Category Archives: Thoughts on Thoughts

“It Just Writes Itself!”: Thoughts About Flow

Idle Speculation, Thoughts on Thoughts, Writing

A couple of days ago, I was writing the entry for ‘Surprise Elemental’ [link], and while writing:

”
Stealth-related skills are very common among denizens of the demiplane of Surprise, and Surprise Elementals are no exception. As surprise is a key component of their makeup, there are actually many exceptions. There are few things more surprising than a Suprise [sic., it was right here that I made the exclamation]
”

the thought came to me that ‘it just writes itself’.

This is amazing. I am laughing with glee. I love writing, and I always used to hate it so much.

Thinking about it, I’m not really sure why. I know I used to find it very difficult to write. It would only happen under extreme deadline pressure, and I would hole myself up away from everyone so I could focus.

It would feel like pulling words from a stone[1], wringing my brain for each sentence. But I knew that I could do it under pressure. My writing got me interviews for my first university job, and some of the writing for my undergrad thesis was “the best he’d seen”. At the same time, it wasn’t good enough to get me into my grad school of choice[2].

So, I could write, after a fashion, but it was never a joy. The closest I came was the snappy repartee of a bunch of friends emailing back and forth, which was awesome, and def. improved my typing speed, but wasn’t really ‘Writing’.

Over the years, I tried tried blogging at various times, usually on Livejournal, but I never felt I had enough to say to warrant continuing beyond a few posts.

But something changed over the last few years. I had one blog, which I was adding to more often[3], I chose a role at work where I was doing more individual contribution, and most importantly, I discovered *flow*[4].

I had been dabbling around the edges of flow for years. One of my fondest memories from high school is spending the entire day at home focused on chemistry problems. We used to say in undergrad that we enjoyed exam season because that meant we could (in a socially acceptable way) push aside all other obligations and actually focus for a couple of weeks. During undergrad, I did a lot of my best writing and other work between midnight and 6am, when no one else was around or was even likely to be around. When I was running my startup, I came up with my best and most original algorithm while on vacation away from distractions. Last year, over the holidays, I started doing Project Euler problems.

It was some of my lifecoaching sessions that really linked the concept of flow with what I was trying to do, more importantly telling/reminding me that it was flow that I was seeking, and that this was a good thing.

The next holidays, I started writing every day, and it continues.

The breakthrough from a couple of days ago feels like the next step, the conversion of flow to joy. A “runner’s high”, if you will. S said that when she was writing every day, it felt like that to her as well. Something about remapping your brain to be good at something, then really focusing on that, so that it’s no longer words and notes[5], that you can play with it and it becomes fun.

It just writes itself!

[1]Or perhaps pulling sword from an eston.

[2]Parts of my application were good, parts were bad, but I remember being specifically dissatisfied with my writing at the time.

[3]About one post every 20 days, but that was much more than before.

[4]’Flow’ in the ‘being productive’ sense, where your tools feel like they’re an extension of your body, and the ideas/art/repairs/something just flow out.

[5]When I was singing with the chorus, one of our goals was to get ‘beyond words and notes’, so that you could focus on conveying emotion.

Go and Weaknesses of Decision Trees

Analysis, Games!, Machine Learning, Programming, Thoughts on Thoughts

Yesterday, we reported that an artificial Go player had defeated one of the top human players for the first time, in a best of five match.

Today, Lee Sedol responded with a ‘consolation win’, to make the score 3-1.

From this analysis of the game, it seems that (at least) two things were at play here (Hat tip PB).

The first is called ‘Manipulation’, which is a technique used to connect otherwise unrelated parts of the board. My understanding of it is that you make two (or more!) separate positions on the board, one which is bad unless you get an extra move, and the other which might allow you to get an extra move. Since the two locations are separate, the player has to have a very specific sense of non-locality in order to be able to play it correctly[1].

To me, this feels like an excellent example of why Go is so difficult to solve computationally, and why there is still much fertile ground here for research.

