Interesting study. The performance increase on the difficult task as audience size increases is counterintuitive at first, but it makes sense when you consider how many humans excel at performing in front of large audiences.
Yet for some of us the stress of being observed and scrutinized is crippling regardless of the task difficulty. I've bombed so many interviews because of this. :(
The people watching were familiar to the chimps, so desire to please or pride may have overcome fear of failure.
It was also only 6 chimps and the experiments were run over many years. I bet replication is going to be troublesome.
The adrenaline from being in front of an audience helps a lot.
But when I was a beginner at it, the stress was indeed crippling.
The cure for that kind of stress is to keep doing it, the stress will go away. Like if your throat freezes up when stepping behind the podium, just take every opportunity you can to public speak.
P.S. I don't get any adrenaline from a zoom presentation. As a result, they aren't near as good as the live ones.
> when I was a beginner at it, the stress was indeed crippling.
But that was because humans were watching you. I imagine it would be notably less stressful if you were being watched by an increasingly large population of chimpanzees instead of people.
Personally I imagine that the larger that group of chimpanzees got, the more relaxed I would feel. Just think about solving a problem in a room with 1,000 chimpanzees just chilling out and watching without a single other human in the room.
Likewise I suspect chimpanzees would perform different if watched other chimpanzees.
This ignores something pretty obvious.
Obviously a chimpanze recognizes humans as something like itself, and that the humans opinions matter. At the very least a chimp knows that the humans totally control it's life.
You have a very different understanding of the relationship between yourself and any group of chimps.
> Yet for some of us the stress of being observed and scrutinized is crippling regardless of the task difficulty. I've bombed so many interviews because of this. :(
I feel your pain.
I had a fourth-round interview recently where I was expected to write code while narrating my thoughts to two people sitting either side of me - and while perched on a wobbly office stool at a standing desk. Couldn't think. Totally bombed it.
Oh that sounds awful I’m sorry! I’ve had to do code tests in online IDEs which fine, but I use vim and so I had to write everything in vim, paste to the IDE, get the live feedback from the rendered output and make adjustments back and forth. It would’ve been fine if not for the timed aspect.
I can’t imagine adding two people, an unfamiliar desk setup, an unfamiliar keyboard even, all while talking about what I’m doing.
Is, "I use vim", a computer version of I am vegetarian?
Well, some people is know for only do their job when a manager is around. They behave similar after all.
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My good man, this is the internet. Grammar does not matter as long as you are understood.
>Grammar does not matter
most people who learn/are learning a foreign language appreciate getting corrections and suggested improvements. People willing to take the time and analyze and share are a valuable resource.
Regardless if you're struggling with the language and could use the help, or just writing hastily, the correction is excessive and reads like an LLM response.
Not native speaker here. Corrections are soetimes helpful, but I prefer shorter corrections. Something like:
> "know": you should use "known" (adjetive) instead of "know" (verb).
And add more details in case the author or someone else ask for clarifications.
no, we don’t appreciate fixing small typos becoming the main point of discussion in a technical forum. It was completely understandable and sounded like someone not agreeing with the content but not capable of refuting it
My correction itself was an interpretation. The phrase was not fully intelligible to me even.
I would have thought:
> Well, some people are known for only doing their job when a manager is around. They behave similarly after all [to the monkeys].
Also, some days I wish there was a way to fix typos in restaurant menus.
Although I would still be flummoxed by "Pork Floss, Chinese Sausage Scorched Rice" (cơm cháy chà bông lạp xưởng)
I understood it (I think), basically they were saying some people only do their job when their manager is around hence the monkeys and people aren’t that different after all.
Hope this helps
Its the specificity that's important. The general vibe is easy to interpret for commonly understood phrases, but often language complexity allows for subtle nuances that may be difficult to interpret if they are not properly used.
Let’s break it down:
> some people is know
Some people are known
> for only do their job when a manager is around.
for only doing their job when a manager is around.
> They behave similar after all.
Their behavior is similar to the chimpanzees in the study.
Now, let’s put that all together:
> Some people are known for only doing their job when a manager is around. Their behavior is similar to the chimpanzees in the study.
That wasn’t so hard now, was it?
Edit: I see that the two sibling comments to mine interpreted it the same way.
No. Grammar does matter on the Internet. So does spelling. Malformed writing takes extra effort to decipher, so even if you're understood, you may also be secretly hated for it.
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Usually, I have become good at pretending that no one is watching. Given my seniority, I explain to the people watching that, I will first prepare something, they are free to watch, I will also write comments so they know what am thinking(unfortunately, I can’t talk and type or draw at the same time), and then I will explain. Or if they prefer, I explain and do the coding/drawing after in bursts of explain-do-explain-do.
Of course, silicon valley has taught that people who can speak and code at the same time are like best things, but if a team is not happy to accept other people’s shortcomings, am probably fine not working with them.
