Psychology
When making decisions in life, especially when we are faced with selecting between two events, we find ourselves comparing how important they are in order to determine which event we should choose. Some people study the implications of each decision and measure how rewarding or penalizing the outcomes might be. Picking the least penalty is a tactic for choosing a decision under this scenario.
Action Influences Thought and Not The Other Way Around.
Most self help books sell you the same idea in different packaging: fix your mind first, then your life will follow. cultivate the right thoughts. visualize the outcome. build the belief before you build anything else.
Indeed there is truth in that, thoughts do shape action, I agree. but there is a half of the equation that nobody talks about, the feedback running in the other direction. action shapes thought. and it does, faster, and more permanently, than thinking ever could.
I remember once posting on Facebook about how I dislike people who compliment me , and I wrote something along the lines of: if you want to be a good friend of mine, do not give me compliments.
Reproducibility is the corner stone of science
Somewhere between building a model and publishing the results, something gets lost. not the results themselves, those make it into the paper. what gets lost is everything that would allow someone else to arrive at the same place.
This is the reproducibility problem in machine learning, and it is more widespread than most people admit.
In 2016, the journal Nature reported that around 70% of researchers had failed to reproduce another researcher’s results , and 50% had failed to reproduce their own. machine learning is no exception. a study that analyzed 400 papers from top AI conferences found that only 6% shared code, roughly 33% shared test data, and 54% shared nothing more than a pseudocode summary of their algorithm. not the environment. not the hyperparameters. not the exact version of the library that made it work. just a rough sketch of the idea.
Lately, I lost my ability to focus and maintain a flow state. I don’t sleep late, I eat relatively healthy food, and I’m not dopamine addicted. The problem comes down to practices that would align your efforts with what you want to achieve.
The art must have a purpose other than itself, or it collapses into infinite recursion.
I’ve spent a lot of time confused about my own wiring. not in a debilitating way, more like an ongoing low grade puzzle that I kept returning to. the confusion had a specific shape: I knew I was deeply analytical, the kind of person who could sit with an idea for hours without needing it to go anywhere, who would trace a concept back to its roots just for the satisfaction of understanding it fully. but I also noticed I was restless whenever nothing was being made. not bored exactly. more like something in me would protest, ask what all this thinking was actually for.