Results for “hamming” 5 found
What I’ve been reading
1. Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea. Yes compelling, and a sufficiently influential book that you should read it. But aren’t you ever tempted to ask: has anyone ever behaved like that?
2. Rutger Bregman, Humankind: A Hopeful History. An elegantly written book, offering an optimistic take on human nature and cooperativeness. I am not sure there is anything fundamentally new in here, but I did in fact read and finish it.
3. Juan Williams, Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary. A very good and readable biography of exactly what it promises, also manages to avoid hagiography.
4. R. James Breiding, Too Small to Fail: Why some small nations outperform larger ones and how they are reshaping the world. A very useful book expanding on the theme that smaller nations have the potential to be much better governed and thus to have smarter policy and greater accountability.
I have not yet read Steven Johnson, Enemy of All Mankind: A True Story of Piracy, Power, and History’s First Global Manhunt, but in general I enjoy his works and find them smart.
There is also Jim Tankersley, The Riches of This Land: The untold, true story of America’s middle class.
Richard W. Hamming, The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn is the latest Stripe Press blockbuster. Here is more information about the book.
How I think about vocabulary
Relative to my education, including self-education, I think of myself as commanding only a limited English-language vocabulary. Some of this comes from having studied two foreign languages as an adult, which means picking up vocabulary in other languages instead, as the marginal value of a word in the foreign language usually will be higher. Another factor is the complementarity of “direct speech” modes and a fairly modest vocabulary; it doesn’t make sense to talk common sense and suddenly interject “albescent.”
There is also a third reason. I think of “flowery” vocabulary as operating against what Richard Hamming calls “compound learning.” Compound learning occurs when your new learning, and your new analysis, builds steadily upon the old. Over time, learning is a bit like compound interest and it cumulates.
When compound learning is possible, you wish to keep a relatively well-defined set of analytic pieces on the table. It is fine and indeed essential to add to those pieces, but then the new piece should be one that will stick around for a while, again so that you may learn with it. Furthermore it should be readily shared with other people, used with ease on the blog or Twitter, and stick in your mind without much if any effort. It’s a bit like having a consistent programming language or micro model to share across a lunch table, or indeed with yourself over time.
Should I write of a “velleity,” or of a slight, non-fervent wish?
The former seems to me rather periphrastic.
The most important truth about hard work, and also reading, that you can find
Now for the matter of drive. You observe that most great scientists have tremendous drive. I worked for ten years with John Tukey at Bell Labs. He had tremendous drive. One day about three or four years after I joined, I discovered that John Tukey was slightly younger than I was. John was a genius and I clearly was not. Well I went storming into Bode’s office and said, “How can anybody my age know as much as John Tukey does?” He leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head, grinned slightly, and said, “You would be surprised Hamming, how much you would know if you worked as hard as he did that many years.” I simply slunk out of the office!
What Bode was saying was this: “Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest.” Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity – it is very much like compound interest. I don’t want to give you a rate, but it is a very high rate. Given two people with exactly the same ability, the one person who manages day in and day out to get in one more hour of thinking will be tremendously more productive over a lifetime. I took Bode’s remark to heart; I spent a good deal more of my time for some years trying to work a bit harder and I found, in fact, I could get more work done. I don’t like to say it in front of my wife, but I did sort of neglect her sometimes; I needed to study. You have to neglect things if you intend to get what you want done. There’s no question about this.
That is from Richard W. Hamming, invaluable throughout. Hat tip is from Patrick Collison. Here is the book by Hamming.
In praise of books
If you want to get recognition long-haul, it seems to me writing books is more contribution because most of us need orientation. In this day of practically infinite knowledge, we need orientation to find our way. Let me tell you what infinite knowledge is. Since from the time of Newton to now, we have come close to doubling knowledge every 17 years, more or less. And we cope with that, essentially, by specialization. In the next 340 years at that rate, there will be 20 doublings, i.e. a million, and there will be a million fields of specialty for every one field now. It isn’t going to happen. The present growth of knowledge will choke itself off until we get different tools. I believe that books which try to digest, coordinate, get rid of the duplication, get rid of the less fruitful methods and present the underlying ideas clearly of what we know now, will be the things the future generations will value. Public talks are necessary; private talks are necessary; written papers are necessary. But I am inclined to believe that, in the long-haul, books which leave out what’s not essential are more important than books which tell you everything because you don’t want to know everything. I don’t want to know that much about penguins is the usual reply. You just want to know the essence.
That is another bit from "You and Your Research," by Richard Hamming, do read this important piece. Being an author of books, I am happy to hear this argument, but I can think of other strategies:
1. Influence the long-run by mattering now with specialized research; this is especially effective if social opinion has a "unit root" and persists (for purposes of contrast, imagine long-term mean reversion, in which case short-run victories wash out). While you may get less long-term recognition, you will get more short-term recognition.
2. Work on projects with the highest expected value of impact.
3. Build up a specialized field that will have long-run influence. Take your pride in the progress of the field, not in how long your name sticks around. What is so special about your name anyway? (Analogy: would you rather your distant descendants know your name, know your contributions but not your name, or resemble you but not know either? It is not obvious that the former option should win out.)
4. Do what you want. If you don’t love your daily grind, it won’t matter for the scientific long-run anyway.
Comments are open…
Against errands
Here is some wisdom for the new year to come:
Other days are eaten up by errands. And I know it’s usually my fault: I let errands eat up the day, to avoid facing some hard problem.
The most dangerous form of procrastination is unacknowledged type-B procrastination, because it doesn’t feel like procrastination. You’re "getting things done." Just the wrong things.
Any advice about procrastination that concentrates on crossing things off your to-do list is not only incomplete, but positively misleading, if it doesn’t consider the possibility that the to-do list is itself a form of type-B procrastination. In fact, possibility is too weak a word. Nearly everyone’s is. Unless you’re working on the biggest things you could be working on, you’re type-B procrastinating, no matter how much you’re getting done.
In his famous essay You and Your Research (which I recommend to anyone ambitious, no matter what they’re working on), Richard Hamming suggests that you ask yourself three questions:
- What are the most important problems in your field?
- Are you working on one of them?
- Why not?
Here is the full argument. Addendum: Here is the correct link for "You and Your Research."