The second seems to be an instance of what is called the ‘Horizon Effect‘[2]. Simply put, if you only search a possible gameplay tree to a certain depth, any consequences below that depth will be invisible to you. So, if you have a move which seems to be good in the short term, but has terrible consequences down the road, a typical search tree might miss the negative consequences entirely. In this particular case, the supposition is that Sedol’s brilliant move 78 should have triggered a ‘crap, that was a brilliant move, I need to deal with that’, instead of an ‘now all the moves I was thinking of are bad moves, except for this subtree, which seems to be okay as far out as I can see’. The fact that at move 87 AlphaGo finally realized something was very wrong supports this hypothesis.

Is the Horizon effect something you can just throw more machine learning at? Isn’t this what humans do?

[1]Specifically, the idea that two things can be related only by the fact that you can use resources from one to help the other.

[2]One wonders what types of ‘Quiescence Search‘ AlphaGo was using that it missed this.

Beautiful AI and Go

Games!, Machine Learning, Programming, Teaching, Thoughts on Thoughts

Something monumental happened today. An artificial Go player defeated one of the top human players three times in a row, to win the best of five match

But I want to go back to game two, where Alpha Go played an inhuman and ‘beautiful’ move 37, a ‘very strange move’.

This is what it must be like to have one of your children, or one of your students surpass what you could ever do. You have given them all you can, and they take that and reform it into something beautiful.

They mentioned that Alpha Go plays the entire board at once, and so is more able to see unusual move possibilities like the one above. Fan Hui mentioned that he’s improved (from ranked 633 to in the 300s) as he plays against Alpha Go.

What else can deep learning teach us? What other amazing, inconceivable things will we learn from this new child which is just beginning to flower?

Unusual Pluralizations

Idle Speculation, Puns, Thoughts on Thoughts, Words!

‘Quartermasters General’. ‘Quarterpounders with cheese’. Some time ago, we talked about unusual long form names.

Today, we talk about unusual pluralizations.

You’re probably familiar with pluralizing ‘Quartermaster General’ to ‘Quartermasters General[1]’, and ‘Quarterpounder with cheese’ to ‘Quarterpounders with cheese’, but are you familiar with the pluralization of ‘Foot Locker’? How about ‘Head cheese[2]’?

‘Man-of-war’? ‘Attorney General’?

It’s enough to make mongeese pull their hairtholomew out.

[1]Not to be confused with the possessive, “Quartermaster’s General”, or the other possessive, “Quartermaster General’s”.

[2]Not to be confused with the ‘Head Cheese’, who stands alone.

Why do I Write?

Administrivia, Idle Speculation, Thoughts on Thoughts, Writing

Earlier today, after showing him my ‘Beenary‘ post from yesterday, M asked me: “How did you get the motivation to write every day?”

I ended up writing a lot on the topic (apparently I have feelings here), and I wanted to share it with you. (I’ve also said a few things on this topic in a previous post.)[1]

There are a few ways to interpret this question:

1) What started you writing every day?
– I was on vacation for the holidays, and had a few days to just sit on the couch and write, to get me started. Last year, I did some Project Euler problems, this year I decided to write. I ended up making some posts, and a bunch of extra drafts, which I mine when I’m looking for inspiration.

2) Why do you keep writing every day?
– I want to be able to look back and see things I’ve done, both for the feeling of satisfaction, and so I don’t forget things.
– It feels *really* good to finally be releasing (in the software sense) some of the thoughts and ideas that have been kicking around in my head for so many years.
– I know that I now feel like I have something to tell the world…I’m not sure where that changed. I know that when I was writing on LiveJournal, that was not the case, and that’s a lot of what stopped me.
– At the same time, I’m doing this for me more than for others. There was a time in February when my readership dropped by more than half for a week, but I found that it didn’t really change my motivation to write (turns out deleting a post manually (I had mistakenly hit ‘publish’ rather than ‘save draft’) on fb turns off autoposting).
– At some point I would like to write a novel (the category ‘Rollick’ is the closest I’ve come so far), and this is a convenient way to break it down into chunks and get ‘er done.

