Letters Remain

  • Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

    The First Law of Fanfiction states that every change which strengthens the protagonists requires a corresponding worsening of their challenges. […] stories are about conflict; a hero too strong for their conflict is no longer in tense, heart-pounding difficulty. […]

    The Rationalist Fanfiction Principle states that rationality is not magic; being rational does not require magical potential or royal bloodlines or even amazing gadgets, and the principles of rationality work for understandable reasons.

    That’s Eliezer Yudkowsky in an introduction to his acclaimed Harry Potter fan fiction, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.

    The piece of “serial fiction” looks at cognitive science and rationality in a Harry Potter-type world where Harry, having been raised by a scientist stepfather, is a rationalist, entering the wizarding world “armed with Enlightenment ideals and the experimental spirit.”

    Currently 63 chapters long–including chapters such as A Day of Very Low Probability, The Stanford Prison Experiment, The Unknown and the Unknowable and Title Redacted, Part I–the Methods is a fantastic read.

    There’s a “book-style” PDF available, ePUB and MOBI versions for those on e-readers, and a great TV Tropes entry. You can find more resources on the unofficial homepage, hpmor.com.

    Although listen to Eliezer when he says “This fic is widely considered to have really hit its stride starting at around Chapter 5. If you still don’t like it after Chapter 10, give up”.

    via Hacker News

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • To Complete Goals, Concentrate on ‘The Big Picture’ (Not Subgoals)

    To help control and manage progress on a difficult or long-term goal, we often split that goal into many individual subgoals. Once we begin to complete these subgoals, our continued motivation and progress toward the main, or superordinate, goal can be compromised.

    A study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2006 shows that by putting people in mind of their subgoal successes or on their main goal commitment causes drastic differences in their future effort (the latter is better):

    The authors show that when people consider success on a single subgoal, additional actions toward achieving a superordinate goal are seen as substitutes and are less likely to be pursued. In contrast, when people consider their commitment to a superordinate goal on the basis of initial success on a subgoal, additional actions toward achieving that goal may seem to be complementary and more likely to be pursued.

    via Derek Sivers (Yep, via the post I linked-to in my previous post. I felt that this needed its own post as I wanted to provide a balanced view on the study, not just saying, somewhat incorrectly, “success on one sub-goal […] reduced efforts on other important sub-goals”.)

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • For Motivation, Keep Goals Secret

    Conventional wisdom for setting goals and following through on intentions is to make a public statement of intent in order to bring about some accountability. However the research on the theory is mixed.

    Derek Sivers summarises a number of studies that suggest we should keep our goals private if we want to remain motivated (especially if that goal is contributing to a perceived or hoped-for ‘identity’):

    Announcing your plans to others satisfies your self-identity just enough that you’re less motivated to do the hard work needed.

    In 1933, W. Mahler found that if a person announced the solution to a problem, and was acknowledged by others, it was now […] a “social reality”, even if the solution hadn’t actually been achieved.

    NYU psychology professor Peter Gollwitzer has been studying this since his 1982 book Symbolic Self-Completion (pdf article here) – and recently published results of new tests in a research article, When Intentions Go Public: Does Social Reality Widen the Intention-Behavior Gap?

    Four different tests of 63 people found that those who kept their intentions private were more likely to achieve them than those who made them public and were acknowledged by others.

    Once you’ve told people of your intentions, it gives you a “premature sense of completeness.”

    The research article in question concludes that “Identity-related behavioral intentions that had been noticed by other people were translated into action less intensively than those that had been ignored” and that “when other people take notice of an individual’s identity-related behavioral intention, this gives the individual a premature sense of possessing the aspired-to identity”.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • An Ignore List, Setting Schedules and Other Time Management Ideas

    Managing time effectively is a matter of cultivating a consistent and deliberate habit through a number of easy steps, says Peter Bregman, suggesting a three-stage process: detailed planning, refocussing (scheduled breaks) and reviewing.

    I’ve dabbled with The Pomodoro Technique and GTD and neither have really helped me (granted, I don’t have chronic time-management issues and instead just harbour a desire to be more efficient), and I’m unsure whether Bregman’s suggested technique would help those in need of help.

    However, what I did like from Bregman is the idea of creating an ignore list in addition to a to do list, and this brief look at studies showing the importance of creating detailed schedules and plans:

    In their book The Power of Full Engagement, Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz describe a study in which a group of women agreed to do a breast self-exam during a period of 30 days. 100% of those who said where and when they were going to do it completed the exam. Only 53% of the others did.

    In another study, drug addicts in withdrawal (can you find a more stressed-out population?) agreed to write an essay before 5 p.m. on a certain day. 80% of those who said when and where they would write the essay completed it. None of the others did.

