
Ten Lessons I Wish I Had Been Taught (1997) [pdf] - srimukh
https://www.ams.org/notices/199701/comm-rota.pdf
======
cableshaft
"Richard Feynman was fond of giving the following advice on how to be a
genius. You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present
in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every
time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of
your twelve problems to see whether it helps.”

Basically just did this again this week. I was re-reading a three year old
board game design diary I had written, and came upon an old idea that I had
put on the backburner after the prototype played just "ok". I tried to come up
with ways to fix it for awhile, and the ideas I had then were so different
they morphed into completely different designs (more specifically, it morphed
into 1 different design, which bombed in playtesting, and then that morphed
into a totally different design, which did really well in playtesting and I
showed to publishers, and then reflecting on their feedback resulted in a
completely new design sparking in my head).

I thought about the problem for a few more seconds, and one new thing to try
popped into my head, not a totally different game this time still keeping with
the core mechanism, but a different method how players were given and used the
cards, and I dug into it a bit more, and I decided on a different method of
point distribution for the cards, and then thought a bit more, and the thought
of adding abilities that encourage comboing based one previous or next cards
played popped into my head, and then I decided to run with it, came up with a
new prototype, tried it out, and it felt at least three times better, and felt
more like a game that could be published.

I have a game that is currently a finalist in a game design contest whose
design had remained dormant for over a year because I was unsatisfied with it,
but something made me think about it again and a new mechanism popped in my
head and I tried that and felt a lot better about it.

The Feynman method works for me, at least when it comes to designing board
games. I don't mind shelving game designs for a long period of time anymore,
since I have had so much luck with just thinking about them again every once
in awhile and fresh new ideas popping into my head to improve the game, that
likely wouldn't have happened if I kept forcing myself to think about that
game.

~~~
kleer001
RUMINATING!

I just watched a bunch of Marvin Minsky lectures about his theory of the
Society of Mind. One of his early questions was (paraphrased) "With all these
words for emotions where are the words for thinking?" He eventually popped the
ones he'd found up on the board. And, of course, I sketched up some of my own.
But nowhere in either of those lists was the quite apropos reference to how a
whole swath of unrelated mammals have come to solve the process of digestion
of rough food material. And, if we consider thoughts, ideas, and problems to
be rough material then I think the word works perfectly.

I'd heard of Feynman's process, but for some reason never thought to assign it
this very appropriate word. Thanks for the inspiration and reminder. Best of
luck on the game! Please Show HN when you can share it. :)

~~~
cableshaft
I'll check out Marvin Minsky, thanks for the mention.

I am planning to take advantage of this weekend and try to get a little caught
up on how to play videos for my games. I've got 6 designs already filmed (Cake
Walk is the one that's a finalist in a game competition):
[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDjU-rdSngu-
eeqJnc2On...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDjU-rdSngu-eeqJnc2OnQl-
QG4FcI_IA)

If I get the newest one up this weekend, it will probably be called 'Shared
Fate'.

I didn't think Show HN is really the place to show off analog board games, so
I wasn't really considering it. I don't have anything published yet anyway
(just one game signed with a publisher), so they're all prototypes.

Does anyone know if posting my game design videos on Show HN would be
appreciated? I come up with a lot of designs, though (my 'need to make a how
to play video' backlog is like 30 games at this point). Assuming I got more
consistent at filming videos, I could probably post one every week or two.
Several of them you could probably play at home with components from other
games.

~~~
kleer001
> I didn't think Show HN is really the place to show off analog board games

Let's game it out:

Worst case scenario it gets flagged for removal and your account gets deleted.
How likely is that? ;)

Most likely scenario, I think, it goes the way of most posts, ignored.

Best case scenario, people like it and you get some good conversations about
it, some interest, and a few new players.

~~~
cableshaft
I think I still have a bit of residual hesitation from my Reddit days when I
posted about a video game I worked on to a couple of subreddits (r/gaming and
r/indiegames, I believe) and an admin shadowbanned me from the entire Reddit
site for self-promotion (and didn't realize it until a moderator informed me
months later that he'd been manually approving my comments periodically. I
just thought people didn't care about half of my comments anymore).

