Epistamic status: Journal

One thing I love about the rationality community is the munchkinism and aiming for really high standards. Don't just arrive at the truth, but arrive at the truth as fast as possible. Cheating is technique. How could I have thought that faster?. Do hard things and do them quickly. I think I found all of this advice valuable, but sometimes, especially in written content, an implicit assumption got implanted in myself that I was failing when I wasn't perceiving myself on a minute-to-minute or hour-to-hour basis as being able to do more well than say my fellow students when it comes to, implementing some algorithmic problem. I would then often feel anxious, and then learning new things would be even harder and also it wouldn't be any fun.

This hurt my self-esteem in university in a counterproductive way when I kept barely passing exams even though I was trying my best. In high school, I got by well, because the math material was just too trivial and I would often have self-studied a lot of the material anyway through Khan Academy. In exams I would be done half an hour early and would be able to go through all of my work again to fix all the embarrassing mistakes I made. And even when it came to writing, I would just practice and get more marks than my peers even if my essay would be half the expected length.

In university I would just barely pass exams because I wasn't fast enough. Whenever I would study with other people before the exam I would notice how people who had a worse understanding before the exam and whom I would explain concepts to would score more well than I did in the exam. I had gone into uni already having read How to Become a Straight-A Student, but all the advice there or elsewhere was no help^[1]. I assumed it must have mostly to do with me getting too stressed in exams and then not being able to read fast enough. Or with other students goodharting old exams more than me. The critical voices in my head would tell me though that this was a cope and I was just not as smart as I thought I was.

After meeting my girlfriend I noticed the critical voice in my head was right, just not quite in the way I expected. My girlfriend is very fast. She reads at 1.5x my speed and waits impatiently while I am taking 3 seconds to parse her questions (she just commented on that while I was writing this post and she was asking me to hand her something) and has mostly given up on delegating tasks to me in the kitchen, since I am just too slow at cutting onions.

I had gotten that onion critique before, but I think living with my girlfriend finally made me realize that I just run at a different clock speed at most tasks. I am a tortoise not a hare. Who knows maybe I am just the equivalent of choline deficient (though I checked that particular hypothesis) and this is ultimately fixable? I haven't found the fix so far and I think there might not be one.

So my new explanation is that I am just slow compared to the median computer science student. On the take-home math assignments I do better than the median students, because they go for more shallow understanding than me, perhaps there is even a tradeoff, where more of my thinking is just naturally invested in reflecting on what I am currently doing which is just slow. I sometimes appear fast because I have thought about a question deeply before and have an answer cached. In exams, I get cooked. I was trying to force myself to go at a speed that I would be able to solve all the questions and would innevitably make too many errors. I don't have any useful advice here for my past self here. Other than to be more patient. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast Going through more textbooks outside of my curriculum instead of goodharting even more on exams was in fact the correct soul-preserving strategy. It also explains why I write slowly, although I am also generally terse^[2] since I like the aesthetic.

The great thing is outside university nobody cares about how fast I can apply the gauss algorithm. It's just important that I know when to use it. Learning and being fast is way less important than prioritizing general skills actually applying what you learn and learning which skills are actually useful under what circumstance. In life generally, but also in learning and research, patience is important.

The way I finally noticed this error was by seeing enough people who I respect being patient with themselves. For example when I was mentally assisting my friend who was trying to understand language, I noticed that after he had been going into a few dead ends for around 30 minutes without really getting traction anywhere, he just mentally gave himself a pat on the back for diving into some confusions and also was noting some traces that seemed worth perhaps following up on some time. You don't have to crack the nut in one go. Now I do dare to tackle challenging problems like this for 5 minutes, but I noticed implicitly I had developed some fear of tackling problems as hard as my friends problem, because I would anticipate seeing myself failing.

