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Not to take away from your point, but from what I have read, the Grand Canyon was most likely not formed by little drops of water, but instead by occasional tor
by telchar 5y ago
Not to take away from your point, but from what I have read, the Grand Canyon was most likely not formed by little drops of water, but instead by occasional torrents of water. There is ~70 feet of boulders and detritus at the bottom of the Colorado River. Only a flood powerful enough to get all that material moving at once will erode the bottom of the river bed and carve the canyon deeper. The slopes and walls probably erode more continually though.
And in geological time, an every-10,000-year event may as well be like every day to us.
- dheera 5y agoAnd so maybe true effectiveness would be achieved by having a torrent of work once a week instead of a few minutes a day.
- dj_mc_merlin 5y agoBoth. I am naturally a very "torrent of work" kind of person, but I've learned that one approach isn't enough. Some problems require a bit every day, some torrents.
- hutzlibu 5y agoAlso the torrent maybe only comes, if prepared through little drops here and there.
- dreamer7 5y agoI think it depends on the activity. It's impossible to build any medium to high complexity software by working on it for 5 mins a day. But you can make a lot of progress by practising every day for very little time. For example, I've improved on my tucked planche progression by just leaning forward while holding a plank for 5 seconds every day.
- dheera 5y agoYeah I agree. For software I find the major infrastructure laying and overhauling should be done in "torrent" blocks of several hours to a full day, while incremental bugfixes and feature add-ons can be done by daily short amounts of time.
- munificent 5y ago> It's impossible to build any medium to high complexity software by working on it for 5 mins a day. Both of the books I wrote, one of which includes two complete implementations of a programming language, were mostly written in sessions of less than an hour. Occassionally I get longer ones and very often they are much shorter. Learning to task switch and suspend efficiently is also a really valuable skill that improves with practice. I have kids, so if I couldn't make progress while being interrupted, I'd never be able to do anything.
- TeMPOraL 5y agoDo you count only writing time, or also the time you spent constructing the book and associated programs in your head?
- munificent 5y agoAll of it.
- TeMPOraL 5y agoThat's very impressive. I envy you. And I wonder how you do it. How are you able to suspend and resume work on a complex project like this? How are you able to stop thinking about it when scheduled time is up, and then pick it up the next day, without paying a huge time cost of loading yesterday's state back into your head? Could you elaborate on this? I'm asking seriously - I myself wish I could do that. The way I work today, in irregular but long bursts of high focus, is somewhat effective, but doesn't lend itself to having a balance in life (work-life balance, but also "personal interests - life balance").
- thorum 5y agoMy experience has been that a small amount of work each day builds mental momentum which can snowball into something bigger when my schedule opens up and I have some free time & an idea that excites me.
- GeorgeTirebiter 5y agoYes, working on a problem daily means your subconscious is daily prodded to "think about the problem". As you do other things, your brain is 'working on it' so when you do get those few minutes or maybe an hour to work on it, you almost always know what to do - you've been thinking about it all day! There is an apocryphal story of what Newton said when he was asked, "How did you come up with the theory of gravity?" replying: "By thinking about it all the time."
- macksd 5y agoI think at this point we're reading too much into specific units to compare very distinct things. The point of the analogy either way is the compounding effect of seemingly small things repeated.
- binarysolo 5y agoRight, even a day or suncycle is kinda arbitrary and human-scale. Point is just that consistent repeatable practice rewards compoundingly over time.
- fladrif 5y agoto follow the example closer, you need to put in work every day, however small (continuous river flow), and that will carve the channels in your life (eh?) to enable the torrent of work that might come when conditions allow.
- Aeolun 5y agoI think the problem with humans is that, other than with falling rain, the throughput is limited. So you cannot really do a torrent of work on grand canyon scale.
- dividedbyzero 5y agoNot sure about the Grand Canyon, but at least around the Alps, lots of wide, deep river valleys were carved into close to their current form at the end of the last ice age, when rivers carried hundreds of times their usual water for quite a while as the ice shield was melting away.
- arnold_palmur 5y agoThis is the quintessential example of a pedantic Hacker News comment.
- mywittyname 5y agoWhat you're saying is the OP is missing the torrent through the raindrops?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- __blockcipher__ 5y agoAnd to expand on what I would like to hope your point is, comments like the GP are exactly why I and many others come here :)
- pkghost 5y agoAnd this is the great thing about threaded comments — everyone who wants to follow the pedantic branch of conversation can do so without derailing the others (though this ideal is frequently thwarted by bad UX). Of course, it's nice when the pedants are self-aware, as is the case here, and acknowledge the pedantry of their tangent. Normalize polite pedantry!
- grp000 5y agoI don't think it's pedantic though. If what makes your argument powerful is tying it back to a natural phenomenon, then it should be right, otherwise you're using a bad example.
