I took a class with Professor Ousterhout. He would end every Friday's lecture with a "Thought for the Weekend", such as this one.
It was very entertaining and charming to hear him discuss his personal and professional life, and lessons he's learned throughout them often occasionally have very little to do with computer science.
I don't remember all of his "Thoughts for the Weekend", but I do remember one story he told about wishing he had apologized sooner to resolve some conflict he was in. That was a bit of wisdom that stuck with me from the class, beyond any of the computer science topics we covered.
I've thought very deeply on the subject of my personal relationships and what causes them to "wear out" as Ousterhout put it. My conclusion differs, and it's because Ousterhout puts the cart before the horse:
> So, the solution is if you want a relationship to last a long time, somehow you have to keep the scar tissue from building up.
The key here is "if you want the relationship to last." In many relationships, people lose the desire for the relationship to last. For instance, in his contractor anecdote, he cares more about the outcome of the construction project that he cares about prolonging his relationship with the contractor. Or in the case of a business relationship, business partners want the business to be run in their own way more than the want their relationship to stay strong. Everything comes down to a desire to keep the relationship going.
I like that this essay frames up this issue, but it's ultimately kind of disappointing in its conclusions. Relationships wear out because they develop scar tissue, and they develop scar tissue... because they do. And there is no clear way to prevent that from happening except to try hard. He doesn't even go into any of his strategies, meaning you're just as on your own as you were before you started reading the essay! It feels to me that a lot more could be said or conjectured on the topic.
I used to live by this philosophy when this article came out. But now I think it's a fairly imperfect model of the world that can lead you astray easily.
The problem with it is that it's very easy to interpret that y-axis, "something good", as static. It's pretty hard to make sense of the model at all if you don't interpret as static, because your slope will bend all over the place, out of the plane, into multiple dimensions, etc. But once you've set your goal point, your "something good" axis, the natural temptation is to optimize your slope until you're steadily progressing against it. And that's dangerous, because you might forget that the "something good" axis was arbitrary to begin with.
Instead, I've become much more of a fan of John Boyd's "OODA loop" [1] model. Here, you're continually reacting to your environment, which is also continually changing around you. And the person or organization that can react faster usually has an advantage, because they can set the terms of the engagement. We can call that adaptation "learning", but the key point is that it's learning an environment that is dynamic, not static. Sometimes the environment will change in a way that invalidates all of your accumulated learning, and that's okay (and you don't really get a choice about it anyway).
This also drives home the point that choosing the environment you're adapting against is a pretty critical skill, and often dominates how well you adapt to it (i.e. your learning rate). I've seen some relatively mediocre people become billionaires because they picked the right industry and the right opportunity within it to join. Similarly, there are people who are brilliant problem solvers but end up in jail because the environment they are in rewards problem-solving that will get you sent there (think Omar from The Wire, or SBF from FTX).
OODA looks interesting, thank you for link. I personally follow a similar model, which I am sure someone would have articulated better than I do already. Anticipate - Perceive - Act - Understand. The first two are in relation to your presence in an environment. The latter two are about your ability to be an agent in this environment. Your understanding of the world informs the things you prepare yourself to observe (e.g. the direction of your eyes when you drive, very similar to the orient in OODA I think). You perceive within the bounds of your anticipation and act according to the perception as it relates to observation (I.e. not thinking too much about it). The thinking is in the understand part where you structure the relationship of the prior and your actions and secondary post action observations. Not all the loops are completely linear, e.g. you may open a loop with an action and then close it years later in a wiser setting or when the feedback comes.
I like your model, but I love that you put Anticipate at the front. It's a loop so doesn't really matter, but I'm entertained by the idea of "Step 1: Take a wild ass guess at what's about to happen"
The y-axis isn’t forever. Once you plateau, it’s time to change the definition. Then a new S-curve can begin.
Over time you observe periods of quantifiable growth interspersed with discrete jumps.
