Anna Koop

I had an epiphany yesterday. The kind I have had before and will probably have again, but it has to do with writing the proposal-that-won’t-die.

It is: It’s just a proposal. It’s just words. It is, in fact, words and ideas for which I have done a tremendous amount of preparation. All it is going to take now is writing time. If I learn nothing more, develop no new ideas, run no experiments, and even think no new thoughts—I’ll still have more than enough material for a proposal.

So. I got quite a bit done today by realizing that it isn’t such a big deal. Work, yes. But the kind of work that you can get done if you just show up and do what’s required. Fill in the gaps. Write a paragraph or sentence or page, then edit a paragraph or sentence or page. No big deal.

Like all epiphanies, it’s more in the feeling than in the words. I read all this last year in How to Write a Lot. It remains good advice. I’m back to feeling it in my bones.

A recurring issue for me is the need for a place to offload the whirl of ideas that fills my head. It can get quite overwhelming, since it is tied to decisions about what to follow up on and a mixture of should-dos and could-dos.

When I was an undergrad I used a Palm program (I can’t remember the name anymore). It was great for juggling class deadlines. I tried using it as a grad student but it didn’t work as well for that. The nature of deadlines changes so much, and the projects turn into these flexible things that can infinitely branch into different areas of research, different paper deadlines, different thoughts to follow up on.

I also, in undergrad, started using Getting Things Done. Now I use a slightly modified version of that with OmniFocus. Most of the time when I’m feeling overwhelmed by my todo list it’s because I either haven’t been putting things into the inbox, or haven’t been reliably clearing things out (In David Allen’s terms, I’ve stopped being able to trust the system and so it all stays in my head).

It’s still not a perfect fit for thesis work, because I haven’t figured out a good way of breaking the proposal down. There are a long list of things I could do (hunt down references, write precis for the lit review, make diagrams, write any portion of the thing itself) and they are all variable length. I think GTD works best when you have countable finite tasks for the projects you’re doing.

I suppose I’m also using a kind of First Things First approach, in that I use OmniFocus for offloading lists of pesky things, but in picking what to do each day I look at what is most important rather than urgent. Which is how thesis work makes the cut without being exhaustively enumerated in OF.

And GTD is way too much overhead for joint projects with Joel. Joel does not have the same intense need for a system—he manages to compartmentalize to-dos better than I do, and tends to just do the thing to get it out of his head. He still (I think) needs some kind of system, depending on how many projects he’s juggling, but he’s more of a visual do-er than compulsive organizer. So we haven’t exactly found the best solution for our joint projects, although the whiteboard and calendar figure hugely in our current work.

If anyone has suggestions for other todo or idea management systems, I’m always interested. Go productivity p0rn.

When my operating systems covered thrashing I felt an immediate affinity to the poor processor. Thrashing is when the processor spends more time switching between processes and shuffling memory than executing anything. I think the example used in class had to do with a queueing system and the set up of a new process using up all of the available processor allocation, requiring a switch, which used up all that processor. My memory is hazy, though, and most of the online examples have to do with paging.

The human analogue is being overwhelmed with all-the-things! and not being able to focus on any of them long enough to make progress. Sometimes it’s set off by a resource chain: “I want to write up this abstract, but I need to double-check this reference, which means I need to find this paper, and oh yeah I needed to look up this other term…” Sometimes it’s set off by an excess of ideas: “I have a day off! What shall I do? I could knit or clean up or read or start this large project or advance that project, and I’ll just check the internet and play Lux until I decide. . .”

In any case, the result is—as the Wiki link currently says—“large amounts of computer resources are used to do a minimal amount of work.” Oh yeah. That there is the root of my procrastination issues.

So, solution? Picking a focus for the day sometimes helps, but even within “concentrate on thesis” the multitude of possible tasks can be overwhelming. Lists are essential (writing to long-term storage to free RAM? How far should I carry this analogy?). Deadlines help, but artificial deadlines don’t always work (and the danger there is setting impossible deadlines, which just leads to discouragement).