> but it makes sense when you consider how many humans excel at performing in front of large audiences.
yeah but maybe these people are just as good when they aren’t in front of huge audiences..
My performance on computer tasks changes when people watch me. I suddenly forget how to type.
When I’m coding I find it much easier once everyone else in the house has gone out or gone to sleep.
It’s like there’s a little bit of my social brain I have to keep on if there’s anyone who could potentially talk to me and when I can switch that off I can use my whole brain for the task at hand and it’s much easier.
It’s not like I’m bad at concentrating. I am that guy who can sit in a noisy open plan office and concentrate on one thing while everyone is talking and trying to get attention. But the lack of all people still really helps.
Does anyone else experience this?
Yes, I experience this exactly. In solitude I can sit and work on a challenging task for 12 hours or more, falling asleep with my laptop and picking up where I left off upon waking. I’m so into it I forget to eat and shower.
I remember hearing a story about a guitarist who was trying to play his scales as fast as possible, and an observer described it as the guitarist being so focused “he forgot to breathe”. That resonates with me.
But if I’m sitting around in the evening with the family, I can’t achieve anything like this level of focus. I’ve come to think of it like an airplane or rocket. It uses most of its energy to get off the ground, but once in motion high above the earth, it can stay in motion using a fraction of that energy.
Being around other people who might interrupt is like launching a rocket, and 3 minutes into the flight we have to land because someone wants a snack.
Sometimes when I try to think about something challenging in these circumstances, in a matter of 20 minutes I feel exhausted to the point it’s hard to keep my eyes open, as if I’ve tried to launch a rocket every 2 minutes and have no fuel left, even though I haven’t gone anywhere.
My performance falls to zero when someone(less familiar) is watching my screen, unless it is a colleague doing pair-programming.
Also random manager, “dude!! How do you even read those texts? So tiny” when passing by behind me. (I use “More Space” resolution on macbook as I prefer to have many things on single screen instead of constantly becoming a bobbing head looking at much neglected monitors on my desk).
I feel you on this. I forget all shortcuts. I'm sure it's like me watching my mother use a computer.
It seems like just the general idea of ‘an audience’ is too broad.
Take a football match. The presence of your own fans has a big positive effect (usually). Presence of the other teams fans has a negative effect (usually).
I would expect that the belief of the person doing the task about the audience and whether they make them feel supported or nervous or angry or whatever other complex emotion would all change the effect
Checks out with what I read in "Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel."
Man, I read that book to my kids so many times I can probably still recite it in it's entirety.
I miss having little kids.
Everyone tells you it goes fast but you really can't prepare for the whiplash you get when 20 years have slid by.
To anyone with little kids; no amount of money is worth the time you have with them. Literally none. You can never get that time back, and every experience for them is important.
Subsequently, I think I understand why parents are almost always better grandparents. They get it.
Loughla is spitting truth here.
Those of you in the rat race, when you get home after a hard day and an hour of sitting in traffic, please, just sit in your car for a minute or two. Shed all of that. Pick a tree in your front yard and name it your worry tree. Before you go in, leave your stress/worries/frustrations with it. It won't stay gone but the intention will make it so those first five minutes when you walk into the door you can be present and enjoy your kids, instead of just bringing in a ball of intensity they won't understand.
Those memories of 'mommy's home' or 'daddy's home' shouts of joy when you go inside are pure gold for the rest of your life.
At a risk of being pedantic, some amount of money is worth some of the time you could be spending with them. The trick is finding the balance.
I think the idea is “no amount of money beyond what you can reasonable attain in a balanced work period” is worth pursuing over your relationship with your kids, but it probably is worth specifying. I think some people find the notion so absurd that they don’t take it as seriously as they should.
I don’t consider myself totally stupid but it took me many years to figure this out. I took major salary cuts to find work with real balance. And to do work I could be proud of as well. I could have started much sooner but I felt this force pushing me to earn a bit more. Vacations could be a little longer (though I’d have to put out fires while I’m on them). We could afford a home (though kids don’t actually care all that much if you rent or own, anyway). I could afford more convenient food to save time (though my kids prefer when I take time to cook nice food from scratch for them). Ultimately it’s like… Your kids will be happy because you are, and you’re spending time with them. It’s that simple. If you can pay the bills, that’s good enough.
The balance is tough to find. I think this is especially true if you grow up poor, or come from a family with very high expectations. Both seem to be poison for the mind when it comes to finances and perception of success. In both cases there’s never enough.
Ever read The Razor's Edge?
My post doc mentor gave me that book to read, and didn't really tell me why. The first half is socialite nonsense. But then there's a deep dive into finding joy in life that isn't related to work.
He could see that my very poor background was making me look to move up to high pay, high stress jobs and was politely trying to intervene.
Finding balance is hard, but worth it. I'm making less than I should at a job that's okay. But I have 45 days of PTO, and another 18-20 holidays. I can take two full months off every year and nobody complains.