That said, I believe the core of y-intercept advice hides two key wisdoms: a) don’t be discouraged when you’re new, and b) don’t rest on your laurels when you’re experienced
And perhaps c) if someone is both way better than you and improving faster, you’ll never catch up. This is why I never pursued competitive boxing, for example. Don’t have the talent.
> But once you've set your goal point, your "something good" axis, the natural temptation is to optimize your slope until you're steadily progressing against it. And that's dangerous, because you might forget that the "something good" axis was arbitrary to begin with.
If you're optimizing your slope, that at least implies your slope is something you can optimize. How do you optimize your y-axis?
That's the point - you don't. Once you're faced with something that you can't optimize because there's not even a clear definition of what "good" is, a lot of those rational tools of hill-climbing, success, continuous improvement, etc. fall out the window.
And that's why it's a fun and rewarding rabbit hole to go down. Because when you're faced with an arbitrary, intractable problem, that's when you need to start developing the fuzzy, emotional side of yourself. That's when you need to start making hard choices about what you want your life to look like and what you're going to care about, and you're finally faced with a situation where there's no right answer, and you only have your feelings to go by.
Then you can return to the hill-climbing and optimization as a tool to achieve those arbitrarily-chosen goals, but now you look at them only as tools.
I think the additional point I'm making is that a 2D-graph necessarily biases your brain into ignoring the environment change, and that makes this a poor model to think about the world. Indeed, the other comment reply posted as of now still references the graph metaphor, but with S-curves instead of straight lines (which isn't really the point I was making - I'm trying to argue that your lines need to be in infinite-dimension space, regardless of their equation). You certainly can have environment change as an additional mental model you draw on when necessary - but if the quality of a model is in its ability to draw useful conclusions about the world from it, then conclusions which need to be corrected by some other model should be viewed with some suspicion.
> I've become much more of a fan of John Boyd's "OODA loop" [1] model.
As a side note, have you ever heard a coherent and/or useful explanation of the "orient" part? It seems like every time I hear about the OODA loop, that's the part that gets yadda-yadda-yadda'd over.
Ender's Game had a fun take on this. Literally naming the different directions was all that he did on first seeing the battlefield, but that is literally orienting yourself.
So, for example, if you can enumerate the possible transitions, do so.
There are two books I have on my reading list which are supposed to address this in one way or another, both by the same author. Violence of Mind and Beyond OODA, by Varg Freeborn (https://vargfreeborn.com/podcasts/). I've started reading Violence of Mind, and it's been enough to motivate some life changes and deep thinking. Have not finished yet though, the author gave an ultimatum of sorts early in the book and I haven't quite come to grips with my answer yet.
Beyond OODA is probably closer to directly answering your question, though Violence of Mind appears to deal with concrete application of "orientation" to self-defense and violent confrontations as a "good guy". I think I recall hearing in a podcast Varg did that he actually talked with one of Boyd's colleagues when putting together Beyond OODA to learn more and make sure the content was spot on, which was a big motivation for my purchase of the book as I find OODA fascinating and the concept has been very influential in my life.
I think it only makes sense in a specific environment/context. And then you can also have a meaningful interpretation of "orient".
It seems many people want to take these sort of decision making frame works to new contexts or generalize them to a point they no longer make sense to market them.
Synthesizing the new information (from observing) with prior information to understand the fuller picture before deciding. If you skip it, then you're, at best, just being reactive and reacting to only the present incomplete information.
I lived in Japan when I was in high school for a year. I went without knowing a word of Japanese.
After I was there for a week, I tried out konnichiwa on a few ten year olds in the neighborhood. They howled with laughter and I felt so ashamed.
I was a Rotary student there. Most of the other Rotary students came with a few years of Japanese study under their belt.
I was better than all of them within three months.
The first takeaway was that it was harder for them to unlearn bad habits they learned when studying Japanese back in the US. A kid in class would mispronounce something, and because that kid often did that from the same perspective as the rest of the class, it was sticky. You learned bad habits easier than good ones. And, it was really, really hard to unlearn those bad habits.