- TeMPOraL 5y agoAlso, to the degree it's wrong, you can try to take that error back and see where the argument flows. Like, compounding is magic, except realistically, one or more of the following typically happens: - Interest rate is so small that it doesn't add up to a meaningful difference over your lifetime. See e.g. most people and regular savings accounts. - You aren't able to keep systematically saving / learning / etching a canyon for long enough for the compounding to matter. - There's a natural decay process that is stronger than compounding. Whether it's digging a canyon, learning new skills, or amassing wealth, it seems that concentrated but unfrequent actions are much more effective than a steady but weak trickle.
- thehappypm 5y agoThat's not true. You might be thinking of the Missoula floods that carved out the channeled scablands of Eastern Washington. But the Grand Canyon's river is generally the same size it always has been, and slow erosion forces created it.
- shoto_io 5y agoDo you have a source? Would love to understand this better
- devoutsalsa 5y agoWhy not both?! It's not ridiculous to allow for constant, steady erosion and the occasional 10,000 year flood shenanigans! Example from in our great-grandparents lifetimes. There's a cool place called the Bridge to Nowhere in Southern California => https://goo.gl/maps/XMerBpT3J2caLJ696 https://goo.gl/maps/XMerBpT3J2caLJ696 / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridge_to_Nowhere_(San_Gabriel_Mountains) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridge_to_Nowhere_(San_Gabriel.... The bridge was built as part of a massive project to build roads through the San Gabriel Mountains in the mid 1930s. Only a couple years after the bridge was completed, there was a massive rainstorm washed away most of the newly built roads. The bridge stand about 120 feet, roughly 36 meters, above the river below. I was talking to a park ranger who said there were reports that the flooding nearly reached the bridge. While this bridge stands over a river that's been slowly eroding the valley below for (millions of?) years, every now and then Mother Nature says "I'm bored, let's hit the biblical flood button and see what happens!" What kind of boulders could a violent rush of 20m-30m+ flooding move? Big ones I'm sure! Who the heck knows what kind of freakish rain storms or natural damn bursts have happened in the time that the Grand Canyon has been forming! For anyone in the SoCal area, the Bridge to Nowhere is a fun day hike. It's about 5 miles (8km) one way from the trailhead. It's a very cool hike. If you're going in summer time, bring plenty of water, sunscreen, and some head protection. It gets toasty in that canyon.
- thehappypm 5y agoSure, there are certainly big floods now and again. But the point stands that the grand canyon's formation was primarily from slow erosion, not from big floods doing the bulk of the work.
- omgJustTest 5y agoLike every problem, it depends on the resolution of the scale you examine it! How much did you zoom? Looks like drops to me!
- hammock 5y agoThe deeper the canyon gets, the larger its watershed and the more likely flash floods, etc. The answer is both, and it has changed over time. Trickle and torrents.
- holycrapguys 5y agoThis comment is a perfect representation of Hacker News discussions.
- unsui 5y agoOP's comment is a vast simplification of what's happening underneath, but nonetheless still tremendously valid as a useful heuristic. Valuable work, like many things in the real world, is not normally distributed, but skewed or following alternate distributions, such as power-law. This is likely what occurs within "torrents" of work: work that is has significantly more leverage than other work. Nonetheless, the implicit bedrock of the just-showing-up heuristic is that the valuable work cannot get done without the consistency of simply showing up; indeed, expert performance is often a function of deliberate practice plus persistence (time); one without the other rarely nets positive results.
- treis 5y agoCouldn't the boulders have come from the side walls collapsing?
- brudgers 5y agoAs a proportion of Earth’s water it is ‘tiny drops.’ As a metaphor it is reasonable as ‘tiny drops’ is not a scientific unit. And a boulder is any non-monolith greater than 256mm…seventy feet is not particularly large in a scientific sense just in an ordinary tourist talk one.
- slingnow 5y agoColloquially, no one would interpret "tiny drops" as "relative to the size of the Earth". Unless of course they were trying to defend an incorrect comment on HN.
- semi-extrinsic 5y agoWell, I think you will find most fluid dynamics researchers will agree that a "drop" is a body of fluid where surface tension is non-negligible. We might argue over whether that limit is 25 mm or 5 mm or whatever for a given fluid, but we all agree it's a lot less than 1 meter for water.
- brudgers 5y agoHow do fluid dynamics researchers measure metaphors…or Hoffstedlierian fluid analogies?
- semi-extrinsic 5y agoWell, in this case the concept is that a drop-like thing has relatively large surface area compared to volume. Translating e.g. to people, it could mean many/all of the people in a group have ties to outside the group. Maybe "drop" is a neighbourhood and "sea" is a country.
- Firezen 5y agoWouldn't the torrents be composed of drops of water, just descending in large quantities. And would not the little drops of water evaporate at some point forming clouds that may come down in torrents at some point?
- slingnow 5y agoYou're right. I think we should start referring to all phenomenon that include water as "tiny drops of water" just to be safe! E.g.: Did you hear about the tiny drops of water that washed away that small coastal town?