They're not bugs, they're fluency errors or something. I'm a bad learner in general, in part because all this preprocessing to set up my iteration assemblage to learn a thing feels like bureaucracy I get wrong all the time.
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This is why when I *do* successfully learn a skill it tends to be where someone else has prepared a sandbox environment that has all the pieces scoped in properly, with the right UX to focus on just learning the "touch patterns" to do things with the assemblage.
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Like take my annual ritual attempt to migrate my limited coding needs from Matlab to Python. Matlab is very much a closed-world sandbox where you can focus on the trial and error. Python, I think *just* got there with Anaconda. Even then it is too open for easy learning.
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Thing is an open iteration assemblage (one where you need to constantly be doing adds/removes and package management and inserting new things you're not fluent in...) is qualitatively a level harder than a closed one.
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Another example that doesn't cast me in as much of an inept light. I find working on courses much harder. The iteration assemblage is MUCH bigger: Teachable, Zoom (for recording video), PowerPoint, an organized folder for materials, Stripe, marketing on blog etc.
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"Working on my course" means ranging over a very large, recursively nested set of things that contain more things. The REPL has a very low "visit frequency" for any individual piece of it. You can't gain fluency in larger patterns because they unfold over weeks, not minutes
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I can "get good" (in an toolchain/infrastructure fluency sense) at any given piece of it, like video editing, but overall fluency is a bitch to attain.
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The easiest iteration assemblages to work with have only 1 object in conscious view. That's why slide decks are so easy. It's one object -- unless you're so computer illiterate that the keyboard and touchpad feel like part of the conscious loop.
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Roam is in this early stage for me. I've never been big on keyboard shortcuts, but Roam relies on them so much you have to get fluent in them. So my iteration assemblage is: the roam page itself, the little helpbox at the bottom right, and occasionally, google.
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I'm trying to set up my workspace as a set of consciously designed iteration assemblages that are more complex than the one for "writing".
It can get complex even for simple things. Like take "whiteboard use"
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I recently created an iteration assemblage for "whiteboard use" (whiteboard, iphone to take a photo, airdrop to mac, archive in a "whiteboard" folder on dropbox). I try to take the photo and upload right before I wipe it clean so the image file is date-stamped correctly, but...
Replying to
.... sometimes I forget, or do a batch of whiteboard photos but don't upload till later and the dates get lost.
So new tool-hygiene step: date the whiteboard itself every time I use it.
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Things I'm trying to create iteration assemblages for with varying degrees of success:
Telescopy
Astrophotography
3d printing
Soldering
Working with arduino+breadboard
Breakfast burrito making
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Here's one that's got weirdly complex: simply reading a book.
Fiction on Kindle is easiest. Just kindle by the bedside, with charger. Read a bit every night.
Non-fiction that I want to live tweet? Add the phone to the loop.
Paper books? Just awful. Photos of pages 🤬
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I should call iteration assemblages "object circuits" or even better "widget circuits" since that would apply to digital as well.
Widget circuits!
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Widget circuit engineering is an object-level (widget level?) meta-cognition skill in its own right, and really hard to acquire. It might be the "learning to learn" skill.
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Failure to appreciate the complexity of it is I think what leads people to gadget-happy shopping spree. The hope is that by just building a completist collection of everything associated with a skill, the learning loop will magically take off. It doesn't.
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You have to wire these things up into a proper widget circuit to sustain the REPL that needs bootstrapping.
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Aka Homer Simpson barbecue pit syndrome.
Many of my learning projects are in this condition. All the parts are there. Just not in the right arrangement, and possibly irreversibly screwed up.
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I'm pretty proud of myself for pulling together what for me is a pretty massive widget circuit for astrophotography:
1. Telescope
2. Camera adapter
3. SLR (advanced use)
4. Phone adapter
Ran aground when trying to add stacking software to the loop: Macs have crappy options
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To level up, I have to either find software that works properly on Mac, or learn painful manual stacking on photoshop, or somehow run a Windows thing in an emulator. That defeated me. I'll get to it eventually.
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That I even got this far is entirely thanks to having a really attractive time-sensitive goal: photographing Mars, Jupiter and Saturn at their brightest. My capstone goal for the year is photographing the Jupiter/Saturn conjunction when they should be visible in the same fov.
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One thing I've gotten unreasonably good at is Ikea assembly. This is almost entirely because the widget circuit is entirely self-contained, and you only need fluency in 1-2 easy tools that they include. Here is my entire iteration history of flat-pack furniture over 20 years :D
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I should write a blog post on widget circuit engineering, but I probably won't because my widget circuit for writing big, ambitious blog posts has been broken by middle age :D
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It's actually more like recipe-ingredients coupling. What you do depends on what you have, what you have depends on what you've been doing. The uncoupled state of recipe and ingredients is the idealized closed-sandbox state.
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Replying to @vgr
You have all the ingredients but not the recipe.
In contrast to:
You have the recipe but not all the ingredients.
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Widget Circuit Theorem 1: Activity devolves to the simplest widget circuit that can sustain a given energy level.
It used to be TV + remote (unless you lost remote under sofa). Now it's phone+TV. If you lose the remote, you can use the app, or just let TV play while you tweet.
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