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You Have to Feel It

mitchellh.com

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Re: You Have to Feel It

#151

Post by mrugge »

bonoboTP wrote: post #138
mrugge wrote: post #89

The only thing you have to do is pay taxes and die. It does help to feel good about the project and the work, but it is not a requirement for a fulfilling life. Looking back at most times I have felt horrible in the depth of adversity, resistance or burnout I realize those were the times of greatest potential for achievement, learning and growth. Those are the memorable chapters, the things that define my character.…

I think you are using different concepts of "feel good". "Feeling good" doesn't exclude adversity or resistance. But it should be resistance where you have reasonable grip on it, with some traction, and it's aiming towards something that you value. Neither trivial, nor so hard that you have no way of getting traction with it, being stuck on zero progress. Happiness is basically equivalent to feeling steady (even if s…

I have often felt bad (or "didn't feel it" to quote this article) and it still turned out OK because I showed up and stuck with it.

Re: You Have to Feel It

#153

Post by godelski »

bonoboTP wrote: post #134
godelski wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a related problem I see in academic review, but I think it applies far more broadly. The easy part of review is recognizing flaws. One should always acknowledge the flaws, but the authors tend to already be aware of them[0]. The difficult part is determining if the flaws undermine the research or if despite the limitations that the work pushes progress forward. (All but a few works are incremental) I think th…

Reviewing is also becoming an utter mess in hyped areas such as AI. It's unpaid, thankless work, where most of what you must evaluate is increasingly some gamed, partially AI-generated paper with strategically hidden aspects, rampant cherry picking, etc. Conference sizes are exploding. AAAI went from 15k submissions last year to 30k submissions, with 75k unique authors. There are close to 30k reviewers. It's becoming…

Tell me about it... I almost didn't graduate because of this stupidity... I can say that the review process wasn't great when I started but there was a quick decline after GPT 3 came out. Everything became so short sighted and I've (and many others) even been screaming about this wall we were going to hit for years. We absolutely could have avoided this slowdown if we just understood you can put your eggs in more than one basket and stopped saying "fuck theorists". In betting on "scale is all you need" they destroyed the upstream research pipeline that got us to where we are today... And then we can't figure out that there'll be an exponential increase in papers if we keep adding more people, publish 5 papers a year, and reject 80% of them. How do you expect this to be sustainable?

I think at a minimum academia needs to start tracking abuse. Because right now, when we find plagiarism we hide it, usually just disappearing during blind review. These people should get a one year ban on first offense and a 5 year ban for every subsequent occurrence. Make it a citation network, and everyone you've co-authored with in the last year gets flagged for extra review. And FFS, let's not give best fucking paper of the year at the number one ML conference to a fucking intern who hacked the company you interned at. Not only is that just encouraging more highly unethical behavior, but how the fuck can you even trust the results of that paper? I love this field, but how did we get infiltrated by a cult?

Re: You Have to Feel It

#154

Post by pants2 »

mock-possum wrote: post #142
henrebotha wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Various studies have shown that trying to explain the reasons for a decision can often cause people to make worse decisions. I remember there was one where lay people were able to taste and rate jams with a high degree of correlation to the ratings of expert tasters; but when asked to explain _why_ they rate one jam better than another, their ratings suddenly drastically disagreed with experts'.

Interesting that you’d count disagreeing with an expert as a ‘worse’ decision, particularly in such a subjective space as the taste of jam. If I taste something, and carefully critically consider my experience, I would count that as a better decision, and the opinion of experts don’t really factor into it, because they’re not me.

For fun a few years ago I went through the process of deciding what my favorite song was. I had a gut feeling but wanted to take a scientific approach, I listened to my top listened songs from the last decade over and over as part of a bracket system, where I was trying to explain logically why one was better than the other.

Anyway at the end of it I chose a song that I later realized was definitely not my favorite despite me being unable to explain logically why my favorite song is my favorite song. Basically having to explain things made my ratings worse.

Re: You Have to Feel It

#155

Post by mcdeltat »

financetechbro wrote: post #65
mcdeltat wrote: post #51

I've learnt that just about everything in life boils down to feelings, which is interesting. No matter how rational a person or people claim to be, usually it comes down to feelings... Life choices? Business decisions? Who gets promoted? It's all vibes and feelings. People will deliberate and argue over facts but ultimately there will be some "weighting" factor which is feelings and will make or break the outcome. Yo…

My theory of life is that Everything is Vibes. I work in the financial industry with individuals who think very highly of their fact driven decision making when it always boils down to vibes. Facts be dammed

I also worked in finance and couldn't agree more. The whole corporate thing is a farce. Spend a year "gathering data" or "planning" only for everything to boil down to one guy making an arbitrary decision which no one goes against because "that's just how it works". That industry exists no matter how you decision-make because it's slurping off an endless money fountain.

Re: You Have to Feel It

#156

Post by noisy_boy »

pendenthistory wrote: post #101
johnfn wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like you're trying to tell me that I don't actually enjoy my work? That seems observably untrue from my perspective? If you don't enjoy your work, that's fine, but trying to tell people who do that they actually don't doesn't make any sense to me.

Whenever someone claims to enjoy or love their job, I'm extremely suspicious. Usually it's some form of cope, because without it how could you stand having to work 8+ hours a day for 40 years? Easier to tell yourself you actually love it. I'm sure you enjoy aspects of your work. But I would guess if you won $100m you wouldn't keep going. If you truly enjoyed it, you would do it for free.

