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Overthinking

aentan.com

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Re: Overthinking

#61

Post by dxbydt »

I hate to say this, but the article is complete bullcrap. Have you even seen the movie he references ? The protagonist is supposed to be this "naturally talented genius" who detests the bookish Indian academic education system, so throughout the film he takes potshots at the stuff he's taught in school, ultimately choosing to drop out without a degree until the Dean formally requests him to take the finals, upon which he gets the highest grade in the university. Its a completely one-sided portrayal, and while it is valid in the sense that Indian education system is wholly bunk, it is unfair to draw any deep profound lessons out of a shallow screenplay played for laughts. The pencil thing as has been pointed out by the commentators below is an urban legend.

The most talkedabout scene in the whole film involves a vaginal delivery using a vacuum blower as a suction device, and a AA battery as an inverter as the OB barks out instructions on a webcam. As a former electrical engineer I refuse to even entertain the possibility of such a stunt. Yet everybody in the media - the newspapers/TV/talkshows went gaga over this scene, suposedly a parable for "necessity is the mother(pun intended) of invention".

There's 2 scenes where the conductivity of brine is demonstrated when a person urinating on a live wire gets electrocuted, again played for laughs.

There's a scene where a student in his final year is unable to graduate because his thesis involves getting a toy helicopter to fly. He's unable to figure out the propulsion mechanics, so in disgust he throws the helicopter into the trash. The hero, our natural genius sophomore, picks up this helicopter, spends the time rigging up wires in the EE lab & finally gets it to fly. He puts a camera on the copter & as it coasts high in the air, it captures the video of the senior who has committed suicide by hanging in his dorm! Now is that crass or what ? Commiting suicide for failing to figure out some stupid propulsion mechanics! I remember thinking at the time that if this same film had been made in English, the critics & audience in the US would have torn it to shreds for such pandering & crass footage. But India being what it is, this very scene was lauded for its authenticity!

Even setting aside all that, the wrapping a string around your palm 11 times is simply trading off precision for some trial & error , not sme clever solution. For the preschool numbers thing, he's making up the rules as he goes along.

Frankly, the article should be titled "Not thinking".

Re: Overthinking

#62

Post by kens »

xarien wrote: post #16

I solved the second one in a couple minutes in my head with value substitutions. Unless you were to do with with a pen and paper, it'd be pretty difficult to pick up on the closed loops. Generating the following list took less than 30 secs when I looked it over, so obviously the example of it taking a long time to solve is a bit contrived. What threw me off a bit at first was that the number 4 was not used at all. I…

Actually, it's a clue that 4 is not used. Note that you can draw a 4 with or without a closed loop, so it make the puzzle ambiguous.

Re: Overthinking

#63

Post by aGHz »

rduchnik wrote: post #52
muyuu wrote: post #22

It's not overthinking, it's called context. If you give an engineering problem to an engineer in a corporate environment, he will try to do what he's been told to be a good job: good precision and low cost, complexity not being a problem as far as the solution is achieved. If he's given 1 hour, then using 59 minutes is just as valid as using 5. And rightly so. As for the numeric problem, same thing. You are not givin…

I think it's totally relevant, I have worked with guys that have fancy PHD's from MIT that always over complicated the crap out of simple things. It's like when you buy something expensive or make an investment, you feel the need to defend and justify it to others. It's the same thing here, you get a fancy degree and everything you do has to be complex to justify getting that degree otherwise what separates you from…

I don't understand why you presume it's a need to defend and justify it to others. Getting a PhD from MIT isn't exactly a walk in the park, I imagine the person got it BECAUSE of a pleasure to tackle complicated problems in the first place.

If I really enjoy dealing with complexity and you give me something really simple to do, well I'm gonna go ahead and have some fun with it. It's not a matter of justifying, it's just that simple stuff is boring to somebody who enjoys complexity.

Re: Overthinking

#64

Post by muyuu »

asolove wrote: post #60
muyuu wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It didn't. When I'm presented bullshit like that IRL I get pissed off, but I can generally take the challenge of pointing out how and why is it bullshit. Being presented it in HN, it's a good chance to educate more people on why this is NOT thinking out of the box or being clever, and why these are NOT proper tests unless adequate context is provided.

The problem is, if your definition of engineering is solving problems where all the context is fully provided, then 99% of what is interesting on HN isn't engineering. It's apparently bullshit. Changing the rules and picking a different context are perfectly valid ways of solving a problem. Squinting hard at real-life patterns and trying to find the rule that generates them is most of the value in business and progra…

In real life you usually know at least 1 or 2 of these:

- what the problem is

- what you want to achieve

- what the constraints are

- what works (a means to know when you have found a solution)

Without that, you have an undefined riddle and you can try to do something original or clever and see how that goes. Obviously the less you know the less convoluted things will even occur to you.