    If you want to get something done, decide when and where you’re going to do it. Otherwise, take it off your list.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Software Project Metrics and Control: They Don’t Matter (Sometimes)

    Software project metrics are not as important as we have been led to believe, and the field of software engineering has evolved to such a state as to almost be almost… over.

    This is according to the eminent software engineer Tom DeMarco who, looking back at his 1986 book on the subject, Controlling Software Projects: Management, Measurement, and Estimates, now believes that our focus on control and metrics is wrong, and we need to completely reverse how we create and manage software, if possible (pdf).

    The book’s most quoted line is its first sentence: “You can’t control what you can’t measure.” This line contains a real truth, but I’ve become increasingly uncomfortable with my use of it. Implicit in the quote (and indeed in the book’s title) is that control is an important aspect, maybe the most important, of any software project. But it isn’t. Many projects have proceeded without much control but managed to produce wonderful products such as GoogleEarth or Wikipedia.

    To understand control’s real role, you need to distinguish between two drastically different kinds of projects:

    • Project A will eventually cost about a million dollars and produce value of around $1.1 million.
    • Project B will eventually cost about a million dollars and produce value of more than $50 million.

    What’s immediately apparent is that control is really important for Project A but almost not at all important for Project B. This leads us to the odd conclusion that strict control is something that matters a lot on relatively useless projects and much less on useful projects. It suggests that the more you focus on control, the more likely you’re working on a project that’s striving to deliver something of relatively minor value.

    To my mind, the question that’s much more important than how to control a software project is, why on earth are we doing so many projects that deliver such marginal value? […]

    For the past 40 years […] we’ve tortured ourselves over our inability to finish a software project on time and on budget. […] This never should have been the supreme goal. The more important goal is transformation, creating software that changes the world or that transforms a company or how it does business.

    via Coding Horror

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • ‘Bit Culture’ and the Benefits of Distraction

    The information consumption habits of many in the younger generations–one feature of the ‘Internet information culture’–has many merits, despite its many detractors. So says Ban Casnocha in an article for The American that acts as both a review of Tyler Cowen’s Create Your Own Economy and a fairly positive and comprehensive overview of the “bit culture” and its affects on attention and learning.

    Casnocha begins with a look at his own media consumption habits (that closely mirrors mine and, no doubt, many of yours, too) and a couple of theories for explaining this style:

    The first is economic: when culture is free and a click away, as it is on blogs and Twitter and the broader Internet, we sample broadly and consume it in smaller chunks: “When access is easy, we tend to favor the short, the sweet, and the bitty. When access is difficult, we tend to look for large-scale productions, extravaganzas, and masterpieces,” […]

    The second reason is the intellectual and emotional stimulation we experience by assembling a custom stream of bits. Cowen refers to this process as the “daily self-assembly of synthetic experiences.” My inputs appear a chaotic jumble of scattered information but to me they touch all my interest points. When I consume them as a blend, I see all-important connections between the different intellectual narratives I follow […]

    When skeptics make sweeping negative claims about how the Web affects cognition, they are forgetting the people whose natural tendencies and strengths blossom in an information-rich environment. Cowen’s overriding point, delivered in a “can’t we all just get along” spirit, is that everyone processes the stimuli of the world differently. Everyone deploys attention in their own way. We should embrace the new tools—even if we do not personally benefit— that allow the infovores among us to perform tasks effectively and acquire knowledge rapidly.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Statistical Significance Explained

    If you didn’t read the House of Commons Library’s statistical literacy guides recently (or you need a refresher on what, exactly, statistical significance means), then you can do much worse than student Warren Davies’ short rundown on the meaning of statistical significance:

    In science we’re always testing hypotheses. We never conduct a study to ‘see what happens’, because there’s always at least one way to make any useless set of data look important. We take a risk; we put our idea on the line and expose it to potential refutation. Therefore, all statistical tests in psychology test the probability of obtaining your given set of results (and all those that are even more extreme) if the hypothesis were incorrect – i.e. the null hypothesis were true. […]

    This is what statistical significance testing tells you – the probability that the result (and all those that are even more extreme) would have come about if the null hypothesis were true. […] It’s given as a value between 0 and 1, and labelled p. So p = .01 means a 1% chance of getting the results if the null hypothesis were true; p = .5 means 50% chance, p = .99 means 99%, and so on.

    In psychology we usually look for p values lower than .05, or 5%. That’s what you should look out for when reading journal papers. If there’s less than a 5% chance of getting the result if the null hypothesis were true, a psychologist will be happy with that, and the result is more likely to get published.

    Significance testing is not perfect, though. Remember this: ‘Statistical significance is not psychological significance.’ You must look at other things too; the effect size, the power, the theoretical underpinnings. Combined, they tell a story about how important the results are, and with time you’ll get better and better at interpreting this story.

