AnneB:
I realized that I need to rethink some things in my blog post on SICP Exercise 2.14, so I reverted it to a draft for now. Was that the wrong thing to do? I hadn’t gotten any comment on it so I don’t know if anyone read it yet. When I repost it, should I mark my changes as edits or just change them? (The big picture is that I forgot about the subtraction procedure and just focused on addition/multiplication/division.)
JustinCEO:
I’ve got a post in draft re: some grammar stuff
JustinCEO:
i made some errors and then have additional comments after the error
JustinCEO:
i’ve got stuff marked as
JustinCEO:
Initial Answer
JustinCEO:
Peikoff’s Answer
JustinCEO:
Answer after further thought
JustinCEO:
that kinda stuff
JustinCEO:
i think one of the ways you can mess up is
JustinCEO:
by fooling yourself about the state of what you knew at different points in time
JustinCEO:
and that the motivation for doing this is not wanting to admit your initial ignorance
JustinCEO:
i’m not accusing you of this btw, Anne, this is just like a general observation of possible relevance
JustinCEO:
generic “you”
JustinCEO:
anyways i think it’s interesting cuz
JustinCEO:
if you fool yourself about the state of your knowledge at the beginning of trying to solve some problem
JustinCEO:
then you can inflate how much you already knew
JustinCEO:
and if you inflate how much you already knew
JustinCEO:
then that can make the learning project look less valuable in retrospect
JustinCEO:
cuz you look back
JustinCEO:
and say
JustinCEO:
“oh well i didn’t seem to learn a lot”
JustinCEO:
but that’s just cuz you lied about how little u knew at the start
JustinCEO:
so i thought that was interesting
AnneB:
Yes, I’ve thought of that too, how if you pretend to yourself that you knew stuff already, you don’t see all the progress you made.
JustinCEO:
it’s kinda like if you lie about what your assets were before doing some business venture. say you had $100 but you say you had $50k. then after doing the venture you have $55k. if you fool yourself with the lie and believe your false estimate of your assets, it looks like the business didn’t do too well, but the reality is different.
JustinCEO:
it’s easier to see the issue in that case, cuz amount of $ is an easier issue to judge than “amount of learning of some set of topics”, which is much squishier
JustinCEO:
so then if you combine the squishiness of judging how much you’ve learned with a bunch of self-lying it can become a real mess
AnneB:
For that post, I’ll try to accurately portray what I thought at first and then what I thought later. There are plenty of other exercises where I write stuff in draft and then later change it as I think about it more. But usually the changes happen before I publish. I wonder if I should be explaining more of that, but I already worry that my exercise answers are long. I’ll think about it some more.
JustinCEO:
long for what purpose
JustinCEO:
if u care about ppl reading your stuff, you could do a short version or mark specific things for people to read
JustinCEO:
for my next post i’m gonna mark one of the answers as a “if u only read one thing read this” cuz i did a whole big analysis re: fused participles and i’d like feedback on that
JustinCEO:
anyways you should consider the goal of your stuff
JustinCEO:
you can’t optimize your stuff for every purpose
JustinCEO:
if you care a lot about accurately capturing your thoughts and the state of your knowledge then that’s going to make it longer compared to something more optimized for getting feedback from other people
JustinCEO:
Yes, I’ve thought of that too, how if you pretend to yourself that you knew stuff already, you don’t see all the progress you made.
JustinCEO:
i think that’s really interesting btw cuz
JustinCEO:
it shows you how insidious and destructive second-handedness can be
JustinCEO:
like you lie to yourself for second-handed reasons, cuz you don’t want to come across as ignorant or newb or whatever
JustinCEO:
and doing so messes up your motivation to learn
JustinCEO:
the operation of the secondhandedness on learning is kinda indirect though
JustinCEO:
like you cook the books re: learning project effectiveness and that has downstream consequences on learning project motivation later