On Really Trying

What are the true limits to motivation? The Programmers’ Credo: we do these things not because they are easy, but because we thought they were going to be easy Maciej Cegłowski Student: How can one realize his Self-nature? I know so little about the subject. Yasutani: First of all, you must be convinced you can do so. The conviction creates determination, and the determination zeal. But if you lack conviction, if you think “maybe I can get it, maybe I can’t”, or even worse, “This is beyond me!”—you won’t awaken no matter how much you do zazen.1 When I came across this quote, I was struck by its relevance to one of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s ‘beisutsukai’ posts about finding the successor to quantum mechanics, “The Failures of Eld Science”. I meant to write an essay on how interesting it is that we intellectually know that many of our current theories must be wrong, and even have pretty good ideas as to which ones, but we still cannot psychologically tackle them with the same energy as if we had some anomaly or paradox to explain, or have the benefit of hindsight. The students in Eliezer’s story know that quantum mechanics is wrong; someone with a well-verified observation contradicting quantum mechanics knows that it is wrong (replace ‘quantum’ with ‘classical’ as you wish). They will achieve better results than a battalion of conventional QMists. But nothing quite gelled. “—for over 30 years”, Jeffreyssai said. “Not one of them saw it; not Einstein, not Schrödinger, not even von Neumann.” He turned away from his sketcher, and toward the classroom. “I pose to you to the question: How did they fail?” Brennan didn’t jump. He deliberately waited just long enough to show he wasn’t scared, and then said, “Lack of pragmatic motivation, sensei.” “The Manhattan Project”, Brennan said, “was launched with a specific technological end in sight: a weapon of great power, in time of war. But the error that Eld Science committed with respect to quantum physics had no immediate consequences for their technology. They were confused, but they had no desperate need for an answer. Otherwise the surrounding system would have removed all burdens from their effort to solve it. Surely the Manhattan Project must have done so—Taji? Do you know?” Jeffreyssai chuckled slightly. “Don’t guess so hard what I might prefer to hear, Competitor. Your first statement came closer to my hidden mark; your oh-so-Bayesian disclaimer fell wide… The factor I had in mind, Brennan, was that Eld scientists thought it was acceptable to take 30 years to solve a problem. Their entire social process of science was based on getting to the truth eventually. A wrong theory got discarded eventually—once the next generation of students grew up familiar with the replacement. Work expands to fill the time allotted, as the saying goes. But people can think important thoughts in far less than 30 years, if they expect speed of themselves.” Jeffreyssai suddenly slammed down a hand on the arm of Brennan’s chair. “How long do you have to dodge a thrown knife?” — They didn’t know that they were looking for a better theory. The students in this story have the incredible advantage that they are starting from a wrong theory and know this for certain, and not merely suspect or hold as a general philosophy-of-science principle ‘there’s probably a better theory than the current one’. This gives them several things psychologically: the willingness to scrap painfully won insights and theories in favor of something new and saves them from spending all their time and effort patching up the old theory. I know in the past when I’ve tried my hand at problems (logic puzzles come to mind) that I am far more motivated and effective when I am assured that there is in fact a correct answer than when I am unsure the question is even answerable. And a quick note to those who think I’m echoing Brennan: I am, here, but my point differs in that I don’t think it was a matter of ‘training’. I think if you abducted all the old greats, gave the necessary experimental data, and gave them a few months to produce the new theory before they were dragged out to the shed and shot, then they could do it just as well as these students. It’s all about motivation. It’s not a matter of competency at paradigm shifts, if you will; it’s accepting that one needs to happen now and you are the one who needs to do it. But there’s no normal way to convince a scientific community of this; isn’t it true that most new paradigms fail to pan out? From “Class Project”: Jeffreyssai took a moment to look over his increasingly disturbed students, “Here is your assignment. Of quantum mechanics, and General Relativity, you have been told. This is the limit of Eld science, and hence, the limit of public knowledge. The 5 of you, working on your own, are to produce the correct theory of quantum gravity. Your time limit is one month.” Ordinarily, at this point, I would say: “Now I am about to tell you the answer; so if you want to try to work out the problem on your own, you should do so now.” But in this case, some of the greatest statisticians in history did not get it on their own, so if you do not already know the answer, I am not really expecting you to work it out. Maybe if you remember half a hint, but not the whole answer, you could try it on your own. Or if you suspect that your era will support you, you could try it on your own; I have given you a tremendous amount of help by asking exactly the correct question, and telling you that an answer is possible. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KipiHsTA3pw4joQkG/timeless-causality https://www.coordinationproblem.org/201016ya/04/neurological-freaks-and-the-drive-to-excel.html Claude Shannon once told me that as a kid, he remembered being stuck on a jigsaw puzzle. His brother, who was passing by, said to him: “You know: I could tell you something.” That’s all his brother said. Yet that was enough hint to help Claude solve the puzzle. The great thing about this hint… is that you can always give it to yourself. –Manuel Blum, “Advice to a Beginning Graduate Student” One of my favorite Kaggle facts: after a long leaderboard stagnation period for a competition, seeing one team make a sudden breakthrough will often cause multiple independent teams to quickly reproduce the same breakthrough—with no knowledge of how the first team did it. —François Chollet Back to the fall of ’74/’75. We were holding the seminar, I met this man Peter Blatman and he told me about Ralph Merkle. And this is discussed also in “The First 10 Years of Public-Key Cryptography”. He said Merkle had been working on the problem of secure communication over a channel with somebody you’d never met before and I had thought about that problem for a long time. I was convinced you couldn’t do it and I persuaded Blatman you couldn’t do it. But I went back thinking about the problem. And so I think Merkle plays a very critical role. As it turned out Merkle already probably knew how to do it at that time, but he saw the problem differently from the way I did. Merkle took Hoffman’s class. Hoffman wanted everybody do a term paper, and he wanted a proposal for the term paper very early in the term. So Merkle submitted a proposal which is a paper about his key exchange system and Hoffman didn’t understand it and Hoffman made him rewrite it and he still didn’t understand it. And they got fed up with each other and Merkle left the class. And Hoffman threw away the chance to have the well known names read Merkle and Hoffman rather than Diffie and Hellman. And Merkle went on working on that problem and eventually wrote a paper that finally appeared as “Secure communication over insecure channels” about 5 years later [CACM 197848ya]. Part of the reason that it wasn’t appreciated sooner is that Ralph Merkle didn’t write very well. I have a draft somewhere, he wrote a hundred pages paper or something, it was very very hard to read. … That’s in essence all of what I called the pre-history. Then as we thought about this for several months and we wrote a paper that eventually appeared in the National Computer Conference in 197650ya, and that was written in December 197551ya. And we sent preprints around and we deadlined a submission for the conference very early, had to give in before Christmas, or by January, 1st. or something like that and immediately we sent the preprints around very widely and I gave one to Blatman who gave it to Merkle. And Merkle, who had been beating his head against a stonewall for years, suddenly realized, here were people who would understand what he was talking about. So Merkle then got in contact with us, he called me because I lived in Berkeley and sent Marty Hellman a copy of his paper, because Hellman was farther away. —“Interview with Whitfield Diffie on the Development of Public Key Cryptography”, 1992 Baker and Minkyung Baek, a postdoctoral fellow in his lab, saw an opportunity. They might not have the code that the DeepMind team used to solve the protein structure problem, but they knew it could be done. And they also knew, in general terms, how DeepMind had done it. “Even at that point, David was saying, ‘This is an existence proof. DeepMind has shown that these sorts of methods can work’”, says John Moult, a professor at the University of Maryland College Park’s Institute for Bioscience and Biotechnology Research and organizer of the CASP event. “That was enough for him.” —“Without Code for DeepMind’s Protein AI, This Lab Wrote Its Own: The Google subsidiary solved a fundamental problem in biology but didn’t promptly share its solution. So a University of Washington team tried to recreate it.” After working as a statistician in Seattle, he [George Dantzig] wrote in 193987ya to Neyman, whose papers had interested him, and an assistantship was arranged for him at Berkeley. This story from that period is a classic: During my first year at Berkeley I arrived late one day to one of Neyman’s classes. On the