I have a feeling mindfulness in general would be helpful, but I haven’t worked out how. Focus is not my strong point. I’ll keep practicing.

It probably comes down to something simple, really: Increase resources or decrease demands. Finding a good way of doing either is the problem.

I have realized something about my writing process.

Progress on my proposal has been slow. Not discouragingly slow, but incredibly painstaking. Other than the usual battles with perfectionism and undue diligence and scope explosion/implosion, I haven’t quite known why. A possible (addition) explanation occurred to me just now.

One of the artifacts of working on writing with Rich, particularly if it’s a topic he cares about, is the constant scrapping of what’s-been-done. I bring something in (when I bring actual writing in and not just the latest point to discuss!), we look at it, we discuss what works and what doesn’t, and I go out to start over from scratch. It’s not just Rich’s critique that does it—I have a strong tendency towards restarting anyway. Restarting after discussing the whole pictures leads to an excellent narrative and very clear ideas about what the work is about. However.

It does not lead to a complete draft. Ever, really. Hence, right now, although I have written several hundred thousands of words over the last two years, my (incomplete) proposal draft contains 680. Subject to change. Always. That’s down from one of the earlier iterations, which did have a couple thousand, I believe (pardon my obsession with word counts—progress must be measured in some way, for sanity’s sake).

I don’t know if this is something I should embrace or resolve. Free-writing tends to lead to this sort of thing, and free-writing is the lowest-pressure way to get work done. The perfectionism and diligence and scope expansion all lead to paralysis, and free-writing knocks me out of that. But . . . I would like to have a draft. As Mike said, only five people are ever going to read this document. Perhaps I am perfecting just a little too much?

I’m caught up on email. That’ll teach me not to neglect the inbox for a week.

The working title for my thesis has been “Empirical Prediction as the Stuff of Knowledge” for quite some time. I have been fond of this title, though not totally sold on it. Rich has not been fond of it, particularly “stuff of.” I thought it was because it was too informal, but I think now he found it too vague?

Anyway, the new working title is “An Empirical Approach to Knowledge Representation.” This is better. Changing from empirical prediction as a noun (which was a jargon-alert) to empirical as an adjective helps with accessibility. And then good old “An” is always nice. Not claiming to be the definitive work!

I was resisting “knowledge representation” for a while, because I thought the term had been lost to the old-school approaches. But now that I know what philosophical framework we fall into, I’m more comfortable with it. The agent is using a representation, and the thing being represented is patterns in the sensorimotor data rather than external entities.

It was a great meeting on Friday, and I have an improved working title: simple, clear, accurate. Good things.

…we have this Making Light post quoting this article.

Doing the academic integrity survey (here, go do it if you’re a UofA student) was interesting. Every now and then I’m surprised by my own naiveté. I was expecting there to be more shades of grey, but almost all of the suggested things I think of as really dreadful cheating (falsifying research data, claiming someone else’s work as your own, copying without citing).

Anyway, the article mentioned above is about a professional custom paper mill. Apparently there’s quite a bit of money to be had, writing assignments for desperate/illiterate/lazy students. I could never have afforded school that way. And, you know, I’m actually here to learn.

There’s a lot of blaming going on in the comments: it’s the ghostwriters’ fault—no, it’s the professors’ fault—no, the administrators’—no, the system—no, the cheaters alone. It does seem like something is broken, and I don’t know that there’s any one person to blame for the whole problem.

One interesting point. It’s bugged me for quite a while that a university degree is considered prerequisite in inappropriate jobs. Obviously it’s relevant for some positions. But I have seen retail manager postings wanting university degrees. Surely four years of retail experience would be more useful? Or some other people-related interaction? Volunteer work? On-the-job training?

It simultaneously over-values and under-values the degree. It means the piece of paper is more important than the education. It means the piece of paper is more important than related experience.

I wish everyone could get a university education. But I don’t think everyone HAS to. I want there to be a place for practical trades learning, for broad academic grounding, for entry-level jobs with growth potential, for specialization of all kinds. These are different. They serve different needs and different kinds of learning. Smooshing everything into “Require a 4 yr bachelor’s degree” is not helpful.

