Comment author:
gwern
16 March 2017 09:04:22PM
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20 points
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child)
Comment author:
gwern
16 March 2017 09:04:22PM
*
20 points
[-]
I believe ‘shave individuals yaks’ is nice advice just for some yak-shaving situations. I see ‘yak-shaving’ like a description of the situation where you stand nested so deep in subgoals that you have forgotten your original goal, after which a great heuristic would be to awaken and say "this quite a bit of yak-shaving!" and consider what’s going on which has brought for an undesirable situation.
Considering my very own applying the word, I believe you will find 3 different types of problems be responsible for yak-shaving: avoidance, insufficient mindfulness, and cascading problems/system failures.
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you’re procrastinating or just being akratic or falling into perfectionism (carefully associated with stalling), by deliberately overcomplicating something or attempting to use fancy or shiny new techniques, which obviously frequently result in new subgoals since you aren’t acquainted with them yet.
This really is fine sometimes (you need to learn individuals new techniques somewhen) or maybe it’s a type of ‘structured procrastination’ (in which the yak-shaving is itself valuable eg since it constitutes a neat blog publish or helpful software program), but frequently is not. The typical akrasia/stalling equation stuff, except it’s being hidden within gloss of superficial productivity. ("I can not write my novel, I must clean my desk which requires [solving 15 much deeper nested issues] that will occupy all all of those other day I sure am a tough-working author.")
By calling it yak-shaving, you admit you’re just faffing around and also you then solve your condition how you understood you need to all along or cope with your reason for staying away from finishing, or if you want to get it done whatsoever. Should you won’t acknowledge the yak-shaving, then even though you ‘shave the yaks’ you’ll just find a different way to overcomplicate things or perhaps a different factor down the sink time on or change to procrastinating on social networking etc.
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you’ve been carrying out a greedy technique of using the apparent option each and every decision node you have now stacked up a lot of tasks to accomplish shows that the greedy strategy has unsuccessful and you’ve got fallen right into a local pessima.
As with sunk costs, you’re ready to stop being so mindless, take a step back, consider it more globally, and get should there be some better approach. Was there some entirely different strategy which appeared too costly when compared with your present path (that has really switched to be much more pricey than predicted) and today looks cheap? Or what are the intermediate middle steps that are costly but eliminate a lot of other steps? Or possibly all of the pathways are extremely pricey the top-level goal now no more looks worth bothering with and you ought to just drop all of the existing tasks and prevent shaving the yak entirely.
Programmers are particularly prone to this since the line between helpful automation and hugely complicated time-wasting tinkering is really a fine one indeed. This is often common in programming where one can say, increase your Rube Goldberg assortment of covering scripts and Emacs functions and manual edits to text since you desired to avoid writing a SQL function (since it would take twenty minutes of talking to the SQL documentation to have it right) but when you are talking to the Party FAQ or resetting IFS variables to handle a problem 30 minutes later, it is good to awaken and get ‘am I yak-shaving?’ – and you might understand that the information or problem has switched to be sufficiently painful (eg plenty of special figures or oddity in data formatting) that you simply can’t catch all of the special cases and also you would’ve been best writing the SQL query to begin with. In Godin’s example, possibly you ought to simply return the yak pillow and hope the neighbor will not spot the missing stuffing, or they’ll choose to only have it back instead of wait that you should repair it whenever, or just bite the bullet of upsetting them just a little or order the hose on Amazon . com even when it is $5 more just to make it happen or, spend the money for damn toll like other people or finally, is waxing the vehicle useful whatsoever (I am talking about really, who notices)?
Here ‘yak-shaving’ works as a helpful mental trigger which could break you from the myopic problem-solving loop. This type of yak-shaving is generally quite bad, and if you do not get out of it in no time, can result in considerable exhaustion and total waste of time, and lock you into bad lengthy-term decisions. Therefore it is best to periodically ask, discover making progress on the problem of intrinsic interest for you, "so that all the work, what’s it for anyway? Basically were beginning over on your own – understanding what I actually do now – is that this really the way i would approach this issue?Inch
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your work is the easiest method to solve the issue overall, it is simply that everything has been failing and you’ve got been encountering continual problems, so you are nested many layers deep coping with the cascade of problems and documentation
…all of your (encrypted) backups are damaged since you can’t make the most recent understanding key since your drive is corrupted since you were running the GPU 24/7 (to mention a current illustration of mine) so you are inside a LiveCD attempting to mount the drive trying passwords trying…
Within this situation, additionally to merely shaving the yak, you must do root-cause analysis – you’re experiencing what could be known as muri or even the swiss-cheese type of failure – and additionally to working out how you can solve each proximate problem in route, understand why they happened & preventing them later on. In programming, this frequently entails filing bug reports & document patches, formalizing your recovery methods as scripts or programs, adding tests or redundancy or upgrading hardware, and writing publish-mortems.
Therefore the OP interpretation of a collection of nested related problems here is only a type of this. But here, simply yak shaving may solve the fur problem & allow popping, but it is insufficient. It isn’t enough to merely close individuals open loops, and have a method for recording open loops. Root-cause analysis is required. Why did the yak fur fall from the pillow to begin with and just how will it be avoided again? Why did not he have his EZPass to begin with? Why wasn’t the hose placed on the weekly grocery list (there’s a grocery list right?) and replaced lengthy before? And so forth. Without attacking problems at the bottom, you may as well purchase a periodic pass towards the zoo, since you are just applying bandaids to some complex system failing, and if you do not inflict root-cause fixes, eventually your problems will seriously compare and you will find yourself hit with a so-known as ‘perfect storm’ (really perfectly foreseeable & inevitable) after which you’ll be sorry.
So ‘yak-shaving’ is really a helpful heuristic to keep planning stacks nested not very deeply by periodically asking whether the first is falling prey to 1 of individuals 3 failure modes, and want to get out of the yak-shaving by a suitable countermeasure of either: interrogating the reason why for that akrasia locating a better approach or prioritizing fixing the main-reasons for requiring to yak-shave (instead of concentrating on the yak-shaving).
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Resourse: http://lesswrong.com/lw/oql/in_support_of_yak_shaving/
15 Things You're Doing Wrong In The Shower
Video COMMENTS:
The claun that comments on whatever he wants.: I'm sorry, but even after knowing all of this, I will still shower the same way I always have:\n1) Jump into the shower.\n2) Rub soap and shampoo across my hair, junk and armpits.\n3) Stand there for a good 15 minutes, pondering my existance. \n4) Upon releasing myself from that mental state, I jump out, ignore the towel, and shake the water off like a dog.
Elizabeth Midford: The very last one is me.
Moses BEAR36: I dropped the soap in prison. \n\n\n\n\n\nOn purpose.
Allen Guerrero: lol did u get raped?
Moses BEAR36: Allen Guerrero I had to earn a favor with the Aryan brotherhood in order to get a shiv to kill my bunk mate and being of brown Hispanic appearance they weren't just gonna give it to me. Atleast not for free…
Mellow Plenty: I sucked pussy in the shower once.
Gertann: Bro. Everyone knows it's a lie
Benjamin Tozier: I would just like to say, the only reason i'm still still subscribed to Danger Dolan is the lists. I do applaud the animation's style and humor, but i still remember the good ol days of March 5th, 2014.
KayaDaKitsune: I was just taking a shower-
Hoss Hopson: yea