I never had that problem because I only heard Japanese from natives.
A corollary to all this: if you want to learn a language, living there is 100x better than any other method. Not the most practical, but it's the best way.
My advice: listen to people who have learned English-as-second-language, and watch for the patterns in their mistakes AND patterns to the successful learners. We are very finely tuned to hearing mistakes in our own language, so we can at least recognise errors. Watch why they don’t learn to correct glaring mistakes. Watch how highly skilled learners pick up the language.
While we are learning another language, it is very hard to recognise our errors, or diagnose or systematic errors. There are systematic patterns to our mistakes, and a lot of mistakes are inherent in the way languages are usually taught (reading before learning conversation being a #1 issue).
Also watch how babies and children learn, and try to replicate that as much as possible.
I learned conversational Spanish reasonably well, which was in part motivated by having a patient girlfriend whose mother-tongue was Spanish.
I met a Japanese guy with fantastic English, who had learned English by living in East London and Australia, and it was amazing to hear his accent change mid-sentence from perfect Cockney to perfect Ocker, especially for phrases and colloquialisms. A demonstration of the power of mimicking via ear, not via writing.
A similar lesson served me well when learning German while living there. My German pronunciation (and some grammar) improved in lock step with my ability to mimic a thick German accent in English.
Being able to systematically reproduce typical German “errors” in English taught me how to speak correctly when I switched to pronouncing German words.
Isn’t the integral of the blue curve higher though? Like if I want to maximize total utility over the displayed time the blue would be higher.
Also time has value, getting something earlier is generally better due to compound interest. Even some vague utility function like fun can display such a property of being better earlier, due to being able to remember the memory for longer.
It's wrong to integrate when the target value is the value of Y. The integral of everything youve learned and accomplished _is_ your y value. A double integral doesn't make obvious sense to me.
For example, if you take `y` to be quality of life, you obviously want the highest quality of life you can get but what really matters is the integral `Y` quality of life over the course of your lifespan.
A steeper slope that starts you with a much worse QOL isn't inherently better just because the end of your life is spent with a high QOL. Doubly so as depending on how age effects your ability to do the things you enjoy or the experiences you form/retain, the true function you care about (let's call it `z` and `Z`) may decrease the impact of `y` with time. Even more so when you don't know what lies in your future and/or how long you'll be around.
This applies to knowledge and utility as well. Your immediate utility `y` is an integral. It's the aggregation of your accumulated knowledge. However the integral of this, `Y` is the total utility throughout your life. You may be more immediately useful with the steeper red slope later on but you get more total work done with the shallower blue slope.
I like this kind of wisdom because you read it, then you fill in the blanks. What is Y to you, etc.? Better than someone telling you to go to the gym every week etc. :-). In real life the curves are more complex.
A tortoise and hare curve would be more interesting. The hare is doing a hackthon at the weekend, getting super tired and giving up. THe tortoise is working on your side project for 4 hours a week every week for years.
The problem with hiring programmers for learning speed is that even fast learners will take months to years to catch up to experienced people. If you’re doubling the size of your company every year, even without attrition, you end up with most of your code written by people who aren’t that good (yet).
Conversely, if you discount learning speed, then you'll have "experienced" people who, even after years, are barely ahead of the starting line. If you keep them around, your code is going to be written by people who still aren't that good and never will be...
Of course it'd be really nice get get one over on this regime by finding people whose bases alone are strong enough to carry, but if you're in the position where you're trying to make this trade-off you probably can't afford them.
I think this makes the error that experience is proportional to time. Some people are just “experiencing” the same problems and attacking them the same ways for years and years and not really building any additional experience beyond the first time they encountered the situation. But maybe that’s why you put experience in quotes.
Indeed. I think a much more accurate model looks a lot like the returns on an investment.
Returns are always accumulating to what you already have. If you know a lot you have context to recognize the next thing that comes along better. You’re in a place that is more wired for learning surrounded by smarter people.