> Whenever someone claims to enjoy or love their job, I'm extremely suspicious. Usually it's some form of cope, because without it how could you stand having to work 8+ hours a day for 40 years?

But you are not doing the exact same thing for 40 years. Since I started my career, there have been so many new projects, new ideas, new things to create and so many new ways to do it. But underneath it all is the common denominator of enjoyment and love of programming.

I'm not sure why that is so unfathomable. Sure, I have plenty of not-so-great days when nothing works or the project I'm working on is uninspiring. But that is just the nature of life. I would wager that your beloved partner isn't an enjoyable company 100% of the time. But you enjoy being with them most of the time because they make you feel great - that's sort of an important requirement. Programming makes me feel great most of the time I'm doing it.

> I'm sure you enjoy aspects of your work. But I would guess if you won $100m you wouldn't keep going. If you truly enjoyed it, you would do it for free.

I'll be able to set the balance of when I want to program and when I want to go watch a movie - we are not one dimensional creatures after all. Of course all of us need to eat but I don't see what getting paid for it has to do with my love for it. Plenty of people love stuff that doesn't pay at all.

Re: You Have to Feel It

#157

Post by TuringTest »

pixelready wrote: post #145
WhiteNoiz3 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another way to look at it is parallel processing vs sequential processing.. our brains can make a judgement call about a thousand subtle variables and data points that we can't exactly put our fingers on unless we really dig into it, which we usually label as 'feelings', using the parallel part of our brain. The sequential (logical) part can only consider a limited number of variables at a time. I don't think either…

I always like to say we aren’t rational, we _rationalize_. Much of our decision making process is subconscious / vibes / “system 2”, but we also have a strong need for a sensible narrative structure to our lives. So what hack did nature come up with? Let us make the gut decision based on a bunch of soft heuristics, then rationalize it and wrap it into a sensible narrative before it reaches our conscious mind. Lets us…

Rationalism is overrated anyway.

All rational thought depends on its axioms/premises, and there's no rational way to define a new axiom - by definition they are asserted from scratch, so you need to depend on gut feeling to choose a good axiom over a bad one.

Rationalism "only" works to discard or modify some subset of your axioms when you discover that they lead to incompatible conclusions; which is a good outcome if you want to achieve a consistent theory, of course; but it doesn't help in selecting one consistent theory over a competing one. Again, those preferences are led by emotions.

Re: You Have to Feel It

#158

Post by marssaxman »

underlipton wrote: post #127
Aurornis wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can have a perfectly argued decision that fails some vibe check and is hence discarded One of the worst hires I ever worked with was excellent on paper, came with good credentials, had an impressive resume, and did objectively well on the interview questions. However, everyone who interviewed him felt uneasy about him. He failed the vibe check, even though he checked all of the boxes and knew all the right thin…

This is why recruitment as it exists now is a farce. If everything is ultimately vibes-based, there's no point in portraying the process as objective. I'd say that it's even a sort of fraud to do so. Set base credentials, lottery of everyone who passes the post, full hire or fire after a short (1 month, at most) probationary period where vibes are considered. There's no reason to go through rounds and rounds of inter…

How desperate would a person have to be to accept a one-month probationary job?

Are those people the ones you really want to hire?

Maybe your bar is low and your confidence is high, but I'd certainly never come work for you under those terms.

Re: You Have to Feel It

#159

Post by pendenthistory »

noisy_boy wrote: post #156
pendenthistory wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever someone claims to enjoy or love their job, I'm extremely suspicious. Usually it's some form of cope, because without it how could you stand having to work 8+ hours a day for 40 years? Easier to tell yourself you actually love it. I'm sure you enjoy aspects of your work. But I would guess if you won $100m you wouldn't keep going. If you truly enjoyed it, you would do it for free.

> Whenever someone claims to enjoy or love their job, I'm extremely suspicious. Usually it's some form of cope, because without it how could you stand having to work 8+ hours a day for 40 years? But you are not doing the exact same thing for 40 years. Since I started my career, there have been so many new projects, new ideas, new things to create and so many new ways to do it. But underneath it all is the common deno…

Programming makes me feel good too, but there are very few programming jobs I would do for no pay, if any. I would work on my own projects though. But that's what I'm saying, I'm sure you can enjoy or even love some aspects of a job, but the totality of it? That's probably very rare, and most who say they love their job are doing it as a form of cope or because it's provides some sort of social status to love your job.

Re: You Have to Feel It

#160

Post by WesolyKubeczek »

bonoboTP wrote: post #141
WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #28

I went through a longer quest, called "getting naturalized in another country". Went through the grind of getting visa, then the work permit, then the different visa, then the short-term residence permit. Changed jobs, had to go to the immigration department again, because these residence permits are tied to the employer. Kept a spreadsheet with dates of each exit and entry. Had to keep all my paperwork ducks in a ro…

It would help to know what your reason was to go through with that. Relief and joy can be more expected if it changes your life circumstances in a way that you were looking forward to. Something related to family etc. Easier travel to some places that you couldn't go before etc.

It did all of that and more.

However, I would say that when a battle lasts long enough, one might have no emotional resources left to feel the victory.

That also applies to TFA.

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