Working Mantras

"Amdahl's law is a bitch."

(When you're trying to improve something, focus on the parts that contribute most to the problem. If something takes 10% of your time and you make it a million times faster, that still only gives you about a 10% improvement overall. Fun fact: in the US federal budget, only about 18% of it is discretionary spending -- the rest of it is mandatory spending on things like interest and Medicare, so a big push to remove bridge-to-nowhere pork really wouldn't do much to reduce spending. Or a more personal example: did you know that by far most of the power that low-power CPUs use is spent just moving data across the chip, and not on logic? And yet people still spend countless man-hours on making the logic use less power, and getting diminishing returns. People can have a hard time seeing Amdahl's law even when it's staring them in the face.)

I've definitely done #7: I was far, far behind everyone and exhausted, backpacking to a high ridge in the Grand Tetons. Something snapped, and I just ran up the absurd climb for a good hour or so, passing everyone several times over. By the time I got to the top, I screamed loudly to the world that I am the walrus.

The point is that you may lose your mind in the process of attacking FAI problems directly and relentlessly, and even if you succeed you may afterward believe that you are a walrus. It's an occupational hazard.

Link to the previous discussion on listening to music while working -- on OB.

A mantra of mine since childhood: "If at first you don't succeed, you're doing something wrong." (Stop and try to really understand the elements of your approach, when feeling frustrated).

I don't listen to music while working, because of studies showing that, e.g., programmers listening to music are equally competent at implementing a given algorithm, but much less likely to notice that the algorithm's output is always equal to its input.

This is absolutely true. I'm a little shocked at how many programmers and other 'mind-workers' (students are especially bad at this) think that putting on some music is helpful, or neutral. It's neither; even classical music or chants hurt.

(I have no studies handy for this, but I've tried music with Mnemosyne, Gbrainy, and Dual N-back, and in all 3 and all the sessions, my statistical performance was hurt to a greater or less extent.)

8 "When the problem is solved, that thought will be a wasted motion in retrospect." (I first enunciated this as an explicit general principle when explaining to Marcello why e.g. one doesn't worry about people who have failed to solve a problem previously. When you actually solve the problem, those thoughts will predictably not have contributed anything in retrospect. So if your goal is to solve the problem, you should focus on the object-level problem, instead of worrying about whether you have sufficient status to solve it. The same rule applies to many other habitual worries, or reasoning effort expended to reassure against them, that would predictably appear as wasted motion in retrospect, after actually solving the problem.)

Of course when you're on your deathbed, alone (save the cryonics team at your side), unknown, with no significant accomplishments to your name clinging to the slim hope of revivification a hundred years hence and you've spent every last dollar and ounce of energy on solving a problem you're just not smart enough to understand you're really gonna wish you had second guessed yourself back in the day.

... But hey, I'm an optimist.

Edit: Yikes people. I was joking. Sorry.

Interesting list. I'd be curious to see other people's.

My experience with (3) is the opposite, in three respects.

First, I often encounter problems in my research that I understand completely. No magic or dark corners remain. Nonetheless, finding a solution remains challenging. When I do find the solution, I don't feel as if the problem has been further illuminated.

Second, the various lines of attack I develop with an impartial understanding of a problem are usually much more creative and varied than after my understanding fully solidifies. When I first encounter a problem I usually take at least a day or two to enumerate possible solutions before actually studying the problem.

Three, I've successfully solved complex problems I didn't understand at the time by blindly trying approaches my intuition threw at me.

I've found that I mentally verbalize several mantras taken from the Twelve Virtues.

1. "There is a time to confess your ignorance and a time to relinquish your ignorance." - This one comes up less at work, as in other cases. I've been in a jiu-jitsu class where a student, after being shown a technique, later at the water cooler said "I don't understand what he was trying to demonstrate." This struck me as dumb, and triggered this mantra in my head, as the instructor would have gladly redone the move any number of times had the student asked. At work I am surrounded by my many of my industry's best developers (this is not an exaggeration). Sometimes I run into a problem I do not know how to solve, but I know they do. This mantra helps me swallow my pride and ask for the information I need to learn how to solve the problem. (However, see #3 below.)