The guy says as much himself when he says “you’re at Stanford” for god sakes. People who didn’t have enough of the good thing in high school aren’t starting at a lower Y-Axis point they’re simply not on the graph at all.
Most of life’s “graphs” don’t look like linear lines they look like compound interest.
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It was very entertaining and charming to hear him discuss his personal and professional life, and lessons he's learned throughout them often occasionally have very little to do with computer science.
I don't remember all of his "Thoughts for the Weekend", but I do remember one story he told about wishing he had apologized sooner to resolve some conflict he was in. That was a bit of wisdom that stuck with me from the class, beyond any of the computer science topics we covered.
> So, the solution is if you want a relationship to last a long time, somehow you have to keep the scar tissue from building up.
The key here is "if you want the relationship to last." In many relationships, people lose the desire for the relationship to last. For instance, in his contractor anecdote, he cares more about the outcome of the construction project that he cares about prolonging his relationship with the contractor. Or in the case of a business relationship, business partners want the business to be run in their own way more than the want their relationship to stay strong. Everything comes down to a desire to keep the relationship going.
The problem with it is that it's very easy to interpret that y-axis, "something good", as static. It's pretty hard to make sense of the model at all if you don't interpret as static, because your slope will bend all over the place, out of the plane, into multiple dimensions, etc. But once you've set your goal point, your "something good" axis, the natural temptation is to optimize your slope until you're steadily progressing against it. And that's dangerous, because you might forget that the "something good" axis was arbitrary to begin with.
Instead, I've become much more of a fan of John Boyd's "OODA loop" [1] model. Here, you're continually reacting to your environment, which is also continually changing around you. And the person or organization that can react faster usually has an advantage, because they can set the terms of the engagement. We can call that adaptation "learning", but the key point is that it's learning an environment that is dynamic, not static. Sometimes the environment will change in a way that invalidates all of your accumulated learning, and that's okay (and you don't really get a choice about it anyway).
This also drives home the point that choosing the environment you're adapting against is a pretty critical skill, and often dominates how well you adapt to it (i.e. your learning rate). I've seen some relatively mediocre people become billionaires because they picked the right industry and the right opportunity within it to join. Similarly, there are people who are brilliant problem solvers but end up in jail because the environment they are in rewards problem-solving that will get you sent there (think Omar from The Wire, or SBF from FTX).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop
The y-axis isn’t forever. Once you plateau, it’s time to change the definition. Then a new S-curve can begin.
Over time you observe periods of quantifiable growth interspersed with discrete jumps.
That said, I believe the core of y-intercept advice hides two key wisdoms: a) don’t be discouraged when you’re new, and b) don’t rest on your laurels when you’re experienced
And perhaps c) if someone is both way better than you and improving faster, you’ll never catch up. This is why I never pursued competitive boxing, for example. Don’t have the talent.
Jim Keller on Change https://youtu.be/gzgyksS5pX8?t=558
If you're optimizing your slope, that at least implies your slope is something you can optimize. How do you optimize your y-axis?
And that's why it's a fun and rewarding rabbit hole to go down. Because when you're faced with an arbitrary, intractable problem, that's when you need to start developing the fuzzy, emotional side of yourself. That's when you need to start making hard choices about what you want your life to look like and what you're going to care about, and you're finally faced with a situation where there's no right answer, and you only have your feelings to go by.
Then you can return to the hill-climbing and optimization as a tool to achieve those arbitrarily-chosen goals, but now you look at them only as tools.
As a side note, have you ever heard a coherent and/or useful explanation of the "orient" part? It seems like every time I hear about the OODA loop, that's the part that gets yadda-yadda-yadda'd over.
So, for example, if you can enumerate the possible transitions, do so.
Beyond OODA is probably closer to directly answering your question, though Violence of Mind appears to deal with concrete application of "orientation" to self-defense and violent confrontations as a "good guy". I think I recall hearing in a podcast Varg did that he actually talked with one of Boyd's colleagues when putting together Beyond OODA to learn more and make sure the content was spot on, which was a big motivation for my purchase of the book as I find OODA fascinating and the concept has been very influential in my life.