Makes me a little more cautious of posting in places where it may not be
welcome.

~~~
kleer001
Fair enough. HN isn't Reddit, if it needs to be said.

Also I've found there's a knack to promoting your game on Reddit and you may
have been a bit too forward. From what I recall it works if you take time to
figure out what tone and explanation works. I feel there's a tutorial out
there somewhere about how to market well on social media. Myself I'm not an
expert.

Also Reddit mods can be petty little tyrants. I'm sorry one traumatized you
so.

------
Forge36
(I really enjoyed this article) It does take some effort to translate from
academia to a corporate environment I'll try do so in a reply.

High level points:

Lecturing

Blackboard Technique

Publish the Same Result Several Times

You Are More Likely to Be Remembered by Your Expository Work

Every Mathematician Has Only a Few Tricks

Do Not Worry about Your Mistakes

Use the Feynman Method

Give Lavish Acknowledgments

Write Informative Introductions

Be Prepared for Old Age

~~~
Forge36
Present Directly

Present Clearly

Iterate On Your Work

Specialize: Add as much new detail to a single piece of work.

Everyone has specialized skills, there's fame in using them to their fullest
potential to explore many areas.

>There are two kinds of mistakes. There are fatal mistakes that destroy a
theory, but there are also contingent ones, which are useful in testing the
stability of a theory.

Use the Feynman Method >keep a dozen of your favorite problems con- stantly
present in your mind, [...] Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new
result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps.

Give Credit To Others no matter how small

Summarize Everything Clearly and as long as is necessary: show your work
second.

Your position as an authority will change abruptly. (I'm have a harder time
rephrasing this. Your work will go from "meh he's washed out" to "he's
perfected his craft" for identical reasons depending on how well it's
received)

------
alderz
Related to the "Every Mathematician Has Only a Few Tricks" point, there is a
Mathoverflow question [https://mathoverflow.net/questions/363119/every-
mathematicia...](https://mathoverflow.net/questions/363119/every-
mathematician-has-only-a-few-tricks) that tries to list all of those tricks,
which is pretty interesting.

~~~
joe_the_user
That quote about hating Erdos is interesting. I think my professor for UCLA
undergraduate honors seminar from years ago, hated Erdos (he at least express
dislike for a colleague of Erdos who operated similar). My impression is Erdos
appeared to operated as something like a whirlwind of chaotic fact and theory
finding whereas at least some other mathematicians aim to build larger
unifying structures. It's a sort of Erdos versus Bourbaki divide (not to say
who's right).

------
mxschumacher
I wonder how the "Publish the Same Result Several Times" recommendation ties
into the "publish or perish"-mantra. I suspect that 1997 was a different time.
Many academics have a super-human publication cadence, not so much because of
all the new knowledge they've extracted from the universe but because they
aggressively re-publish their existing results. Very low read- and citation
counts are common implications.

From the outside, it seems hard to sift through all the redundancy. At the
edge of knowledge it gets harder to verify what is genuinely new and what is a
rehash.

It feels like the infrastructure and format around scientific publishing could
benefit from compression, consistency and version control.

~~~
generationP
> "Publish the Same Result Several Times"

Do not take this too literally. Usually it won't work or will get you branded
as a self-plagiarist (not exactly a deadly sin, but not a good reputation
either; people will discount your work for this). In Rota's example of Riesz,
the first publication was "in some obscure Hungarian journal", the second one
was in Comptes Rendus, and the third was in a "real" journal. The choice of
venues is no accident; you couldn't do it the other way round. Comptes is
specifically for short (ca. 4 page long) communications that mostly serve to
announce results and ideas; it's not unlike the "extended abstracts" you
submit to conferences. And there are no obscure Hungarian journals any more in
the age of the Internet. You won't get the same result published in 3 "normal"
journals unless at least two referees are asleep at the wheel.

