Posts
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The Blogging Gauntlet: May 13 - Appearing Skilled and Being Skilled are Very Different
CommentsThis is part of The Blogging Gauntlet of May 2016, where I try to write 500 words every day. See the May 1st post for full details.
I am bad at chess.
When I say I’m bad at chess, I mean I’ve played at most 10 games of chess my whole life. Anybody who’s learned the slightest bit of chess will wipe the floor with me.
When other people say they’re bad at chess, it could mean anything. I’ve heard novices say they’re bad at chess, but I’ve also heard a master say he’s bad at chess. I’ve heard someone say they’re bad at chess, then play against that master and almost win. I’ve seen someone say they’re awful, then win with a handicap of a queen and two rooks.
When everyone says they’re bad at chess regardless of their skill level, hearing “I’m bad at chess” gives zero information. You can’t learn their skill level unless you watch them play a game.
Yesterday, I went to a board game cafe. One of the staff members recommended we play Dominion. I mentioned I played a lot online, and he said he played a few games back in the day. Two sentences later, I learned “a few” meant 1500 games.
I’m not going to talk about why people downplay their accomplishments, because you could read the imposter syndrome Wikipedia page instead. What I want to talk about is the consequences of this kind of behavior.
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One day, I was at a gathering in a friend’s house, and someone proposed playing Codenames. I hadn’t played Codenames before, but from the reviews it sounded great. I immediately went into teaching mode, setting up the board and explaining the rules.
We started playing the game, and on the 4th round someone mentioned an exceptionally good clue from a game she played last week. Someone else then wanted to clarify what variants we were using. Neither of them said they had played Codenames before; it was only revealed well into the game itself.
There are couple factors at play here. Once I got going, there was natural inertia to let me continue with my explanation. And during the game itself, everyone was focused on playing the game, not on explaining their experience with the game.
Still, I wonder how many of my friends are secretly experts in subjects I’ve never heard them talk about.
I feel this issue is exacerbated with introverted people, who generally don’t talk about themselves, and with women, who generally don’t play up their accomplishments as much as men do. It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize most of my Khan Academy intern class had done more functional programming than me.
It’s shown up in this very blog. People have told me they liked my blog posts, but I don’t see them as especially interesting or special. I know people who have better thoughts, more insightful thoughts, relayed through private conversations and real life instead of posted on the Internet for all to see.
To quote Neil Geiman,
Everybody has a secret world inside of them. I mean everybody. All of the people in the whole world, I mean everybody — no matter how dull and boring they are on the outside. Inside them they’ve all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds… Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands, maybe.
(From The Sandman)
The difference, then, is that I try to wear my thoughts on the outside. The outside world won’t know of a friend’s brilliant insights into the privacy vs security debate, or their research on post-quantum cryptography, but it will think I’m good at cryptography because I wrote one blog post on garbled circuits. It hides that I’ve only taken two crypto courses, had to struggle through both, and am woefully uninformed about the wider state of cryptography research.
The world is biased towards people who do things that make them look special, not towards people who are special. I’m worried about the gap between the two, and what it could lead to.
Finally, a closing thought. Turn these ideas back onto this post. Did this post give you a new perspective? Or did it only give words to ideas you already had?
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The Blogging Gauntlet: May 12 - I Just Watched Someone Eat a Sandwich While Blindfolded
CommentsThis is part of The Blogging Gauntlet of May 2016, where I try to write 500 words every day. See the May 1st post for full details.
Today, I watched a blindfolded man eat and critique Chicago’s two most popular Italian beef sandwiches.
Why did I do this?
A simple explanation is that I was bored. My browser was already open to YouTube, and this video appeared in my recommendations.
That’s an okay explanation, but I’m not satisfied with it. Why did I choose to watch YouTube instead of opening a Steam game? Why did I click on that video instead of any of the other YouTube recommendations? When I reflect on my decisions, I always assume there’s a reason behind my behavior. This is true even if I don’t know why I did something. In that case, it just means my subconscious influenced me in a certain way, and it’s up to me to puzzle out the pieces.
Let’s consider a few explanations that might have played into my decision.
The Novelty Explanation
I’m not 100% sure of this, but I’d guess most people don’t spend their time watching blindfolded food critics eat sandwiches. Just a hunch.
That makes this video special. How often have I seen blindfolded taste testing? Not very often. From an exploration-exploitation perspective, that places a ton of value of watching it once. Maybe I’m actually a huge fan of blindfolded taste-testing. I have to watch to make sure.
However, by that logic I should be watching every video on YouTube, because I haven’t seen anything quite like it yet. This explanation doesn’t accurately incorporate my prior beliefs. Yes, novelty played a role in my decision, but I must have already had a prior belief that this specific blindfolded taste testing video would be worth watching.
