Automated Processes

[swan_tower]

This is apropos of my recent post on cooking vs. driving. It seemed easier to make a new post than to respond individually to the multiple people who made related points.

When I talked about the “attention” either task requires, what I’m really referring to is the extent to which certain processes are automated or not. If you think back to when you first started driving, changing lanes involved something like the following steps:

1. Look for a suitable gap
2. Put on turn signal
3. Check blind spot
4. Move into gap
5. End turn signal

(Or some variant thereof.)

Once you’ve been driving for a while, though, the process of changing lanes looks something more like this:

1. Change lanes

All the smaller steps that go into the act are sufficiently automated that you don’t have to think about them, not to the degree that you did before.

So it is with me and cooking — or rather, when it comes to cooking, I’m still a novice driver. If I’m making a dish that calls for chicken sautéed in garlic and olive oil, then to me, the process looks like this:

1. Put olive oil in pan
2. Peel garlic cloves
3. Smash up garlic cloves
4. Put garlic in oil
5. Get cutting board
6. Get chicken out of package, onto board
7. Throw away packaging
8. Cut up chicken
9. Heat up burner
10. Put chicken in oil
11. Cook until — hmm, is that long enough? — not sure — okay, we’ll call that done.

Whereas for those of you who cook a lot, I’m betting the process looks more like:

1. Sauté chicken in garlic and olive oil

Because the steps along the way are sufficiently automated that you don’t really have to think about them to any high degree. “Peel garlic cloves” isn’t a process in its own right; it’s part of a larger process.

And this means you have more processing cycles available for other things. When I’m driving, I can think about writing or sing along with the music or have a conversation. When the experienced cooks among you are cooking, you can listen to an audiobook or watch a TV show or — and this is what several of you reported — think about cooking. But my impression is that what you’re thinking about is stuff like “hmmm, could use a bit more rosemary” or “this should have a salad to go with it” or “if I want to make this again, we’ll need to buy more nutmeg.” In other words, you can contemplate the bigger picture, whereas I am busy struggling with the fact that I still don’t know how to cut up a chicken breast very efficiently. I can’t spare the cycles to think about anything other than that task right there.

Of course, automation hath its dangers. Drivers often overestimate their ability to multitask, which is why laws against texting while driving are increasingly common. And probably most of us who drive a lot have had the experience where you set out for the doctor’s office or wherever, but then autopilot takes over and you drive to the gym instead. (Not just a hazard of driving; it can also happen on foot/bike/etc!) In the kitchen, inattention can result in a cut finger or a burned pan. But the fact remains that competence consists partly of being able to do the minor stuff without having to think about it in a directed, conscious fashion.

I am a competent driver. I am not a competent cook. I would probably enjoy cooking more if I were competent, because then I could think about other stuff . . . but that would require me to cook more frequently first.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

Comments

[stormsdotter.livejournal.com]

This is an awesome analogy. I have been describing something similar for years in regards to Teaching Math. People who are Good At Math can intuit "Change lanes." Most people can't do that, including myself. So I always teach All The Steps to ensure others follow how to do the problems.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Hmmm -- I wasn't thinking of intuition, precisely, which now has me contemplating where the boundary is between "intuition" and "I have learned this without noticing it."

[wshaffer.livejournal.com]

Yeah, one of things I was thinking about when I was reading the comments on the earlier post is that I spent years before I ever cooked a complete meal helping out my mother in the kitchen. And when I was doing that, I was mostly just doing individual steps, like "chop these vegetables" or "stir this pot and make sure the contents don't burn". Which meant that the first time I actually tried to produce a full meal, I had a pretty good grasp of many of the individual steps.

Of course, I'm not really sure if I like cooking because I helped my mother in the kitchen, or if I helped my mother in the kitchen because I like cooking.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I never helped my mother very much in the kitchen . . . so yeah, chicken and egg (no pun intended): do I not like cooking because I didn't do that, or did I not do that because I don't like cooking?

[dr_whom]

I never helped my father in the kitchen, but it turns out I like cooking anyway. Data point?

[pameladean]

This entire discussion is very interesting to me, since I have pretty much mastered cooking, but I still can't drive and have pretty much given up ever being able to learn to do so. Possibly because cooking, while an acute failure might involve burning down the house, does not involve multi-ton semis whose brakes might fail.

