anki, but it takes almost no effort to create new cards, and that’s good for me because I can easily get sucked into fiddling with tools instead of using them.

Re: How to get better at painting without painting anything (2015)

#128

Post by Aunche » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 2:23 PM UTC

nextaccountic wrote: post #75

foxes wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not a problem with the drill style per say but toxic teachers and parents. You can make someone drill without tormenting them for failing. I think doing drills is good if done in a supportive setting, but it is also and should not be the only way to teach.

Do you know any kid that signed up for math drills? It's nearly always imposed by parents or teachers.

I was certainly more excited by math drills more than attempts to make math "fun."

Re: How to get better at painting without painting anything (2015)

#129

Post by sha256kira » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 2:43 PM UTC

chris_st wrote: post #126

As much as I agree with a lot in this article, I totally don't understand the "Code Kata" thing promoted by Uncle Bob Martin and others. I understand drilling a specific skill in the arts, but writing the same piece of code over and over just makes no sense at all (and yeah, his example was solving the "Bowling Score" problem every time). So, anyone do code katas and like/recommend them? If so, what does it teach you…

I dont like them per say, but they worked for me when I had to learn data structures and algos under a lot of pressure. What I noticed (and what I tell my students now) is that they can help you get to a point where you get enough muscle memory to start to watch yourself coding in real time and think critically about what you're doing when your doing it.

Re: How to get better at painting without painting anything (2015)

#130

Post by tsumnia » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 2:44 PM UTC

chris_st wrote: post #126

As much as I agree with a lot in this article, I totally don't understand the "Code Kata" thing promoted by Uncle Bob Martin and others. I understand drilling a specific skill in the arts, but writing the same piece of code over and over just makes no sense at all (and yeah, his example was solving the "Bowling Score" problem every time). So, anyone do code katas and like/recommend them? If so, what does it teach you…

I don't personally do katas, but I would recommend them. As a disclaimer, I've written a research paper on the use of typing exercises to help learn CS [1]. For typing exercises, I consider it akin to building muscle memory at getting comfortable with code syntax with a variety of examples. I look at katas in a simple fashion, small scale problems designed to get you comfortable with building mental models in your head. There is also research out of Utah on giving super small coding drills with good results [2].

When it comes to teaching it, the biggest hurdle is that you need to build a lot of small, unique exercises. This is still drilling, just now focusing on making the techniques flexible to different problems. I use the analogy of drilling technique in martial arts, but you could consider that training with a different partner to understand how the technique works with a new body type. The trick I've found useful is to collect a number of textbooks to review when thinking up practice ideas. If the textbook is good, it typically has "real world" examples modeled with the topic - for example, one I built the other day looked at creating bigrams from a list of words.

[1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3373165.3373177

[2] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3372782.3406259