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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   2068 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for May 8, 2024

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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but not solve as many problems

This is a common issue, solving problems tends to be effortful, and people tend to avoid it when they don't "have to" do it for homework.

If you can't solve problems you have a child's understanding. Children understand things fall down under gravity, that doesn't make them experts on general relativity.

I don't think I have ever met someone in a technical field that is both good and hasn't taken the time to do a bunch of calculation, even bona fide geniuses (like Putnam Fellow level).

From Grant Sanderson on self teaching:

I think where a lot of self learners shoot themselves in the foot is by skipping calculations by thinking that that's incidental to the core understanding. But actually, I do think you build a lot of intuition just by putting in the reps of certain calculations. Some of them maybe turn out not to be all that important and in that case, so be it, but sometimes that's what maybe shapes your sense of where the substance of a result really came from.

If you want to feel smart join Mensa. If you want to get something out of being smart, you have to put in the work.

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