When I think about cooking, it's on several levels. One goes more like, "Remember to start the rice and set the timer. Good. I love smashing garlic cloves. CATS SHOULD NOT EAT ALLIUMS, GET AWAY FROM THAT. Okay, the ginger and garlic go in at the same time so chuck them in that teacup; hard vegetables next but carrots take longer so they need their own bowl GODDAMMIT, CAT, GET OUT OF THE SINK yes it's boring but really the broccoli florets need to be the same size or some of them will be very limp and you don't like that phooey I forgot to wrap the tofu I HATE THIS KITCHEN THERE IS NO COUNTER SPACE GET OUT OF THE GODDAMNED SINK. Where is the recipe? Right, cabbage. If you don't mix up the sauce you'll forget it and that will be annoying. That smells really nice. WHO STOLE MY CORNSTARCH?" while another goes more like, "The almonds were good in this last time but I think I'd better use up those unsalted peanuts YIKES WAS THAT YOUR PAW WHY DO YOU DO THAT YOU ARE AN OBLIGATE CARNIVORE okay you're not limping; right, peanuts go in with the scallions and cilantro, better chop the cilantro, and this fish sauce isn't really sweet enough so hmm, honey or sugar, honey's easier OUT OF THE SINK; is the longer knife clean; it's a good thing I don't cook professionally because my tofu cubes always look like Escher did them in a drunken stupor; whoops, don't forget to actually steam the frozen green beans in their little bag, because otherwise the sauce turns too watery OUT OF THE SINK Oh geeze, the rice is done already I AM NOT MAKING ANYTHING CATS LIKE AND I JUST WANT A FORK TO FLUFF THE RICE.

Hmm, those aren't as different as I'd thought, but they feel different. The pace tends to accelerate at the end.

P.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Aheheheh. Well, no cats here, but even stripping that out, that's not very much like how my brain goes when cooking. It's more like "okay, I need how much rice? And how much water? Put both in rice cooker. Plug in rice cooker. Hit lever to start rice cooker. Get out garlic. Peel garlic. Smash garlic. Get out ginger." And so on.

Which makes a far less entertaining paragraph to read or to live through. :-P

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Riffing off both posts on this: I did not use to enjoy cooking, and now I do, and for me getting to enjoy it was very much helped by increased competence: learning more about cooking generally and the individual steps particularly. If you're struggling with cutting up a skinless, boneless chicken breast odds are that you may also a)not have a really good, sharp knife, a1)not be using a steel every single time you take it out to use b)not be holding it correctly, and c)not be using the correct attack with that grip. All of those things make a *ton* of difference in how quickly and efficiently you can cut up a piece of meat (or anything, really), and at least in my case, how much I enjoy doing it. Which is to say it's not just being my able to think about other things -- which when handling a very sharp blade there isn't perhaps that much of -- there's also an active enjoyment of the task and my competence at it.

For years I heard people going on and on about the value of a single good-quality chef's knife but I was resistant; as a firm fan of my carbon steel Chinese cleaver, I thought I already had the knife thing figured out. And I still am, for certain things, a great fan of the Chinese cleaver, but I finally got pushed over the edge to try a high quality chef's knife at a demo booth at Costco, discovered that I loved the feel of it, and how much better it worked, and wound up buying it. Now I'm in love with my knife at a whole new level. I actively have fun cutting up vegetables and meat, even slicing uncooked Italian sausage which used to be such a damn' struggle with the casings not cutting cleanly.

So if you decide you want to get more competent, I recommend checking out good knives, and how to use them, and possibly getting a better one. Also, a lot of individual kitchen skills can be picked up watching YouTube -- knife skills, knife sharpening, using a steel, chopping an onion, butchering a whole chicken, etc. Some are better than others but there's an amazing wealth of useful information out there.

But here I am rambling on at length I see. I'm afraid that ever since I read The Kitchen Counter Cooking School I've become something of an evangelist...

