Left: Unknown Origin – Work without thinking to the expert path
Right: An Algodoo simulation for the left illustration.
The reason why I have started this series was to express my frustration on my former master studies, and seeing and hearing a bunch of derailed advices that doesn’t work both from real life and online because I got so much work from the degree yet learning so little to none from the subjects… and… what I really worked for?
In my first semester, I got a course that was about AI professional, telling about ethics and the vision of AI and data science, but imo, all students can just skip this lesson and read the similar on blogs shared from Hacker News, which is a total waste of money and time. Even worst, it had two group assignments on studying latest AI models and writing a proposal on using AI for solving some arbitrary problem to fulfil the 17 human goals.
However, we didn’t know a single thing about AI at the time other than the name LLM only which we didn’t even have any concepts how it works under the hood, even worst, the professor told us to use ChatGPT to do the proposal and cite that as a reference… I really want to know what we can really learn from this group project? Without a solid foundation, no matter how great our ideas are, it won’t be realistic; telling us to use ChatGPT to do the proposal, students are going to copy and paste whatever it comes from the prompt, without actually learn a single bit of data, not to mention that no creativity involved in the process because most people probably just ask the AI “give me some ideas to solve humanity problems using AI and paraphrase it”; as a result, we just did the assignment for the sake of doing it because we also have other tough yet more meaningful assignments to do which we need to prioritize. When we attended the presentation section, everyone just used their “Power Paragraph” with close to text color background, and screamed and spammed the word “LLM” as the solution without actually knowing how it works and the effectiveness into their problem… Perhaps, people would argue about the purpose of the assignment is to train “soft skills”, but let’s discuss that in the later chapters.
This might not directly related to this topic, but it rhymes because we ended up working for the sake of working, and we didn’t learn much from that project. This shows a real problem of work without thinking: if we don’t know what is the point of doing the task, if we don’t have any knowledge, and if we don’t know how to plan to learn and how to work smarter and more efficiently, all the hard-work could be just a waste of time, which is like the illustration above spamming a bunch of papers trying to get into the expert position, but all the sliding papers ended as an unnecessary wasted effort if not useless. It might still lead you to somewhere, but it just wasted too much unnecessary effort and time which is unmatched to the current living style where everything is rush yet demanding.
Expertise a subject not only requires works, but also the plans to learn the subject. I remembered reading this blog post by Erik Dietrich, talking about more and more people stuck at the “expert beginner” role because many people insist to use their old techniques to works on their subject, but no matter how hard they have tried, they have hit into a bottleneck of not improving, performing at the sub-optimal level. The bowling story is a good example of instead of blindly working on their task, they sometimes need to change the technique and strategy on doing their task to be a better bowling player.
This applies to any skills: you can’t just banging the piano aimlessly long enough to play Liszt Hungarian Rhapsody 2 although you might discover chord and intervals at the time; you can’t really learn the deeper aspect of programming and software development if you only do vibe coding, copying and pasting the code without any analysis and hoping for the best; you can’t just pour enough money into some random investments and win a buck without understand many of the terms, jargon, and obviously, the trend; you can’t just be good at presentation by attending enough public speaking where preparation and reflection after the events are needed. As you can see, to expertise any skills, thinking and planning is as important as hard-work in many occasions, and usually, what makes your work works is the thinking process before and after the work, and learning things from success and mistake foreach events, rather than the work alone.
Thus, give your task a brief plan and solve it accordingly, and the plan doesn’t need to be detailed and strict (since I also hate following tight schedule and I found it limiting), but something you have a good idea and direction. After you succeeded or failed, give yourself a reflection and lesson to understand why things work or don’t. Only thinking is a problem, but without a direction and reflection, doing for the sake of doing won’t lead you to the goal, or hugely inefficient at best.
Bonus: Bogo is hardworking, and Bogo believes in being the expert of sorting things if he works hard enough, sorting everything just in one go. He works, works, and works, flipping all his collections everywhere and rapidly compare any two objects, and if he is not satisfied, he just flipping the collection once again. He believe in such a tedious work. Quick told him to prioritize stuff with a cutoff line, Merge told him to break down everything into smaller size and merge the task group by group, Heap told him to structure his collections, but Bogo doesn’t listen and believes that his hardwork will sort quicker than any or his peers; however, up to these days, he is still trying… working out his very first collection.