5 ms·

Fields medalist: Continually aim just beyond your current range

29 points by hhm 19y ago

DaniFong 19y ago
I was really pleased when Terry started blogging ...rarely does reading a blog push me past my current range. smile There's a promising trend of putting, on blogs or wikis (Terry has done an incredible job on the dispersive wiki, and Scott Aaronson built the complexity zoo), thoughts not quite ready for 'primetime' (nor any specific journal). It's quite an exciting development. It certainly changes the social dynamic: I can imagine that in the near future, the most important research institutions will not be individual research departments but online communities crystallizing around prominent scientists who happen to be terrific bloggers.
mynameishere 19y ago
For many years, weight lifters thought that by increasing the number of repetitions, they could increase their strength. Eventually, they found out this wasn't true. What's needed is a very few reps and a great amount of weight. The same is likely true with intellectual pursuits. Better to struggle with Bach's inventions 30 minutes a day than to play "Smoke on the water" for 10 years.
- hhm 19y ago
  Very interesting! Do you have some source / link for this?
  - vlad 19y ago
    You would probably want to go for size, not just strength, so about 10 reps per set instead of 4 or 5, about 3 sets plus a warmup set, and about 3-5 exercises per body area, and repeat about once a week. So, about four times per week. You really want to take about 45 to 55 minutes, unless you do cardio for 20 minutes beforehand to build up cardiovascular strength as well, in which case you would spend about 1:30 at a gym, four times per week. That's all it takes. Tomorrow, I'll try to find some links. But the main thing is to eat a lot of protein, drink plenty of water (to flush your kidneys), eat many meals throughout the day, and get lots of sleep. That's what's harder to do than going to the gym.
- nanijoe 19y ago
  The original author is actually wrong..especially using his chess analogy. Incremental improvements will get you nowhere. The best way to raise your chess game is to play against people who are faaar better than you. Do this for one week, and you will find yourself crushing your [former] peers. Using the same analogy, Mark Zuckerberg should have beeen aiming to build facebook into a 10 million dollar company (or something)
  - deleted 19y ago
    [deleted]
  - michael_nielsen 19y ago
    The original author is arguably the world's best mathematician. He certainly hasn't gone nowhere. It may be worth considering that he knows what he's talking about.
    - nanijoe 19y ago
      It may be worth considering that I am talking about chess.
      - michael_nielsen 19y ago
        You made an analogy to Facebook, so you weren't just talking about chess.
  - whacked_new 19y ago
    That point about chess is highly debatable. Brain scans on domain-specific experts (math and chess are domain-specific skills) have shown activation in areas that store episodic memory. What this means, is that a large part of the "expertness" comes from efficient retrieval from long term memory (a fast pipeline between RAM and HDD, if you will). Writing to HDD, in the brain at least, is usually an incremental process. I am not a chess player, but in go, this makes perfect sense. You start with the most basic strategies and build on them as you advance. If the skill gap is too wide you'd probably drown in confusion trying to take apart what is going on. Granted, it's not black and white. If you're smart you'd be able to take bigger jumps and piece together several steps with each jump, in which case, for you, playing somebody faaar better is simply a reasonable next step for you, but relative to your skill level it's still a "slow" process.
- menloparkbum 19y ago
  Bach's inventions aren't really that hard.
  - deleted 19y ago
    [deleted]
  - mynameishere 19y ago
    ...they're used in education, unlike e.g. Rachmaninoff's 3rd.
hhm 19y ago
Oh, please, can anybody correct the title? It's "Fields medalist", not "Field's medalist".
brl 19y ago
I think the way to translate this principle for hackers is: "Continually aim to be the stupidest person in the room". If you want to improve quickly you must work on projects with people who have a lot more skill and experience than you do.
- aswanson 19y ago
  As long as you have sufficient ego to not take the experience of being repeatedly outperformed to mean that you suck.
  - brl 19y ago
    Most programmers are not nearly as good as they think they are. Learning how much you suck at programming is the very first step to getting any good at it.