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

My "struggle" has nothing to do with getting the blade through the meat; we have a very nice set of Wusthof knives we keep in good condition. It's me staring at the meat going "aren't you supposed to cut with the grain of the meat, or against it, or at a diagonal, or something? Which way is the grain, again? What do I do with the part underneath where there's extra bits of meat that aren't part of the main mass? Should I cut that first, or just do it with the rest of the breast? But if I do that, some of the chicken ends up wildly different sizes from the rest, and that bugs me because I AM A VIRGO GODDAMIT."

What I should do is take a kitchen knife class, like my mother did.

[yhlee.livejournal.com]

Yeah, one of the things I hate about driving, which is unfortunately a bad feedback loop, is that I have not yet clocked enough driving hours to feel comfortable doing it; I hate lane changes in particular because having to take my eyes off the road in front of me makes me super-anxious. Add to that the fact that I have to think about "left" vs. "right" and have trouble parsing the road when I'm moving faster than 30 mph and driving just becomes horrible. I wish we could move back somewhere that had actual public transit.

I hate cooking too, but it's rare that something will go wrong at high velocity with a p = mv collision situation. I've never set anything on fire and at worst I've gotten the slightly inedible meal or a thumb sliced open.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I've got all that, except for actually living with what passes for good US public transit outside of NYC. Well, and I've probably forgotten most of what I did know about driving, but I had a license once and drove around for a few weeks without too much trauma. But still not that comfortably, and I'm not thrilled by the idea of being on the road (in traffic) enough to get good at it, which is thus a vicious cycle.

Also Boston area traffic may be worse than California's, where worse means "need to pay even more attention, and those rules they tested you on don't mean as much."

[yhlee.livejournal.com]

I used to live in Boston and really miss the public transit. I'm currently in Baton Rouge, which has...I'm sure there's some historical reason for it, but the city layout is ridiculously spread out, and there are no crosswalks. Admittedly I live at the outskirts, but while the nearest elementary school is technically walkable, the lack of crosswalks and the fact that Louisiana drivers are terrible made me not want to walk my daughter in because I was afraid we'd get hit by a car during the necessary crossing-at-some-point. (She is now attending a GT program at another school and is taking the bus.) I'm not worried about a 30-min. walk, I used to walk longer when I lived in Pasadena, but the danger factor makes me unhappy.

Also, Boston drivers are crazy, but they're usually competent. Or anyway more competent than the ones we have here in Louisiana, who are crazy and incompetent. :(

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Memory says that an alumni (Caltech, so I know southern Pasadena walks) list had an argument once over whether LA drivers (obey the rules) were better or worse than Boston ones (keen attention to traffic!) and that they agreed to rag on rural drivers, who were neither law-abiding nor used to dealing with other cars on the road.

Though Baton Rouge shouldn't be that rural.

[yhlee.livejournal.com]

I have been informed by actual Louisianans that it's not just my imagination, there just seems to be a culture of bad driving around here. (I'm from Houston but have lived all over.) I have never seen so many drivers who fail to signal before switching lanes in a really risky manner.

I lived in Pasadena before we moved here; my husband works for Caltech. We were a few blocks from Caltech and that region is indeed walkable, although some stuff is easier to get to than others. There is also a bus system, although I wouldn't call it super-awesome.

Baton Rouge allegedly has buses, but they seem to run something like every hour, we personally live too far at the edge of town to conveniently get to them, and in three years here I have maybe seen two at a bus stop ever.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

What's in Baton Rouge that he's still working for Caltech?

Yeah, Old Pas was like a 30 minute walk from campus for me (I'm a fast walker.) Or the Trader Joe's at California and Arroyo... getting a cheap bike that cut that to 15 minutes and gave me baskets as really nice. Supermarket was 15 minute walk, which is as far as I've ever lived from groceries apart from a bad contract job.

When I was there the Arts bus was every 15 minutes and free; I think they started charging later (after 1998). Nice little circulator service. If there were normal buses I don't think I ever took them, apart from an LA bus to downtown LA for jury duty one unfortunate week.

I've seen LA described as "a bunch of walkable neighborhood pods you need cars to get between".

