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Be prolific

chrismytton.com

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Re: Be prolific

#91

Post by strikelaserclaw »

enriquto wrote: post #58
li4ick wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Newton's notebook was published here a while ago. http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-04000/40 There's a ton of work behind the genius. There's no "apple on the head" story, almost never.

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…

He was the ultimate "do it for somethings own sake" type of guy. He had a ton of curiosity, and just spent most of his life indulging it to the fullest. I mean, we in the modern world are so boxed in with our notions of right and wrong (most of which come from "authority"), newton wasn't like that, the man was equally comfortable studying about the bible, alchemy, as we was studying the natural world, building telescopes and as you said polishing his own lenses.

Re: Be prolific

#93

Post by jmcqk6 »

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…

The problem is distinguishing "busywork" from "the work". Often times, they look very similar, especially to outside viewers.

Re: Be prolific

#94

Post by vikramkr »

jmcqk6 wrote: post #93
the_other wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The problem is distinguishing "busywork" from "the work". Often times, they look very similar, especially to outside viewers.

When I think busywork, I think work given to me to occupy my time by someone (probably a teacher or a manager) that has no actual use other than timewasting. Theres this thread of being an externally administered task to my understanding of the word which helps me distinguish the two - im curious if similar connotations exist for others

Re: Be prolific

#95

Post by meheleventyone »

jlokier wrote: post #69
meheleventyone wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It should be obvious to most people that it's trivially true that practice helps you improve skills that require manual dexterity. I also think it's highly likely the anecdote is supposed to be illustrative rather than literal. IMO it's meant to be advice to students not to fret about how perfect their work is and that with time it will improve. It's just been distorted by the "one quick hack" culture of self improve…

> highly likely the anecdote is supposed to be illustrative rather than literal If it is a made up anecdote, that would be rather misleading under a headline that says "science-backed". The article argues that it's supported by data that focus on quantity leads to better quality than focus on quantity. It doesn't argue that it's merely a compelling idea that we should try for ourselves.

Random writing on the internet can be misleading.

Re: Be prolific

#96

Post by nlh »

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…

Agreed 1000%! I think ‘do the busy work’ can even be applied more broadly:

Years ago I ran a small business in my mid-20s, and one of the critical mistakes I made was getting hopelessly behind in our bookkeeping (and by hopelessly behind I mean it - things were going well and the bank account kept going up, so I kinda just piled the sales receipts on top of each other for close to a year).

When the company started to grow up, we had to get properly reconciled financial statements in order for our bank loans to be renewed. I hired what felt like an endless stream of contract bookkeepers and financial consultants who all had their own way of “doing it more simply” to try and avoid what at that point was probably 100 hours of busywork to reconcile all the credit card transactions.

They all failed. We just kept falling more and more behind and lost resolution on how the business was doing.

In the end, the ONLY thing that worked was when I found someone who understood this and just rolled his sleeves up and did the work. There simply was no way around it. No shortcuts. No way to intuit how your business was doing without knowing exactly how much each customer spent. And no way to do that without matching up each credit card transaction.

Do the work. Don’t try to find ways around doing it because it’s hard or rote or mind numbing. Do the work.

Re: Be prolific

#97

Post by mncharity »

enriquto wrote: post #58
li4ick wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Newton's notebook was published here a while ago. http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-04000/40 There's a ton of work behind the genius. There's no "apple on the head" story, almost never.

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. My in-person ones... covided. :/

[1] eg, for plastic lenses, https://secureservercdn.net/45.40.144.200/i1r.357.myftpuploa... from http://www.gkci.com/opthalmic/ready-to-use-plastic-lens-poli... . [2] page 7 of https://www.osapublishing.org/oe/fulltext.cfm?uri=oe-16-14-1...

Re: Be prolific

#98

Post by smasher164 »

shannifin wrote: post #16

"Quantity leads to quality." The analogy of being graded on quantity in an art class tends to make me imagine I'd just line up a ton of canvases and slop paint on them all at once to be the top of the class, or create pots in only their crudest acceptable form. That is, quantity does not lead to quality by itself. The student must be trying to learn something new with each new piece. Quantity iterates the feedback lo…

My music teacher often reminded my of this Lombardi quote which really resonated with me:

"Practice does not make perfect. Only perfect practice makes perfect."

Re: Be prolific

#99

Post by webmaven »

vikramkr wrote: post #94
jmcqk6 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is distinguishing "busywork" from "the work". Often times, they look very similar, especially to outside viewers.

When I think busywork, I think work given to me to occupy my time by someone (probably a teacher or a manager) that has no actual use other than timewasting. Theres this thread of being an externally administered task to my understanding of the word which helps me distinguish the two - im curious if similar connotations exist for others

> When I think busywork, I think work given to me to occupy my time by someone (probably a teacher or a manager) that has no actual use other than timewasting.

That is one source. The time wasting can have several (non-exclusive) motivations, however:

* Punishment

* Important but not urgent work

* Creating the appearance of insufficient resources to prevent allocation of labor elsewhere

That last motivation also applies to self-assigning busywork, of course.

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