Gwern is one of my favorite patient writers (This entire section on his long content writing is inspiring):

I have read blogs for many years and most blog posts are the triumph of the hare over the tortoise. They are meant to be read by a few people on a weekday in 2004 and never again, and are quickly abandoned—and perhaps as Assange says, not a moment too soon. (But isn’t that sad? Isn’t it a terrible ROI for one’s time?) On the other hand, the best blogs always seem to be building something: they are rough drafts—works in progress. So I did not wish to write a blog. Then what? More than just “evergreen content”, what would constitute Long Content as opposed to the existing culture of Short Content? How does one live in a Long Now sort of way?

My answer is that one uses such a framework to work on projects that are too big to work on normally or too tedious. (Conscientiousness is often lacking online or in volunteer communities and many useful things go undone.) Knowing your site will survive for decades to come gives you the mental wherewithal to tackle long-term tasks like gathering information for years, and such persistence can be useful—if one holds onto every glimmer of genius for years, then even the dullest person may look a bit like a genius himself⁠. (Even experienced professionals can only write at their peak for a few hours a day—usually first thing in the morning⁠, it seems.) Half the challenge of fighting procrastination is the ⁠pain of starting⁠—I find when I actually get ⁠into the swing⁠ of working on even dull tasks, it’s not so bad. So this suggests a solution: never start. Merely have perpetual drafts, which one tweaks from time to time. And the rest takes care of itself.

I have often tried writing blogposts like this one, but would often not be able to ever finish them. I tried setting myself a two hour deadline thinking this might help^[3], but this made all the frustrating parts about writing, like copyediting even more annoying. Given that I am writing about patience I tried just not setting any deadline for this blogpost. I started at ~6pm and I was finished around 5 hours later.^[4] Most of the time was probably spent reflecting and reading writing I vageuly remembered to link it (Most of it I didn't end up including, because I would have spent even more time trying to tie it all together. In next blogposts I think I will experiment with including more and trying to tie it together less).^[5]

When I looked at this video of this guy studying quantum mechanics, notice how he is extremely patient with himself (I cleaned up the transcript a little with GPT-5).

Prototype I’ve made that’ll let us look at this book while I use this unusual practice. The general idea and what I’m going for here is that we’re going to be reading some quantum computing—sorry, quantum mechanics—stuff. This will be cold for me, and I anticipate this will be difficult for me.

I last studied quantum mechanics 16 years ago. I looked at it briefly during my collaboration with Michael Nielsen a couple years back when we were working on quantum computing. But, to be clear, he was the expert there. So this is cold for me.

I read the preface where Griffiths talks about linear algebra requirements, and those are also about 17 years out of date. So we’ll see how this goes. I think it’s going to be hard, and because I think it’s going to be hard, I think I’m going to need help.

I’m going to lean on various tools for help. I’ll lean on GPT-4 if that seems useful, but mostly I think what’s going to be hard is that there’s just going to be a lot of new stuff very rapidly getting thrown at me, and I need to internalize this stuff.

One way to do that is by doing a bunch of practice problems, and we’re going to do a little bit of that—assuming that we get there. But in order to have a decent experience during those practice problems, in order to make good use of time, I also need to have internalized the core terms, the core concepts, the ways that they relate to each other, the properties of things, and notations.

There’s a lot of notation in this book—I can see already just by glancing at it—and I don’t want to be in a position where I’m looking at these problems and trying to figure out, “What does this variable mean?”

So anyway, we’re going to be using this memory system stuff as I go, and the idea is that I’m going to be writing little tasks for myself as we read that try to transform the knowledge in the book into tasks that make me retrieve or use or do something with that knowledge, so that I internalize it more effectively.

I will practice those tasks as I read to make sure—before I go too far beyond a new idea—that I have indeed internalized it. But I’ll also be carrying these tasks with me in subsequent weeks, so that ideally, if we talk about the content of this chapter in a month, I will still be able to talk about it confidently.

And that is not my experience. When I studied quantum mechanics 17 years ago, I think