3) How do you keep writing every day?
– I’ve made it a non-negotiable. I’m allowed to get a day or two ahead, but I’m not allowed to fall behind. It helps that I usually finish them in the late evening for the following day, so I can trade a bit of sleep for writing the post that day.
– I currently have 127 drafts on the go, in addition to hundreds of emails to myself and a bazillion Apple Notes to myself. If that runs out, I have 19 years of journals and five figures of photos to mine for ideas.
– But don’t let that daunt you. After doing this for a bit, I find that I can take some random words and spin a story in about an hour that fills a few hundred words, sometimes more. I often start with puns, or two words which sound the same but are not really related. ‘Bracer, Embrasure’ started this way, I envisioned a hallway with display cases, a thief creeping down the hall, then I fit it into the existing ‘Rollick’ universe.

One thing I’m finding is that I would like to do more more in depth posts, but they are much more difficult to do on a work-during-the-week writing daily schedule. I usually have to give up an hour or more of sleep to get the focus and time required to get one of them done. Not sure how to solve this, other than doing more ‘quicker’ posts and giving myself more time for the more in-depth ones.

Really all of the above is a lot of words to say that I’m doing this because I enjoy doing it, and more fundamentally, I enjoy the act of creation.

[1]For those of you keeping score at home, this will be post 157, daily post #77, meaning I had 80 posts during the previous ~4.5 years. I also have 128 drafts, and 2 of my drafts went to the trash. 4800 emails, and 480 emails in my project folders. I’m releasing faster than I ever have, and the backlog is still piling up. Turns out prioritization is important in everything. (Compare with 5 Jan, where I had just finished my 10th daily post, I had 93 drafts, 0 Trash, 3600 in my inbox, and 400 in my project folder.)

Four Colours

Idle Speculation, Thoughts on Thoughts, Visualizations

Today, I wanted to share with you an ‘organizing things to do’ method that Y showed me a long time ago.

This method is from a podcast by a talented individual known as Chris Westra[1].

I also love ASCII 4-quadrant diagrams, so we’ll start with one[2]:

  Spend 80%       Spend 20%
  of your time    of your time
  on this         on this
  column          column

  DEEDS           TASKS
*---------------*-----------------*
| Red:          | Black:          |
| Things which  | Required, but   | 
| Move your     | Not Important   |  TODAY
| Project       | in and of       | 
| Forward       | themselves      |
| in a Big Way  |                 |
*---------------*-----------------*
| Green:        | Blue:           |
| Things to     | Maybe important |  TOMORROW
| Automate or   | in the Future,  |
| Delegate      | but Not Now     |
*---------------*-----------------*

The upper left corner (Red) is ‘Things which move your project forward in a ‘Big Way’. This is the writing that important post, writing that module[3], calling that important new client, building that thing. Basically, anything that is a deed, not a task. Done once, will move your project forward.

The upper right corner (Black) is ‘Things which are required, but not important in and of themselves’. Chris uses the example of ‘changing the printer ink’, to mean anything that needs to be done, but you really shouldn’t take more time than you need to. Anything which is a task, something that you do repeatedly is in this category. You should be constantly looking for ways to automate or delegate things in this category (we’ll cover that later). This category contains tasks which may feel somewhat satisfying to perform in the moment, but ultimately are meaningless in the grand scheme. The tasks here tend to be easier and require less decision making than red tasks, so it’s easy to get distracted here.

The lower right corner (Blue) is ‘Things which are maybe important in the future, but not now’. All of your undirected R&D is in this category, Chris mentions reading trade publications, lots of random browsing can be in this category.

The lower left corner (Green) is (for me) where this method really shines. In this category is ‘Things which you can automate or delegate’. Something where you spend an hour today which saves you a minute a day for the rest of your life[4]. Chris says (and I agree) that it’s important to do one or two of these every day. You will thank yourself later.

In my first phase after discovering this way of thinking, I rotated from Black/Blue to Blue/Green. Through considerable work, and some life coaching, I feel like I’m finally making the rotation from Blue/Green to Green/Red. This takes considerable self-discipline, and can feel emotionally difficult as you give up spending time on things which give short-term accomplishment feelings, but don’t really help you towards your goals.