There is also this article that introduced OODA to me, and it goes fairly in-depth on the "orient" section: https://www.artofmanliness.com/character/behavior/ooda-loop/
"Orient" is "given all this information, what are the possible solutions"
Decide on one solution, and then act upon it.
Repeat ad infinitum.
It seems many people want to take these sort of decision making frame works to new contexts or generalize them to a point they no longer make sense to market them.
After I was there for a week, I tried out konnichiwa on a few ten year olds in the neighborhood. They howled with laughter and I felt so ashamed.
I was a Rotary student there. Most of the other Rotary students came with a few years of Japanese study under their belt.
I was better than all of them within three months.
The first takeaway was that it was harder for them to unlearn bad habits they learned when studying Japanese back in the US. A kid in class would mispronounce something, and because that kid often did that from the same perspective as the rest of the class, it was sticky. You learned bad habits easier than good ones. And, it was really, really hard to unlearn those bad habits.
I never had that problem because I only heard Japanese from natives.
A corollary to all this: if you want to learn a language, living there is 100x better than any other method. Not the most practical, but it's the best way.
While we are learning another language, it is very hard to recognise our errors, or diagnose or systematic errors. There are systematic patterns to our mistakes, and a lot of mistakes are inherent in the way languages are usually taught (reading before learning conversation being a #1 issue).
Also watch how babies and children learn, and try to replicate that as much as possible.
I learned conversational Spanish reasonably well, which was in part motivated by having a patient girlfriend whose mother-tongue was Spanish.
I met a Japanese guy with fantastic English, who had learned English by living in East London and Australia, and it was amazing to hear his accent change mid-sentence from perfect Cockney to perfect Ocker, especially for phrases and colloquialisms. A demonstration of the power of mimicking via ear, not via writing.
Being able to systematically reproduce typical German “errors” in English taught me how to speak correctly when I switched to pronouncing German words.
Also time has value, getting something earlier is generally better due to compound interest. Even some vague utility function like fun can display such a property of being better earlier, due to being able to remember the memory for longer.
Sometimes, you really do need someone who will be a heavy hitter on day 1. Other times, you can afford to wait to let someone mature.
For example, if you take `y` to be quality of life, you obviously want the highest quality of life you can get but what really matters is the integral `Y` quality of life over the course of your lifespan.
A steeper slope that starts you with a much worse QOL isn't inherently better just because the end of your life is spent with a high QOL. Doubly so as depending on how age effects your ability to do the things you enjoy or the experiences you form/retain, the true function you care about (let's call it `z` and `Z`) may decrease the impact of `y` with time. Even more so when you don't know what lies in your future and/or how long you'll be around.
This applies to knowledge and utility as well. Your immediate utility `y` is an integral. It's the aggregation of your accumulated knowledge. However the integral of this, `Y` is the total utility throughout your life. You may be more immediately useful with the steeper red slope later on but you get more total work done with the shallower blue slope.
A tortoise and hare curve would be more interesting. The hare is doing a hackthon at the weekend, getting super tired and giving up. THe tortoise is working on your side project for 4 hours a week every week for years.
Of course it'd be really nice get get one over on this regime by finding people whose bases alone are strong enough to carry, but if you're in the position where you're trying to make this trade-off you probably can't afford them.
If I'd known this when I was younger I probably wouldn't have spent so much time learning all those languages, none of which I now remember.
Returns are always accumulating to what you already have. If you know a lot you have context to recognize the next thing that comes along better. You’re in a place that is more wired for learning surrounded by smarter people.
The guy says as much himself when he says “you’re at Stanford” for god sakes. People who didn’t have enough of the good thing in high school aren’t starting at a lower Y-Axis point they’re simply not on the graph at all.
Most of life’s “graphs” don’t look like linear lines they look like compound interest.