If you give a bunch of numbers to mathy people they will very likely try some math. They will expect it to be math. That's not loss of creativity, that's reasonable expectations.

In real life, if I'm given a pizza and told to divide it in 11 equal slices I'm pretty sure I can achieve reasonable precision without any measurements. 1/11 is just slightly more than 1/(4*3) which is easy enough to figure out. At most I'd make a few tentative marks before going ahead and cutting it. When you give a problem like this in an interview, you can assume you're expected to prove your relevant skills to the job. In a software company that would be math, algorithms, etc. not just problem solving. If your objective is to get upvoted, then maybe you should try something clever and accessible.

Re: Overthinking

#65

Post by aGHz »

aGHz wrote: post #63
rduchnik wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's totally relevant, I have worked with guys that have fancy PHD's from MIT that always over complicated the crap out of simple things. It's like when you buy something expensive or make an investment, you feel the need to defend and justify it to others. It's the same thing here, you get a fancy degree and everything you do has to be complex to justify getting that degree otherwise what separates you from…

I don't understand why you presume it's a need to defend and justify it to others. Getting a PhD from MIT isn't exactly a walk in the park, I imagine the person got it BECAUSE of a pleasure to tackle complicated problems in the first place. If I really enjoy dealing with complexity and you give me something really simple to do, well I'm gonna go ahead and have some fun with it. It's not a matter of justifying, it's j…

To clarify, I'm not saying over-engineering is a good thing. I'm saying there's a mismatch between the complexity of the problem and the desires/personality of the person having to solve it. Give the simple problem to people who valor elegance, minimalism, simplicity, and keep the MIT PhD for rocket surgery and stuff.

Re: Overthinking

#67

Post by ankurdhama »

The numbers based question was hilarious!!, specially to know that pre-school children can solve it in 5 mins. Try to show this question to a pre-school child and let us know what happens.

Our brain is just a amazing pattern matching machine. As soon as it is presented with a problem it starts to find patterns/relations in the problem along with going through the knowledge base it has acquired till now and trying different permutations and combinations to find the solution. In the number question, as soon as you read it, the brain will try to find patterns "using" the mathematical knowledge it has and it will keep on doing so until it gets frustrated an says WTF there is no relation here but it may happen that few days later you subconscious do find a pattern here based on "shapes" and not "numbers" but that is very very unlikely because as soon as we see numbers we think in numbers and not their shapes. If this problem was presented using shapes, anybody could have solved it in seconds.

Re: Overthinking

#68

Post by muyuu »

Melyan wrote: post #56
muyuu wrote: post #22

It's not overthinking, it's called context. If you give an engineering problem to an engineer in a corporate environment, he will try to do what he's been told to be a good job: good precision and low cost, complexity not being a problem as far as the solution is achieved. If he's given 1 hour, then using 59 minutes is just as valid as using 5. And rightly so. As for the numeric problem, same thing. You are not givin…

Maybe you were too stupid to solve the problem in a reasonable time?

Took me 3 seconds. Didn't you read the message? :P

Re: Overthinking

#69

Post by bandy »

thelastnode wrote: post #4

Even in the movie 3 Idiots, at the end of the movie, the man with the pen points out that there's a reason for the complexity: bits of graphite flying around in zero gravity near instrument panels and people's eyes, etc. Simplicity is great, but sometimes complexity is warranted. More importantly, assuming other smart people ( many other smart people) are wrong without deep thought is not a good idea.

Not only graphite, but assuming a proper non-mechanical pencil, you'd end up with wood shavings in addition to the graphite bits flying about — which you could solve by adding a vacuum to the pencil sharpener, to capture the debris.

Re: Overthinking

#70

Post by paulhauggis »

aGHz wrote: post #63
rduchnik wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's totally relevant, I have worked with guys that have fancy PHD's from MIT that always over complicated the crap out of simple things. It's like when you buy something expensive or make an investment, you feel the need to defend and justify it to others. It's the same thing here, you get a fancy degree and everything you do has to be complex to justify getting that degree otherwise what separates you from…

I don't understand why you presume it's a need to defend and justify it to others. Getting a PhD from MIT isn't exactly a walk in the park, I imagine the person got it BECAUSE of a pleasure to tackle complicated problems in the first place. If I really enjoy dealing with complexity and you give me something really simple to do, well I'm gonna go ahead and have some fun with it. It's not a matter of justifying, it's j…

"it's just that simple stuff is boring to somebody who enjoys complexity."

This doesn't work very well with business. Sometimes, you just need the simple solution.

It's also the reason why many startups never get off the ground. I'm guilty of it myself, but I have learned over the years to not over-engineer something until it's really needed.

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