Comments? Put them below!

Note: I added the column and row labels above. They’re not quite accurate. If you have better suggestions, comment!

[1]I can’t seem to find him online any more. If I do, or if someone points me to him, I’ll put it in the comments below. EDIT: I added http://christopherwestra.com above. He also has a site at http://icreatereality.com which is…a little…on the strange side of new age. But the mental model above is still very useful.

[2]Some people have said that it reminds them of ‘The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People‘

[3]This would be true for any of the 3+ meanings of ‘module’.

[4]A handy chart from XKCD on when this is worth it. This may understate how worth it is, if it also reduces your ‘open loops‘.

Agile: Limitations of Scrum

Agile, Programming, Thoughts on Thoughts

Based on some recent experiences and conversations, I wanted to explore a couple limitations of Scrum that have come up recently.

1) Limitations of the Standup

Long-time readers will know that I’m a strong advocate of the 5-minute daily standup.

Where 5-minute daily standups are weak is in any discussion of the larger picture. If you try to have a reasonable discussion about the larger picture during a 5-minute standup, this will take far more time, and most of your group will have tuned out by the time you’re done. Conversely, under normal operation, your 5-minute daily standup is great at firefighting issues with currently open tickets, and seeing what is not being worked on, but unless you’re paying active attention, it’s easy to miss someone being semi-blocked or not speaking up to say that they’re blocked. This can happen often due to pride or embarrassment, often with inexperienced or new team members.

Proper use of one-on-ones is probably the best way to deal with this. But if your team member is shy and embarrassed about issues they’re having (especially if they feel technically inadequate), you may need to do some serious digging and active listening to ferret this out. This will require, but also help gain trust of your team member.

Another method is to have regular demos, perhaps daily or weekly, as part of your cadence, which will very quickly show who is having issues (or who does not know how to demo).

2) Limitations of having many small tasks

Organiation and prioritization can be difficult and time-consuming. It can often be easier to delegate all of it to the Product Owner (after all, they have final say on prioritization). However, they may not be the expert on which items should be split into smaller items, or they may try to determine too much of the ‘how’, instead of focusing on the ‘what’ and especially the ‘why’.

What this can cause is a disconnection between the ‘why’ and all of the rest of the team. The work can start to feel like an endless stream of little unimportant tasks, rather than a cohesive whole.

My tactic to deal with this would be to have a planning and prioritization session with everyone attending, so the entire team can be and feel involved, and so the entire team understands the why of each of the items (and can influence which ones will be done and not done!)

I was talking to a manager from another company earlier this week, and they had (I thought) a good idea for dealing with this type of issue. I would typify it as being somewhat orthogonal to Scrum, perhaps somewhat orthogonal to Agile. The concept is to give each member of the team a project of their own, where they are completely in charge. This way, they have complete ownership, and ostensibly will be much more engaged. I like this idea, and it helps a lot with the next point:

3) Scrum works well when team members are well-fungible

A lot of Agile and Scrum especially assumes that team members are reasonably fungible, sometimes almost to ‘Mythical Man-Month’ levels. If you have team members who have vastly different specializations (like Valve’s ‘T-shaped individuals'[1]), your prioritization may be greatly limited by their inability to map to your team members’ strengths.

The tactic mentioned above, where you give each team member a small (or large!) project of their own can help a lot here, but depending on how much of a disconnect you have between the composition of your team and what your organization requires, you may need to hire some people.

[1]If you have not read Valve’s Employee Handbook, go and read it now. I’m talking above about their description of employees who are ‘T-shaped’, which means that they have a broad set of skills, but are exceptionally deep in one area.

BOF VII: More Vignettes:

Idle Speculation, Internet Culture, Nostalgia, Thoughts on Thoughts

(Some mild editing to protect the more innocent.)

Belleville, Day2.
Science question:
Irritating life partner #1 is going “Aaaugh”.
Irritating life partner #2 is going “Pffftbbbbr” at a 45 degree angle.
At what angle does the associated weather pattern emerge, and which irritating life partner grows more damp as a result?

