The Anosognosic's Dilemma
Jun. 25th, 2010 10:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pasitheaFascinating article, posted mostly as a placeholder for myself.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/the-anosognosics-dilemma-1/
It's something I've been observing a lot in myself lately. What you believe you know and what you actually know are different things. It's actually been the subject of a lot of my meditation. I've been really working on how to approach things in a more structured and scientific manner. I'm still failing horribly but I can see some slim amounts of progress.
For example: I played a game of Go on kgs last night. I won but I wasn't happy because I knew I'd played poorly. The other player had merely played more poorly than I did. Afterwards, I had the opportunity to review with a much better player. As we walked through my game, my mistakes were so painfully obvious. I did stuff that I _KNEW_ was wrong at the time I did it but they _SEEMED_ right at the time. He would ask me about a play and I would almost immediately point out a much better approach than I'd taken and I could explain in detail what was wrong with the play I'd made. Often he offered solutions that were even better than my improved solution because he's able to predict the game further out than I am.
For me, much of this is tied together. It shows up in my career work, my artwork, my go playing. I'm very impatient. There's so much to do that I want to do it ALL, RIGHT NOW. I was taught that the best way to learn is by doing. Truth of the matter is, that's a lie. The best way to learn is by careful observation.
My evolved process is to do a hundred million iterations of something instead of doing it right the first time. In my artwork, this shows up in the frantic scratchiness of my lines. In my code, it often shows up in the form of many iterative compiles. In Go, the assumption that I will learn by losing. In short, I do a half-assed job at everything. It just happens that most things are organic enough that they can absorb and mask those flaws.
The real problem is that my method _works_ so for a long time, I've thought I was doing stuff the right way and was frustrated at how slow my progress seems to be. For years, I've been conning myself into believing that I was learning in the best way possible.
So.. I'm working on strategies to change my behavior. With art, I've been struggling for the past several months to make a conscious effort to draw only a few lines instead of frantic hen-scratches. With code, I've been taking a really structured approach to design, fully designing everything up front and then writing the code that goes with it. Go.. I've not found a solution for it yet. It's a game and as games tend to excite, it speeds up my thought. I know I need to slow down and think but it's a real challenge. However, it does show me how far I have to go in everything else.
Learning how to learn is a difficult challenge but... I've done it once before....
Actually, I sort of wonder if this was the way I learned and did things before I had my memory damaged. My short term to long term memory got trashed and the way I taught myself to remember things was to create a high-speed refresh with a decay pattern.
For the past year, I've been working on learning a new way to remember things. It's slower and more ... ... I want to say 'painful' but it's not exactly the right word. It's more like ... moving in slow motion but because the air has become so dense that you have to push your way through it. There! It's like swimming under water as deep as you can. It takes a lot of effort and there's pressure, and there's a little of the panic like the burning in your lungs. In short, it's unpleasant. But also, it's something worth doing. I am self-writing software. I had to make a huge hack to myself because of hardware limitations but it's well past time I fixed my lousy emergency patch.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/the-anosognosics-dilemma-1/
It's something I've been observing a lot in myself lately. What you believe you know and what you actually know are different things. It's actually been the subject of a lot of my meditation. I've been really working on how to approach things in a more structured and scientific manner. I'm still failing horribly but I can see some slim amounts of progress.
For example: I played a game of Go on kgs last night. I won but I wasn't happy because I knew I'd played poorly. The other player had merely played more poorly than I did. Afterwards, I had the opportunity to review with a much better player. As we walked through my game, my mistakes were so painfully obvious. I did stuff that I _KNEW_ was wrong at the time I did it but they _SEEMED_ right at the time. He would ask me about a play and I would almost immediately point out a much better approach than I'd taken and I could explain in detail what was wrong with the play I'd made. Often he offered solutions that were even better than my improved solution because he's able to predict the game further out than I am.
For me, much of this is tied together. It shows up in my career work, my artwork, my go playing. I'm very impatient. There's so much to do that I want to do it ALL, RIGHT NOW. I was taught that the best way to learn is by doing. Truth of the matter is, that's a lie. The best way to learn is by careful observation.
My evolved process is to do a hundred million iterations of something instead of doing it right the first time. In my artwork, this shows up in the frantic scratchiness of my lines. In my code, it often shows up in the form of many iterative compiles. In Go, the assumption that I will learn by losing. In short, I do a half-assed job at everything. It just happens that most things are organic enough that they can absorb and mask those flaws.
The real problem is that my method _works_ so for a long time, I've thought I was doing stuff the right way and was frustrated at how slow my progress seems to be. For years, I've been conning myself into believing that I was learning in the best way possible.
So.. I'm working on strategies to change my behavior. With art, I've been struggling for the past several months to make a conscious effort to draw only a few lines instead of frantic hen-scratches. With code, I've been taking a really structured approach to design, fully designing everything up front and then writing the code that goes with it. Go.. I've not found a solution for it yet. It's a game and as games tend to excite, it speeds up my thought. I know I need to slow down and think but it's a real challenge. However, it does show me how far I have to go in everything else.
Learning how to learn is a difficult challenge but... I've done it once before....
Actually, I sort of wonder if this was the way I learned and did things before I had my memory damaged. My short term to long term memory got trashed and the way I taught myself to remember things was to create a high-speed refresh with a decay pattern.
For the past year, I've been working on learning a new way to remember things. It's slower and more ... ... I want to say 'painful' but it's not exactly the right word. It's more like ... moving in slow motion but because the air has become so dense that you have to push your way through it. There! It's like swimming under water as deep as you can. It takes a lot of effort and there's pressure, and there's a little of the panic like the burning in your lungs. In short, it's unpleasant. But also, it's something worth doing. I am self-writing software. I had to make a huge hack to myself because of hardware limitations but it's well past time I fixed my lousy emergency patch.