Luckily, it’s easier to explain where that belief came from.
The Nostalgia Explanation
This video isn’t of any food critic, it’s of Alton Brown, host of Good Eats. I used to watch Good Eats as a kid, because
- It taught the science behind cooking in a way that a kid could understand
- I got to watch someone cook delicious food.
Nostalgia is a very powerful force. My past enjoyment from watching Good Eats must have made me interested in watching more Alton Brown videos.
This satisfies my curiosity by enough, but for completeness let’s add one more detail.
The Celebrity Explanation
I’ve watched some of Alton Brown’s videos in the past. See Grilled Grilled Cheese and Champagne Saber Time.
Again, these are entertaining videos. And that’s the key. Alton Brown is, at heart, an entertainer. He’s a celebrity in the food world. I don’t want to get into stardom theory, because my memory of it is fairly hazy, but you could call me a fan of his. The natural instinct of fandom is to watch everything related to the fandom, and thus, Alton Brown YouTube videos.
It doesn’t matter that I’ve never been to Chicago, and have no opinions on Italian beef sandwiches. If Alton Brown is giving a review, I’m going to find it interesting, because I trust his work to be good.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m hungry. Time to head to a sandwich place.
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The Blogging Gauntlet: May 11 - From Gaming, Lead Me To Optimality
CommentsThis is part of The Blogging Gauntlet of May 2016, where I try to write 500 words every day. See the May 1st post for full details.
From ignorance, lead me to truth.
From darkness, lead me to light.
From death, lead me to immortality.
(Translation of the Pavamāna Mantra)
As a kid, I played a lot of games. That hasn’t really changed since college.
In Dustforce, I’ve logged 316 hours.
In The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth, I’ve logged 212 hours.
In Dominion, I don’t know how many hours I’ve spent, but I know I’ve played about 3500 games.
This is a ton of time, to put things mildly. It’s so many hours! I could be doing so many more productive things. And sure, that’s true, but playing games is fun, I need ways to relax, and playing games doesn’t automatically make you a lazy person.
In fact, far from it. Despite all the time I’ve spent, I’d say gaming has been a net positive force in my life.
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First, I should explain my viewpoint on games, to clarify where I’m coming from. We’re diving into philosophy land here - hold on to your hats.
All games take place in their own world.
That world follows certain rules. For example, baseball. There are two teams. There are four bases. There is a pitcher, and a shortstop, and so on. There are strikes and outs and home runs.
This is true of all worlds, but for worlds constructed by games, the rules of the game are the rules of the world. When you get three strikes, you’re out. This is a fact that you cannot argue against. It’s how the world works.
In this viewpoint, playing a game is the same as taking actions in the world, game strategy is the same as task planning, and winning a game is the same as executing a series of actions that maximizes your win percentage.
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When viewed this way, deciding whether to buy Park Place in Monopoly is similar to choosing where to go for lunch, or what job to pick. However, there’s one key difference. Game worlds are much simpler than the real world.
In the real world, I’m a pretty quiet person. But put me in a game of Resistance, and I’ll talk a bunch. What changes? If I’m playing Resistance, everybody’s context changes. The objective is very simple: find the spies, or pretend you aren’t a spy. The rules of Resistance place very heavy constraints on everyone’s behavior, and within those constraints it’s massively easier for me to judge social behavior and make reads on whether someone is hiding something or not. And I don’t have to worry about what to talk about, because everyone’s only going to talk about Resistance. That’s something I know.
This leads into my next point. When the rules the world follows are simpler, it’s easier to act optimally. In Dominion, one of the first lessons people teach is that all cards are judged relative to one another. What matters is not how impressive a card looks, but how impressive it looks compared to cards of similar cost.
You may recognize this as a textbook example of opportunity cost.
I’ve seen other life lessons over the years. A simple strategy can be better than a complicated one. Dominion is zero-sum, so you don’t need to be good, you just need to be better than your opponent. The thousands of Dominion games I’ve played have thrown me into tens of thousands of situations where I’ve gotten to practice implementing these ideas. Sure, the context is different, but the core skill is the same.
About two weeks ago, I was playing a game where I had fallen behind due to bad shuffles. I paused to take stock. I needed a lucky break to have a shot. After thinking for a bit, I wagered the entire game on drawing cards in exactly the order I needed. It was about a 10% chance of happening, and if it went wrong I’d be so behind that I’d have to resign.
The choice wasn’t intuitive, but when I envisioned the worlds where I won the game, they all needed that 10% chance to come true. So I risked it all, and went for it.
And it did.
And I won.
On one hand, it didn’t feel like I deserved to win. On the other hand, I won. I made the perfect calculated risk, and it paid off.
Yes, I could have been doing something productive instead, but you know what? I wouldn’t trade that victory for anything else I could have done in those 15 minutes.