The modern way to get high publication count "for free" is doing a lot of
incremental work (as opposed to trying to write up something definitive and
general) and splitting your papers up into "least publishable units". These
aren't bad things to do, though: Often you have to do incremental work as a
warm-up before you have a chance to see the full picture (unless you are
Grothendieck, presumably), and the thinner your papers are, the easier (and
faster) they will get through peer review. It's a matter of knowing where to
stop.

~~~
MaxBarraclough
There's a Wikipedia article on this:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Least_publishable_unit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Least_publishable_unit)

------
dang
Rota had at least three different ten-lesson sets:
[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=comments%3E0%20rota%20lessons&sort=byDate&type=story&storyText=none)

Looks like the previous discussions of this set are:

2017
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15989599](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15989599)

2016
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11747598](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11747598)

2011
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3220746](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3220746)

2007 (1 comment)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=85611](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=85611)

~~~
dredmorbius
Wait, we can limit Algolia results by comment counts?

Oh, also author, points, and timestamps:

[https://hn.algolia.com/help](https://hn.algolia.com/help)

------
durnygbur
These hints reminded me that we don't have "great scientists" anymore. Can you
list recent Nobel Prize laureates?

Great scientists were basically people-institutions and all the mundane and
scrupulous work was done by assistants, doctoral candidates, technicians, as
we have an example of Hilbert and some much less known mathematician. There
still exist relicts of this system in the academia.

With increasing emancipation and alternative opportunities this extend of
exploitation of the nameless is not possible anymore, and this is good.

~~~
535188B17C93743
We do have "pop scientists". While they're not all necessarily
"groundbreaking" or "leading researchers", I wouldn't discount the impact of
folks like Neil Degrasse Tyson, Michio Kaku, and Brian Greene.

~~~
toyg
In the UK, Brian Cox for physics/astronomy and David Attenborough in the
natural sciences are likely responsible for enough recruitment that will
probably lead to significant knowledge gains.

------
JadeNB
Could we put "Rota" in the title? It's currently not even clear from the title
that this is about mathematics, let alone that it's written by an expert and
highly opinionated mathematician.

------
scottlocklin
Rota is sort of the RP Feynman of mathematics; his "Indiscrete Thoughts" was
probably the best thing I read in 2019; I recommend it to anyone who enjoys
two fisted tales of applied math.

------
xenonite
The author writes that a scientist is probably best remembered by his or her
expository work. How ironic that I have never heard of this author before, and
this paper is probably the only one I will ever read of him. So his statement
rings true. His name is Gian-Carlo Rota.

------
jhallenworld
"My late friend Stan Ulam used to remark that his life was sharply divided
into two halves. In the first half, he was always the youngest person in the
group; in the second half, he was always the oldest."

Can confirm that this happens to software engineers.

------
fouc
This seems to be related to doing well in Academia

~~~
Forge36
It is, but the advice isn't strictly academic. How to give good lectures ->
how to present well in a meeting.

How to acknowledge mistakes, and differentiate between fatal mistakes ones of
lesser detail

------
lorey
Damn, I really like the design/layout. Anyone know where to find it by any
chance?

~~~
jamessb
The AMS uses LaTeX for typesetting. They release packages for their other
journals [1], but not _Notices_ , which apparently [2] uses Lucia Bright, a
font that is not free.

[1]: [https://www.ams.org/arc/journals/journal-
produce.html](https://www.ams.org/arc/journals/journal-produce.html)

[2]: [https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/76053/which-font-
is-...](https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/76053/which-font-is-used-in-
notices-of-the-ams)

~~~
pflanze
The PDF file contains the string "/Creator (QuarkXPress\252: LaserWriter 8
8.3.3)", so it doesn't appear to be made with LaTeX.

I'm not a designer but I know designer friends using QuarkXPress around that
time, and it is my understanding that you'd create the layout largely via the
QuarkXPress GUI and also much manual tweaking, so the layout was probably
confined to the company producing this document.