I love academia, I love being a student, I love research, I love teaching, and I absolutely adore learning. At times this seems completely at odds with the perceived role of universities.

I’ve spent hours today going over three sentences. The final result?

“The mind tries to predict and control sensorimotor signals.” 9 word sentence, 1,315 words to get there.

“Knowledge is about patterns within sensorimotor data.” 7 word sentence, 1,006 words to get there.

“Predictions about specified behaviours create conceptual knowledge.” 7 word sentence again, 1,527 words to get there.

That’s 0.6% word retention, for those keeping score at home. Every word in each sentence has been looked up, pondered, substituted out and back, and exhaustively analyzed for appropriate connotation and denotation.

And they’re still subject to revision.

I love my work.

From blog posts to presentations to dissertations—why should people bother with you? Be quick and clear about your point.

I recently gave a talk in the Psych department on my research. Overall it went well, but I lost the thread (and a few people) partway through the talk. What was the problem? Not having a succinct summary of my contributions is a big issue. It’s coming, but oh-so-slowly. The other problem was that, although I had a clear outline, I forgot to keep referring back to what my contribution was. Why I was telling this particular group about this smattering of things?

The outline was:
        Introduce the grand question (How do we connect sensorimotor data and conceptual knowledge?)
        Go over some historic attempts at answering this.
        Explain our take (Knowledge is about experience).
        Go through pros and cons of our approach.
        Existing results.
        Future plans.

Around the end of the historic attempts, I forgot to keep referring back to the grand question. I did it a few more times, but not consistently or clearly. As Rich and Leah both commented, I didn’t make it clear that “Knowledge is about experience” was our approach. And I really wasn’t clear about the pros and cons. It’s a nice outline and would have been infinitely stronger if I had kept coming back to our shtick. Succinctly.

Another issue might have been trying to pack too much into a one-hour talk, but that’s a post for a different day.
-=-

Various ways of phrasing this point:
Get to the point clearly and quickly.
Tell people why they should care.
What are you actually doing? State it clearly and refer back to it.

Rob DesJardins’s point—that the research question is like the chorus of the song, and the sections of your talk/proposal are the verses. Keep coming back to the chorus.

Quotes from Rich—
        List your points and make them small enough to hang on to: “Weird thing, weird thing, weird thing”         and then explanation of how those weird things contrast existing things. What they mean.
        “Be firm about your approach.”
        “Be more explicitly comparative.”

One of the toughest things about the thesis I’m writing has been word selection. I am constantly battling jargon and reaching for clarity, trying to find the right mix. Sometimes jargon is good—when the concept you’re trying to explain has a label, it’s clear that it’s a thing rather than a random collection of ideas. And the label gives the reader something to hook on to, a clue to the contribution of the work.
        On the other hand, every bit of jargon is another potential barrier to understanding. “Okay, I have to remember that X means this concept here.” Or “Y . . . now what was that again, something important?”. So it matters, keeping to intuitive language.

        Then throw in the “that does not mean what you think it means” dilemma, combined with discipline- and lab-specific nuance, and it’s enough to make you swear off research.

        My current conundrum: “cognition” vs “mind”. I’m most tempted to talk about cognition, but I have a suspicion that mind is more accessible. Neither are consistently defined, both have baggage, both are in the layperson’s dictionary (but cognition is more likely to need looking up).
        
        “Cognition is the act of making sense of sensorimotor data.”
        Rich’s version: “The mind is an information processor.” Though I am not *quite* comfortable with that. It is lovely and concise (and absolutely loaded with philosophical baggage).
        Potential Anna-twist: “The mind is at the centre of a signal exchange between an agent and an environment.” The problem there—mind, signal, agent and environment are all potential jargon, albeit intuitive jargon.

        I’ll get back to you when I decide.

        Edit: “The mind sends and receives signals, and tries to make sense of them.”
        Edit2: “The mind is that bit of [me/an intelligent agent] that sends and receives signals, trying to influence and [make sense of/understand] them.”

        I have a tendency to pack too much into things.