the flow state isn't something that is triggered by music. It can help maybe, but it's not a pre-requisite.
It's something common to a lot of creative fields, that moment where u enter a sort of hyper-focused state where the line between you and the code blurs and you operate at peak efficiency.
It quite literally feels like overclocking your brain. I miss it a lot.
Yep. But, in most senses, trading algorithms don't need to interact with humans, or human society. Is the world around the "thought experiment" AI CEO dehumanized enough that that's also the case for it?
If not, I'd expect major problems there.
A related point - trading algo's can completely pivot in seconds, and live & die by extremely simple and short-term metrics. Even in a human-free world, that's not at all how the vast majority of industries work. What is "profit", when your AI CEO is organizing the construction of a new steel mill? Judging its performance then requires deep domain expertise.
Stats is one of those subjects which displays the dunning kruger effect really well.
Sure on the surface stuffile averages, medians, standard deviations etc are quite easy but the moment you start going deeper you realize how difficult and un-intuitive things start to get.
I'm still in the valley of despair, and frankly it's probably the best place to be in for the average person. Understand the basics and know just enough to realize how easy it is to mislead people with it.
One interesting thing I've just come to notice is that ever since I started using AI agents, ive not had a single moment of 'flow-state' whereas I used to semi-frequently have such experiences prior.
I feel like some parallels can be drawn between the reading and coding brain in this regard.
I take breaks from AI agents and write a percentage of commits purely by hand, partly to keep experiencing the flow state, partly because I think I need the expertise.
To make it worse, I feel like the idea is really good, but I have no clue why on earth this requires 'AI'
I've seen similar clocks (software) that work by just storing a bunch of quotes and sentences from all kinds of different literature and then randomly picking one to show (with credits)
You get the same effect and (bonus) you get exposed to some piece of art that you may not have known about before.
It's really interesting how the education system works, you walk into a room of 7-year olds and you'd be amazed at the level of curiosity and interest those kids have for everything around them, you can literally see it in their eyes.
Fast forward a few years and all of that is gone, in teenage classrooms. There is no "awe", it has meticulously been sucked out of them.
I really love maker spaces exactly for this reason, it helps keep that spark alive.
By that same logic, you could compare a room full of 7-year-olds to a room full of teenagers and claim that the school system gives people sexual libidos.
It's true that adolescents are very behaviorally different from younger kids, but it isn't clear how much of that is natural biological development, how much is parenting, how much is culture, and how much is the school system.
To be fair: this was a parent stepping up to offer the students something unique. Doing so with children is easier than it is with teenagers, but I think that has more to do with the values we instill than it does with the nature of schooling. While children are still interested in how the world works, while teenagers are more interested in popular culture.
The reason why I say that is because most children seem to be curious about non-school stuff, but even the little ones can lack curiosity about the things they learn in school. Math is the classic example. While you will always have a few who are intensely curious about it, I have to mentally prepare myself to present how amazing math is anytime I say the word in front of children. (In my case, it's not that hard since I grew up fascinated by math-adjacent subjects. For most people though, that would be difficult.)
Being interested in popular culture is being interested in how the world works. It's an interest in how influence and power and money make things move in the rooms that aren't factories, and how to navigate your way into and out of them safely.
We've designed a world where math mostly doesn't hurt you when you're not thinking about it, but boy, oh boy, can your community, social circle, or people you don't even know hurt you if you haven't paid attention to and aligned yourself with the common sentiment.
> We've designed a world where math mostly doesn't hurt you when you're not thinking about it, but boy, oh boy, can your community, social circle, or people you don't even know hurt you if you haven't paid attention to and aligned yourself with the common sentiment.
This isn't the result of anyone's design. In human communities hundreds of thousands of years ago, your community, social circle, or people you don't even know (because they are foreigners from a different 100-person hunter-gatherer band than your 100-person hunter-gatherer band) could absolutely hurt you; and these are the conditions that human beings evolved our social skills in. Understanding math came much later in the history of humanity.
I don't think this is necessary at all, anecdotal but I used to have terrible social anxiety and fear of public speaking but after putting myself through it for several rounds it just kind of clicked.
Eventually, your body learns to adapt and understand that this thing you dreaded isn't so bad after all
