Random Thoughts

Back from california today. Not a big fan of flying.

Anyways here's some random thoughts.

Read two books on the trip. Super Freakonomics and Talent is Overrated. Both are pretty good.

I'm not sure there is a connection between self-efficacy and mastery. Self Efficacy is the belief that you are in control of your life. Hoping you can overcome obstacles seems reasonable. If there's a problem, try to overcome it.  A generalized belief that you have control over your own destiny seems like trash. If improvement through practice requires small challenges outside your comfort zones, why not just approach each of those problems one by one? Don't create some vague belief system that says you're probably right.  Because you're not. You are wrong.

Modern Science is like the catholic church of the middle ages. Access to the bible is limited as peer reviewed journals and scientific data is limited. (It's Not like those are in a book store or easy to find on the interwebs.) Priests translated the bible from latin/greek and spoke it to the laypeople. Authors like Malcom Gladwell or whoever wrote freakonomics write in understandable bits and bites.  They do the hard work of finding and interpret the scientific texts for the hoi polloi.  Maybe I should just buy books for their reference sections and try to get at the actual information. Too bad thinking for onesself takes effort. It's much easier to have someone else think for me. Laziness wins again.  =/

I wonder what intelligence is. Maybe everything is learned (aka Nurture). Geoff Colvin makes a pretty good case that talent is bullshit.

I need a feedback model for Melee. ORLY said after a tournament he was frustrated. That he either messed up his tech skill or made a bad decision. That seems like a shitty model for feedback. How do you know why you lost? How do you know what to improve? If you keep losing to same people, how the hell do you know if you are improving, stagnating, or getting shittier? I don't even know. Like I have my own mental model of the game. I fit each piece of data in there, but I'm not the best so clearly this could be improved. Maybe I could work on understanding failure. If you can isolate the problem it's much much easier to fix.

I watched the best samus play a few games. Was impressive. Maybe I'll write out those reflections.

How do I improve my decisiveness? Lol just asking that question highlights my hesitation. If I was decisive I would know what to do. Regardless how can I practice it? Just make decisions? Maybe the problem is lack of preparation. Maybe I should believe in self-efficacy so I have less doubt.

Gonna have to dig through Talent is Overrated and make some practice methods. Hope they work.

First day of classes is tomorrow. I hope the people don't suck.