[yhlee.livejournal.com]

LIGO Livingston (http://www.ligo-la.caltech.edu/)--why you would put a gravitational interferometer in Louisiana right next to a bunch of logging that messes up their readings is beyond me, but I'm informed it was a combination of graft and misunderstanding of just how often they harvest trees of the kind they grow here (?) that resulted in the site being put here. The other LIGO site is in Hanford, Washington (we used to joke about radioactive locusts and tumbleweed); we've lived there too.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I haaaaaaaate Boston traffic because it's the polar opposite of what I grew up on, i.e. Texas highways. I am happy as a high-speed clam going 85 down a freeway, but put me on congested urban streets (much less congested one-way cow-paths, which is what Boston has instead of streets) and I become homicidal in three seconds flat.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I suspect that the reason I find driving to be easy and fun (barring bad stop-and-go traffic, which I hate with the heat of a thousand suns) is because a lot of it is about spatial reasoning, and I'm good at that. I can very easily keep a general sense in my head of where the other cars are and how fast they're moving. That doesn't save me from the occasional incident where the guy in front of me slams on his brakes right when I'm checking my blind spot, but mostly I can judge where things are going and where I fit into that.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Ah, when it comes to navigation I seem to be at least androgynous (going by stereotypes); I like my landmarks. Our car died sans replacement when I was 7 or so, and even before then I spent drives with my nose in a book, not watching where we were going, and it still takes deliberate effort to pay attention to where a car I'm in as a passenger is going, vs. treating it as a magic chariot. When I slowly drove from SF to LA I kept buying maps for the towns I was in; on the fly navigation was NO.

Also on that trip I found I had trouble staying between the lines if I went more than 65 or 70. 85 was thrilling, scary, and clearly unsafe for my skills. But I had trouble watching the speedometer on top of everything else, so tended to speed up, until I started following semis by 4 seconds. Maintaining constant distance was easy, and CA semis obey the speed limit on 101.

Did I mention I'd gotten my first license two days before? Without any freeway training or testing? I don't want to drive, they let people like me on the roads. (And yet, I at least used my turn signals, unlike many others on the freeway...)

Boggle app is my current braindead entertainment.

***

You going to have any free time while you're in town for Vericon?

[yhlee.livejournal.com]

Also, the whole issue of automation affects what I'm willing to do to destress. My husband, when he's dead-out tired, will gravitate to games because they're the low-effort thing he can do when he's brain-dead. Whereas if I'm brain-dead I can't even play Talisman anymore. And yet I can compose right up to the point when I keel over, not that this is actually a useful life skill and even less useful for socializing.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I can play solitaire* when my eyes are literally crossing from jet lagged sleep deprivation -- I know because I've done it -- but not other kinds of games.



*Not even Klondike, which is the one everyone knows. I can play Canfield or Scorpion when I'm brain-dead.

[querldox.livejournal.com]

Basically, you've discovered the psychological principle of chunking (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chunking_(psychology)), also a big thing in a certain school of AI. Ties in with the old 7 + or - 2 things you can recall in short term memory. As a basic example, instead of remembering 10 individual numbers for a area code plus phone number, you recall three chunks; a single number for each of the area code, the prefix, and the last four digits.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Huh -- I only thought of chunking as a concept applied to memory, not activities like this. But I see the article has a section on motor learning, so I guess it applies to things like cooking, too. (There certainly is a kind of memory involved in, say, cutting up celery, but it isn't "memory" as I thought of it in the context of that concept.)

[vcmw]

This analogy works for me.

I know that for me I think of "cooking" differently from "cooking from a recipe." I like both, but there's lots of spare headspace for me in cooking something I've cooked a bunch, or cooking food items where I don't need to look at notes. Whereas following a recipe strictly is something I usually only do on weekends, as a project, because it feels like it needs more brain and attention. (Unless I'm cooking from a recipe I almost never measure things precisely, or time things carefully, because I've done a lot of cooking and have cooked the usual things a bunch of times.)

Similarly, I approach "driving somewhere I've been a bunch" very differently than "driving somewhere new." If I've been there before I know that the turn is a bit after that store and I'm going to need to keep an eye out for the one tricky lane change in the intersection, and that after that I can change the cd if I want to because there are no lights or on off ramps or whatever. Whereas if it's the first time it's more of an alert state where I have to keep an eye out for signs, and try to track how many miles it's been since the last turn, etc.