29 points by hhm 19y ago

I was really pleased when Terry started blogging ...rarely does reading a blog push me past my current range. smile There's a promising trend of putting, on blogs or wikis (Terry has done an incredible job on the dispersive wiki, and Scott Aaronson built the complexity zoo), thoughts not quite ready for 'primetime' (nor any specific journal). It's quite an exciting development. It certainly changes the social dynamic: I can imagine that in the near future, the most important research institutions will not be individual research departments but online communities crystallizing around prominent scientists who happen to be terrific bloggers.

mynameishere 19y ago

For many years, weight lifters thought that by increasing the number of repetitions, they could increase their strength. Eventually, they found out this wasn't true. What's needed is a very few reps and a great amount of weight. The same is likely true with intellectual pursuits. Better to struggle with Bach's inventions 30 minutes a day than to play "Smoke on the water" for 10 years.

hhm 19y ago
Very interesting! Do you have some source / link for this?
- vlad 19y ago
  You would probably want to go for size, not just strength, so about 10 reps per set instead of 4 or 5, about 3 sets plus a warmup set, and about 3-5 exercises per body area, and repeat about once a week. So, about four times per week. You really want to take about 45 to 55 minutes, unless you do cardio for 20 minutes beforehand to build up cardiovascular strength as well, in which case you would spend about 1:30 at a gym, four times per week. That's all it takes. Tomorrow, I'll try to find some links. But the main thing is to eat a lot of protein, drink plenty of water (to flush your kidneys), eat many meals throughout the day, and get lots of sleep. That's what's harder to do than going to the gym.
nanijoe 19y ago
The original author is actually wrong..especially using his chess analogy. Incremental improvements will get you nowhere. The best way to raise your chess game is to play against people who are faaar better than you. Do this for one week, and you will find yourself crushing your [former] peers. Using the same analogy, Mark Zuckerberg should have beeen aiming to build facebook into a 10 million dollar company (or something)
- deleted 19y ago
  [deleted]
- michael_nielsen 19y ago
  The original author is arguably the world's best mathematician. He certainly hasn't gone nowhere. It may be worth considering that he knows what he's talking about.
  - nanijoe 19y ago
    It may be worth considering that I am talking about chess.
    - michael_nielsen 19y ago
      You made an analogy to Facebook, so you weren't just talking about chess.
- whacked_new 19y ago
  That point about chess is highly debatable. Brain scans on domain-specific experts (math and chess are domain-specific skills) have shown activation in areas that store episodic memory. What this means, is that a large part of the "expertness" comes from efficient retrieval from long term memory (a fast pipeline between RAM and HDD, if you will). Writing to HDD, in the brain at least, is usually an incremental process. I am not a chess player, but in go, this makes perfect sense. You start with the most basic strategies and build on them as you advance. If the skill gap is too wide you'd probably drown in confusion trying to take apart what is going on. Granted, it's not black and white. If you're smart you'd be able to take bigger jumps and piece together several steps with each jump, in which case, for you, playing somebody faaar better is simply a reasonable next step for you, but relative to your skill level it's still a "slow" process.
menloparkbum 19y ago
Bach's inventions aren't really that hard.
- deleted 19y ago
  [deleted]
- mynameishere 19y ago
  ...they're used in education, unlike e.g. Rachmaninoff's 3rd.

hhm 19y ago

Oh, please, can anybody correct the title? It's "Fields medalist", not "Field's medalist".

brl 19y ago

I think the way to translate this principle for hackers is: "Continually aim to be the stupidest person in the room". If you want to improve quickly you must work on projects with people who have a lot more skill and experience than you do.

aswanson 19y ago
As long as you have sufficient ego to not take the experience of being repeatedly outperformed to mean that you suck.
- brl 19y ago
  Most programmers are not nearly as good as they think they are. Learning how much you suck at programming is the very first step to getting any good at it.