Be prolific • Hacker News Board

Re: Be prolific

#131

Post by fuzzfactor » Sun, Oct 25, 2020, 4:19 AM UTC

bluetomcat wrote: post #10

The definition of "creating more" is the elephant in the room. Do you stay focused on one subject, iterating multiple times over the result, in order to achieve incremental improvements? Do you explore a wide breadth of problems, giving you new perspectives on thinking about the problem at hand? Do you churn out mindless crap just for the sake of it? It's a rather fuzzy and abstract philosophical notion and any attem…

I can accept those terms and must be as flawed as anybody else.

>Do you stay focused on one subject, iterating multiple times over the result, in order to achieve incremental improvements?

Yes.

>Do you explore a wide breadth of problems, giving you new perspectives on thinking about the problem at hand?

Yes.

>Do you churn out mindless crap just for the sake of it?

No.

I just like to churn out mindless crap when it's absolutely required.

This is what takes up most of many people's time.

You're going to have to churn out some mindless crap anyway, so when you do things for the sake of it try your very best to make it non-mindless for a change.

Sometimes the mindless, or the crap, or the stuff for the sake of it can be the glue that binds all efforts in a way that they are always moving forward together though.

Re: Be prolific

#132

Post by fuzzfactor » Sun, Oct 25, 2020, 4:32 AM UTC

the_other wrote: post #81

ChrisRackauckas wrote: post #11

When teaching mathematics I like to always mention that the greats like Ramanujan, while it seems like they just knew everything from pure thought, they all actually did a ton of work by hand. Ramanujan in particular is known for his fastidious notebooks calculating thousands of digits numbers like pi. From writing out the calculations for hours and days, he'd come up with simplification formulas and develop new insi…

I’m pretty sure this is right. However the kind of work you’re discussing doesn’t match my understanding of “busywork”. Busywork means unnecessary work done to give the appearance of actual work. Busywork doesn’t produce much value beyond appearances. The work you’re discussing is “the work”. It’s the underpinnings, the research, the practice, the artist’s sketchbook, the exploration, the learning. None of that is “b…

pg referred to this as a necessary schlep

http://paulgraham.com/schlep.html

Re: Be prolific

#133

Post by enriquto » Mon, Oct 26, 2020, 9:09 AM UTC

mncharity wrote: post #97

enriquto wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Newton was just incredible. The man polished his own lenses for his experiments. This, although there were already professional lens makers in England at the time, and they were better than him. Today, these antics would be dismissed as "bad practice", "reinventing the wheel", "losing two weeks rewriting a stupid lens" or some other corporate bullshit. But his great insights on the nature of light came from the very…

> it becomes transparent when the grain of the sand is half the wavelength of the light That seemed to have intriguing potential as an educational story. But it felt odd. Briefly googling suggests optical polishing compound grains are almost all 1+ um.[1] But maybe that Oh well. :) Thank you for this. I wish I could find an online community interested in crafting improved stories for teaching science and engineering.…

Sorry, I don't recall the specific details of glass polishing in this story; probably the datum I said does not make sense.

You can find this inspiring story, and many, many others, on Feynman lectures on physics. I'm sure the stories as written by Feynman will be exact and true.

Re: Be prolific

#134

Post by _Microft » Tue, Oct 27, 2020, 6:20 PM UTC

_Microft wrote: post #4

I'm reasonably sure that it was a pottery class (or study) in which students/study participants were asked to produce either the best piece they could think of or as many as possible. I think it was actually a study that I read about. It might need some internet sleuthing to find it. I'll try later. I do not think that it is surprising that practice improves skills though (well, except for people with an exceptionall…

UPDATE: the lecturer responded and as it turns out, they were also referring to the story from the book Art & Fear by Bayles and Orland.

Searching Google Scholar for older publications on the topic of quantity vs. quality did not turn up anything useful either. Looks like we are out of luck here.