2. "Let the winds of evidence blow you about as though you are a leaf, with no direction of your own." This one has come into play lately when I've been reading or listening about political issues. I used to be very conservative, then later libertarian, but now I'm trying to mentally divorce my identity from political association entirely. I see this as similarly difficult a transition as when I became an atheist after being Christian. I still get easily baited by left leaning editorials, etc. I do not like these reactions, but they happen despite my conscious desire to not have them. So, I've taken to largely expunging my political beliefs in an attempt to move more toward an evidence driven world view. When you start to look at news sources in this light you find that most lack useful information to operate on and you feel less guilty about unplugging from those sources.

3. "Those who wish to fail must first prevent their friends from helping them." This concept has always been significant to me, but this phrase captures the essence. When I am curious, I attempt to solve the problem on my own and do my own research. There are times I get information from those who are wiser, but in those cases I prefer hints over spoilers. The key is to get help, but not too much help.

Some more on #3 that occurred to me while re-reading my post. I've been working on Project Euler. So far the problems haven't slowed me down, but looking ahead I can see some really tough ones. I've set a goal that I would try and learn, myself, what I needed to solve the problems. This may be impossible. At what point do I condemn myself to absolute failure unless I turn to an expert for help? How do I get the right amount of help on a subject I don't know, because, in not knowing, I am less able to distinguish between too much help and not enough? If I have a good problem to solve and someone hands me an algorithm that solves it, it robs me of the chance of deriving the algorithm. But if I lack the requisite tools to derive the algorithm, I may also not recognize the difference between the tools and the algorithm itself.

So there are three of the twelve virtues that continually pop into my mind.

These remind me so much of the Oblique Strategies cards: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblique_Strategies

If you've not seen them EY, you might want to read through and see if they give you any ideas for more mantras.

"If the problem is hard, study all the approaches you can find to thinking about even slightly related problems."

Read voraciously, do your homework.

I needed 9. There's not enough time to get utility U out of the project, so the right thing to do is to get U-100 out of it, and there's time for that. Owning up to it doesn't make it worse.

I experimented on myself plenty back in the day. Lots of my experiments had to do with pain - refusing pain medication when it was available to me, prodding places that pained, using more medication than helpful and so on. I remember one instance when I found myself in immence pain and some words came to mind from a Wikipedia article on a Buddhist mantra I had heard long ago. I read that the prescription for this branch of Buddhism was the mere repetition of the line: I take refuge in Amida Budda. Later, I found that the mantra is longer but it was an amazing altered state to find tranquility in that unlike any other purposeful altered state I had experimented with to cope with the pain (e.g. mindfulness, gratitude, imagery....)

I don't use anything of the sort - I just try to keep my mind on the problem, turning it over and inspecting it, and scream "THINK!" whenever my mind begins to wander. If I get tired, I stop thinking and resume another day. After a while the problem ends up solved. Not sure if this approach will work for others.

"There's always just enough time when you do something right, no more, no less."

I see this as related to one of my habits-- when I feel like I'm short on time, I'll hurry. That is, I'll try to move faster than I can really regulate well, presumably as a sort of self-signaling that I don't have enough time, but I'm trying hard.

I don't have a mantra for the the situation, but if I find myself thinking "I'm trying to hurry", it's an indicator that I need to stop pushing so hard.

Don't have many mantras, although I stress the importance of understanding before trying to solve.

One that does stand out is more of a question:

"What am I not thinking here?" or "What are we forgetting here?" - Followed by estimations based on meta-biases and human error tendencies to make some hypotheses where cognitive, social, or cultural blind spots might be. And then comes the testing, followed by more hypotheses. And so on.

After all, every field of thought is developed by humans. It's a common point of failure.

Any pointers to those studies?