    To get a real feel for this, Davies provides a simple-to-follow example (a loaded die) in the post.

    via @sandygautam

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Evidence-Based Study Tips

    A recent issue of The Psychologist included a “rough guide to studying psychology” by the editor of the excellent Research Digest blog, Christian Jarrett. In his guide, Jarrett provided nine evidence-based study tips:

    • Adopt a growth mindset: [Students] who see intelligence as malleable, react to adversity by working harder and trying out new strategies. […] Research also suggests lecturers and teachers should […] avoid comments on innate ability and emphasise instead what students did well to achieve their success.
    • Sleep well.
    • Forgive yourself for procrastinating.
    • Test yourself: Time spent answering quiz questions (including feedback of correct answers) is more beneficial than the same time spent merely re-studying that same material. […] Testing ‘creates powerful memories that are not easily forgotten’ and it allows you to diagnose your learning. […] Self-testing when information is still fresh in your memory, immediately after studying, doesn’t work. It does not create lasting memories, and it creates overconfidence.
    • Pace your studies: The secret to remembering material long-term is to review it periodically, rather than trying to cram. […] The optimal time to leave material before reviewing it is 10 to 30 per cent of the period you want to remember it for.
    • Vivid examples may not always work best: Students taught about mathematical relations linking three items in a group were only able to transfer the rules to a novel, real-life situation if they were originally taught the rules using abstract symbols. Those taught with [a metaphorical aid] were unable to transfer what they’d learned.
    • Take naps: Naps as short as ten minutes can reduce subsequent fatigue and help boost concentration.
    • Get handouts prior to the lecture: Students given Powerpoint slide handouts before a lecture made fewer notes but performed the same or better in a later test of the lecture material than students who weren’t given the handouts until the lecture was over.
    • Believe in yourself: Students’ belief in their own ability, called ‘self-efficacy’, and their general ability both made unique contributions to their performance. […] Instructors that focus on building the confidence of students, providing strategic instruction, and giving relevant feedback can enhance performance outcomes.
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    Lloyd Morgan

  • The Three Design Principles and The Simplicity Myth

    We are confusing usability with simplicity and capability with features. This is faulty logic, says usability and ‘cognitive design’ expert Don Norman, and our interpretation of our needs is mistaken: the goal is not simplicity; it is appropriateness, usability and enjoyability.

    Suggesting that what consumers really want are frustration-free, capable devices that tame our complexity-rich lifestyles, Norman looks at how the ‘simplicity argument’ is not about simplicity, but poor usability and design.

    Once we recognize that the real issue is to devise things that are understandable, we are halfway toward the solution. Good design can rescue us. How do we manage complexity? We use a number of simple design rules. For example, consider how three simple principles can transform an unruly cluster of confusing features into a structured, understandable experience: modularization, mapping, conceptual models. […]

    Modularization means taking an activity and dividing it into small, manageable modules. That’s how well-designed multifunction printers, scanners, copiers, and fax machines do it: Each function is compartmentalized by grouping and graphics, so each is relatively simple. […] Learn to do one function, you then know how to do all of them.

    Good mapping is essential to ensure that the relationship between actions and results is apparent.

    But most important of all is to provide an understandable, cohesive conceptual model, so the person understands what is to be done, what is happening, and what is to be expected. This requires continual, informative feedback, which can also be done in such a way as to be pleasurable: see any Apple product.

    Emotional design is critical to a person’s enjoyment of a product, the most critical variable here being the need to feel in control. This is especially important when things go wrong. The key is to design knowing that things go wrong, thereby ensuring that people will understand what is happening and know what to do about it.

    The argument is not between adding features and simplicity, between adding capability and usability. The real issue is about design: designing things that have the power required for the job while maintaining understandability, the feeling of control, and the pleasure of accomplishment.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Focus Points for Entrepreneurs

    When someone asked for advice on How to become a millionaire in 3 years on Hacker News, serial entrepreneur Jason Baptiste took the task seriously providing thirty-seven things to focus on when starting a company, including:

    • Market opportunity
    • Inequality of information
    • Surround yourself with smart people
    • Your primary metric shouldn’t be dollars
    • If you do focus on a dollar amount, focus on the first $10,000
    • Get as many distribution channels as possible
    • Be a master of information
    • Be so good they can’t ignore you
    • Give yourself every opportunity you can
    • Look for the accessory ecosystem
    • Make the illiquid, liquid
    • Don’t be emotional
    • Don’t leave things up to chance
    • Raise revenue, not funding
    • Don’t get comfortable
    • Don’t skimp on the important things
    • Keep the momentum going
    • Listen to (or read the transcriptions of) every Mixergy interview you can
    • Learn how to filter

    Jason goes into great detail for each item on his list, starting his post with the clarification that these tips are for making a success of a business endeavour in “a short time frame” (i.e. not specifically for making a million dollars in three years).

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    Lloyd Morgan