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How You Know

paulgraham.com

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Re: How You Know

#101

Post by mathattack »

nilkn wrote: post #10

There's also a danger associated to this phenomenon. If the source of your mental model is later debunked, you may not realize that you need to revise your model precisely because you don't remember what your source was. You may even read about the debunking of the source but fail to draw the connection and realize the implications that it has for your own view of the world. I think that perhaps very squishy subjects…

"Let's not let facts get in the way of a good argument." :-)

Many times we tune out feedback that isn't congruent with our worldview and get locked in. That's why it's good to follow Paul's lead on rereading and revisiting. Sometimes it's hard to remember the anecdote or story that steers us, but finding it again allows us to question it. There was a specific retelling of a Vonnegut (of all authors) story that got me interesting in technology. Rereading the story in it's original form 20+ years later allowed me to understand the first better.

Re: How You Know

#102

Post by pitchups »

An associated problem caused by a change in the mental model due to reading is the "Curse of knowledge" principle - which essentially states that "....better-informed parties find it extremely difficult to think about problems from the perspective of lesser-informed parties."

Once you have read something and your mental model of the world is adjusted to include the new information, you have a difficult time understanding why others don't see what you see. This is compounded by the fact - as highlighted by pg in the essay - that you also forget how and when your mental model changes.

This is one reason why not every expert is a good teacher - as they fail to see the world from the point of view of students.

But it is also relevant and useful to remember this in the world of startups. Established large companies routinely get disrupted by novice startups - often because the experts at the large company fail to see problems the way novices do. It is impossible to become an expert at something while continuing to view the world from the eyes of a beginner.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge

Re: How You Know

#103

Post by chubot »

Raphmedia wrote: post #37
chubot wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm definitely a fan of taking notes on things you've read (among other things, the effort to write notes makes you choose what you read more carefully). And I agree that it will help you remember the sources for various ideas. But I think a journal is the wrong model (i.e. time ordered entries, either electronic or paper). I have used a paper notebook in the past, but I would rarely go back and look at things, and i…

I've heard a few people tell they use a Wiki. Do you host it on your own server? Is is a public wiki, or a private one? I'm very curious.

It's a private Wiki, which started out as a Python CGI on shared hosting, but is now a WSGI app on a Linode.

I started it 10 years ago, and side benefit was that writing a Wiki is a good project to learn about web programming. The first version was of course riddled with XSS and escaping problems :-/

I think writing a Wiki is still a good exercise now. I'm not a front end person per se, but every programmer should know something about the web. I'm always a little taken aback when I meet some back end guy who doesn't know how HTTP or the browser works.

And IMO there is too much bloated JS on the web now. I think people forgot how to make a simple web app with a form and plain buttons. There are too many fast-moving frameworks, so just doing it "raw" (or to WSGI) is a good learning exercise.

Re: How You Know

#104

Post by sinamdar »

'Reliving experiences' is part of the Exposure Therapy that is used to treat PTSD. I remember watching on NOVA or some science program how virtual reality was being used to treat veterans suffering from PTSD. By reliving a dangerous situation in the VR world, they are able to 'recompile' the program in a safer context than it actually happened.

EDIT: Found the link http://www.nami.org/Content/NavigationMenu/Top_Story/Using_V...

Re: How You Know

#105

Post by napoleond »

nl wrote: post #75
not_that_noob wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In practice, people rarely if ever revise their mental model as the world around them changes. Which is why a younger generation without this baggage inevitably rises to supplant the older one.

"It's not that old theories are disproved, their supporters just die out". The best people adapt to new information, no matter their age.

The best people do, indeed. I'm still fairly young, but I'm starting to understand that "adapting to new information" is not something that happens by accident. "Continuous learning" is a lifestyle thing; I've never had to think about it. But forcing myself to re-evaluate things that I already thought I knew--that is a conscious and often difficult process.

Re: How You Know

#106

Post by kissickas »

ojbyrne wrote: post #65
worklogin wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you read the article? There are multiple reasons for reading, and though many of them feed into enjoyment, it's not always the end.

I did read it, and found it trite and obvious. My problems with it were essentially summarized by the particular sentence I quoted.

I found it obvious, which pg admits, until this quote: "The same book would get compiled differently at different points in your life."

A nice analogy, as others have pointed out, and that is the thirteen-word summary I'll remember from this essay. Not bad, considering most thousand-page books will be compressed down to a page of take-away memories.

Re: How You Know

#107

Post by jimbokun »

gatehouse wrote: post #43
arjunnarayan wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an important corollary of Paul's essay that I wish he mentioned. Sometimes when you update your model of the world significantly, you still have a cache of previously computed facts that were computed using the old model. You have to clear out that cache and recompute with the new model, and that takes a significant amount of time. Often, rereading is a core part of that, since it forces you to revisit a lot…

For an example of this, ask yourself: What is the world population? The longer it has been since you checked, the further off the number will be. https://www.google.com/search?q=world+population

My kids recently caught me claiming the world population is 6 billion people. Having learned the number more recently, they had the more accurate value.

Re: How You Know

#108

Post by awolf »

pitchups wrote: post #102

An associated problem caused by a change in the mental model due to reading is the "Curse of knowledge" principle - which essentially states that "....better-informed parties find it extremely difficult to think about problems from the perspective of lesser-informed parties." Once you have read something and your mental model of the world is adjusted to include the new information, you have a difficult time understan…

>better-informed parties find it extremely difficult to think about problems from the perspective of lesser-informed parties

Reading this made me think of poker. Calibrating to the skill level of lesser players is often very difficult for intermediate and lower-advanced players. Being able to synthesize the less sophisticated thought technologies beginners are using is surprisingly difficult. Failure to adjust often leads better players to play incorrectly against newbies. Anyone who has experienced the frustration of beating medium/high stakes cash games only to lose in home games with your friends for 1/1000th the stakes will know what I mean.

Re: How You Know

#109

Post by eaurouge »

nilkn wrote: post #10

There's also a danger associated to this phenomenon. If the source of your mental model is later debunked, you may not realize that you need to revise your model precisely because you don't remember what your source was. You may even read about the debunking of the source but fail to draw the connection and realize the implications that it has for your own view of the world. I think that perhaps very squishy subjects…

There's always a danger that you'll introduce a bug in your code at some point, right? If you 'pull' from a lot or sources, at some point one of those sources will introduce a bug. But if you have a lot of high quality committers (book authors) and you continue to pull (read) from those sources, you stand a good chance of discovering and squashing these bugs eventually. In fact, as your code (mind) matures, you start to develop procedures to test unproven pull requests (theories/ideas) before merging and committing. You'll be especially careful of unknown authors or authors that have introduced buggy code in the past, while possibly giving full commit access to authors you trust.

Re: How You Know

#110

Post by zenogais »

I think this is part of a larger point. Books aren't just collections of facts. Deleuze and Guattari perhaps said it best in the introduction to "A Thousand Plateaus" - "A book itself is a little machine..."

They then go on to say: "We will never ask what a book means, as signified or signifier; we will not look for anything to understand in it. We will ask what it functions with..." Books are machines you plug into your understanding of the world and they either have an effect on you or they have no effect at all. What and how a book plugs into your understanding and works on it is more important than the content of the book itself under this view.

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