Thanks, I’ll check that out. Lately I love finding stuff like this not only for myself, but for my kids eventually who I’ll probably need to indirectly nudge here and there as your post doc mentor did.
That all sounds great to me. I can say with certainty that it would have sounded terrible 10 years ago. How can you waste all that time not advancing your career? The irony is that the PTO and holidays absolutely do advance your career in the sense that they make you a more complete, fulfilled person who can keep cracking away at their career in a steady and consistent fashion for the decades to come. When you’re 25 you have no idea how badly you’ll need that, and how soon.
YMMV
This might be why I do so well at a coffee shop sometimes.
Very interesting result! It does kind of baffle me, though, when people describe things as “uniquely human” when even a passing familiarity with basically any mammal (and often other ‘simpler’ creatures) reveals that they also do these things.
So every time someone fails doing a demo it is proof that they are great at the task and or performing demos, because if they found it hard thier performance would have improved and they would have smashed it, so they must have found i easy.
I will be adding this to my list of demo failure excuses.
Having someone watch me coding helps immensely to tame my ADHD.
Opening HN because brain is bored is not an option.
Works for me too:-) (Not ADHD though)
At a co-working space (or in an office) I have to work, or I'd feel embarrassed whenever someone else was nearby (which is almost all the time).
Chimps' prompt engineering.
> The significance of witnesses to humans under various contexts could be explained by the importance of reputation management to our species.
It could also be explained as the researches accidentally recreating "Clever Hans."
'After 1916, there is no record of him and his fate is unknown, but he was drafted into World War I as a military horse and "killed in action in 1916 or was consumed by hungry soldiers"'
I feel like regardless of confirmation behind how high the intellect of the horse was, this is no way him to go out. Hans truly loved him. This may sound dramatic but it feels like if my pet cat were to get killed in war and possibly eaten after i died
Got me curious about consumption of cat meat. https://www.wrdw.com/content/news/President-Trump-Signs-the-... Federal act signed in 2018 banning consumption of dog and cat meat. Was previously legal in 44 states.
Wouldn't it still be legal in 44 states?
There's a federal ban on marijuana but it's legal in many states.
Those states won’t themselves prosecute you for consuming cat (or cannabis), but that doesn’t mean the act of consumption is legal.
Is there a reason? Like disease or something? Weird.
If the test was what the images in the paper suggest then chimps are way better at it than humans. So there's no way to borrow intelligence from the audience.
> After a formal investigation in 1907, psychologist Oskar Pfungst demonstrated that the horse was not actually performing these mental tasks, but was watching the reactions of his trainer.
Sounds like machine learning
Sounds like a failure mode in machine learning.
Erudition signalling may be in full circle.
Mine gets worse when people watch me.
Can't wait for a middle manager to quote this study at me to justify his no-WFH policy.
mean reversion to the level of available feedback seems like the principle at play.
All hail the quantum chimpanzees!
(No, that's not how quantum mechanics work)
Sometimes the jokes write themselves
The title should have been...
Monkey Seen, Monkey Do
Because they think they're getting treats for it, from the humans.
I don't think they see any value in computer tasks other than getting treats.
They do the task because they know that they will get a good reward from an automatic feeder, with or without an audience. They might perceive them as competition, better get the treat before one of the hairless ones takes it. In private, just randomly mashi f the screen until the feeder is cooperative might be good enough, even if it takes a little longer.
Doesn't sound so different from a lot of jobs...
The scene from Groundhog's Day with the two drunk guys.
Stuck in the same day over and over again. Yep, sounds about right.
Same with humans!
Pretty much all of that headline has me saying "wait, what??"
Pretty soon the apes in charge are going to be using this study to demand that the chimps return to the office 5 days per week.
This matches what we've observed at the company I work at.
The chimpanzees seemed like a big cost saving at first but when you factor in the wages of the human supervisors, it's hardly worth the legal issues it causes.
That's why I've a manager
> Audience + Easy Task = Performance Decrease > Audience + Difficult Task = Performance Increase
I haven't been able to replicate this during coding interviews
it seems to be Easy Task + increasing audience = doesn't really do much.
and Difficult Task + increasing audience = improved performance
which makes sense to me. 1 person is a distraction. a group of people is an audience.
So the chimps will be the ones to finally bring open office plans to an end?
Paradoxically, my work slows when chimpanzees are in the room observing me
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Maybe they're quantum chimpanzees
> Model 2: Performance changes with the number of total audience present
I hope everyone realizes what this means, just look at those scaling laws: if we can just fund a company that gets money to pay potentially millions of people to watch a chimpanzee performing a difficult task, we could potentially get super human intelligence.
If we can get, and I know this sounds wild, trillions of dollars in funding we might be able to pay billions of people to watch a single chimp and that will potentially lead us to singularity, saving us from climate change.