“The person who rebuffs you… Are they already shiny?”
S, D, and L like this.
GW: wait… if they’re rebuffing you, isn’t it you that was/is shiny?

“Post-modern Rube Goldberg machine. Discuss.”
MC: Facebook? The most convoluted advertising mechanism every built. Founded upon our natural narcissism and need for attention.
Me: Kind of like gossip/tabloids 2.0?

Me: Sherriff = Shire + Reeve. Huh.
K and D like this.
SED: Shire = village, reeve = protector. You’ll never guess where “fireplace” comes from!
Me: A type of fish that lives in fir trees?
RG: Yes that’s right.
AK: Neat. Word etymologies are fun for the whole family. I use this site, which seems pretty nifty: http://www.etymonline.com/
Also, “spitfire” used to be more profane: http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=spitfire
– Etymonline, a map of the ‘wheel-ruts’ of English.

Me: Do you get your money back when you return an error code?
You, P, and S like this.
IM: Yes, but in bitcoin
DR: yes but…in counterfeit bills?
IM: Or error bills– collectors’ items

Outside

Thoughts on Thoughts

Why does outside feel like outside?

You walk outside, you take a breath of fresh air. It smells different. It feels different. Why?

Is it the fact that the air is moving? Is it the plants? Is it the fact that homeostasis becomes easier because air is moving?

Is it the feeling that you can see the sky?

For me, a day always feels better when I’ve been able to get outside. I’m sure some of it is the sun, as getting outside during the day is better than at night, but even getting outside at night feels better than being inside.

So, what could it possibly be? Let’s go over the options:

1) Light

As anyone who’s ever used a full-spectrum light box knows, they can be incredibly powerful and useful in changing one’s mood and awakeness state. There could also be something to do with Vitamin D, even a placebo effect during the winter. (It is suggested that the human need for sunlight-created Vitamin D might be sufficient to explain much of the variation of human skin colour.)

2) Something in the air

Something about the outside just feels fresher. I don’t think inside air really has concentrations of CO2 or O2 that much different from that outside (if it really built up that quickly, you would probably suffocate), but there might be other impurities either missing or in higher concentrations inside.

3) …or something in the way it moves…

If you’ve ever seen a cat react to a window being opened on the other side of the apartment, you know that they can detect air currents. I know that I love the breeze on my face (at least during the non-winter).

4) Sounds

The rustling of leaves, the chirping of birds. They make me feel more relaxed. Like I’ve come out of my cave and I’m alive again? Even the sound of the wind…

5) Not having something overhead

Again with leaving the cave. There’s something uniquely oppressive about having something overhead that close all the time. It makes you feel like you’re hiding all the time? So, why do trees not trigger any fear of something jumping out of them at you? Have humans been apex predators that long? Or is it something that is trained into you, like hearing Lancasters flying overhead?

Fishing for Elusive Thoughts

Thoughts on Thoughts

In my first post in this blog, four and a half years ago[1], I presented the analogy of elusive, fish-like thoughts.

One of the corollaries of this, at least for me, is the phenomenon of multiple simultaneous fleeting thoughts that almost can’t be measured without collapsing them. Up until a conversation with K yesterday, I thought this never happened to anyone else.

For me, the first time I remember noticing this was when I was trying to write ideas into my journal. An idea would come to me, and as I was writing it, another would come to me. If I didn’t start writing the second one immediately, it would submerge, and have to be brought out again[2]. I soon learned to start writing the second (and sometimes third) one before I finished the first. Many of my journals have arrows between lines of text for this reason.

My conversation with K suggested that a verbal vs. writing dichotomy may be responsible. The experience was that as soon as thoughts were mentally converted to something that could be written down, they would disappear, almost collapsing in on themselves.

After much discussion, we worked out that taking the thoughts and setting them to audible or semi-audible words would not cause this collapse, leading to the verbal vs. writing dichotomy mentioned above.

Has anyone else experienced things like described above? Let me know in the comments above!

[1]Wow, time flies when vous êtes banane.

[2]I’m still afraid of losing these brief glimpses of insight. Luckily, I remembered the one I had today.