I am Aditya Prasad. I am from the old and diverse city of New Delhi, India.
Every once in a while, I think of something that feels worth writing down, however, I never do. I’d like to change that. Hopefully it’ll be useful for future me and anyone else who stumbles upon this website.
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This summer, I am working on machine learning problems and as a result I have had to reacquaint myself with the literature. I say reacquaint because I have worked on it before. Like several others at my college, I too fell for the hype in the beginning of my sophomore year which led me down a few rabbit holes before the interest eventually vanished.
I find myself working in the same field again and this time is different. I wouldn’t exactly say that I am wiser so I understand things better, thats not it. I do struggle with some of the same concepts and it takes a little while before I develop intuition. I say that because I have a better appreciation of the problem at hand. And, its not the cutting edge nature of the problem that I am talking about here. I am talking about the canonical problems that everyone is introduced to when they start learning the subject (this probably applies to other subjects as well). For machine learning or deep learning, its the MNIST hand-written dataset classification problem, or the flower classification problem. Previously, I shrugged them as ‘too basic, give me something more complex so I can change the world’, now I realize that sometimes its the simplest of problems that one should spend considerable amount of their time on before they move on to more complex ones. The shift in attitude does seem to play a part here. I’d share some of the learning from working on these simpler problems in future post(s). Howerver, for this one, I have another experience to share.
I realized that my thinking, while I am going over the same material, something I like to call as live-thinking is also very different to the last time. Previously, most of my effort would go into thinking mostly of the end product, or on the qualities of the end product. Now, its mostly about trying to intuit/piece-together the inner machinery of the process by learning more and more and tweaking more and more. I guess as an engineer, that’s my primary goal anyway. To me, its a paradigm shift in thinking. Plus, there is an added benefit to realizing this. Now I know if I have to teach the same material to someone, I can pick their thought process much better. I know what its like in the beginning to struggle and be in a state of confusion, where the concepts just don’t seem to gel together. Personally (and I guess this is common for others too), the problem isn’t that I don’t know indivdual discrete concepts well, I just don’t know how they connect with each other. As a result I have difficulty zooming out of one area of the conceptual landscape and zooming into the another. This becomes a challenge and if we couple that with super high expectations like I did the first time round, one can easily loose interest.
I thought, this was an interesting finding.
PS: I will try to make it a point to finish every post with a music recommendation where the title matches a phrase from somewhere in the post. Bonus points if the meanings happen to sync as well! Here it is: Paradigm Shift by Liquid Tension Experiment.
I have come to realize that in any goal-oriented or timed activity the ‘point (measured by some metric such as minutes or completed work such as features implemented in a software program)’ where 50% of the task has been achieved can be a great influencer of the remaining 50% of the task. Let me first explain what I mean by an example and then I’ll hypothesize about why it might be so.
In my current (pandemic time) routine, I typically exercise by climbing the staircase that leads upto my house. It’s a great cardio exercise if one does it running up and then down multiple times in a stretch. Almost always I have a goal I want to achieve (i.e. the number of round trips). I was doing this largely to loose excess weight and build endurance and stamina. I started really low around 15 rounds the first day and by the end of 8 months I was at 100. Coming back to the point, its a struggle to pull ones weight up a flight of stairs (especially if one is overweight) and (this obviously changes as you gain stamina and start loosing weight, but you will feel it at some new threshold if you keep pushing your limits). After a few round trips, it becomes apparent that you have taken on a insurmountable challenge. The one thing I learnt to focus on in those moments was to get just to the 50% mark of my original target. Doing that I find does two things, first, the goal is now half of what it was before. And second, the point of this article, is that once you reach it and move just past that mark (such as one more round trip on the stairs), all of a sudden the required steps to goal reduces to less than half. Knowing that you have completed more than 50% of the activity at such as stage when you’ve spent atleast half of your resources– physical and mental– can act as a much needed rebooster.
I think the point I am trying to make is that, we all have goals and mostly they are time bound. We want to meet them as quickly and efficiently as possible but often we fall short. There could be a myriad of reasons why that might be. I find that being able to get to the 50% mark and tracking it can be a reasonable mental trick. Moreover, it flips how one approaches the goal at the 50% mark like I described in the example above. That can be all the difference between achieving the goal and giving up altogether.