Denial of Senses
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The commonly held belief that programming is inherently hard lacks sufficient evidence.
Block-based programming has become extremely successful, particularly with younger children.
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What Does Saying That 'Programming Is Hard' Really Say, and About Whom?
Well, this article suggests that you have no idea what we mean when we say that "Programming is hard". But damn, did you sure knock down a lot of straw that you set-up.
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Although they don't claim to have found a holy grail of making programming easy for everyone. That alone sets them apart from most other articles on the subject. On the other hand, hypothesizing that programming is only hard for white middle-class people and we simply don't have enough data on programmers of less privileged backgrounds to see it... that certainly sets them apart but I don't think in a way they'd appreciate.
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@Dragoon said in Denial of Senses:
What Does Saying That 'Programming Is Hard' Really Say, and About Whom?
Well, this article suggests that you have no idea what we mean when we say that "Programming is hard". But damn, did you sure knock down a lot of straw that you set-up.
Pretty much. During pretty much every sentence during the whole article, I was thinking, "Yeah, but that's not what's hard about programming."
What's hard about programming is constructing the conceptual model of the problem space (the real world thing you're programming for), and then translating that into the solution space (the programming language and associated systems). Block-based programming, weird compiler messages(1), and all those other things the article mentioned have almost nothing to do with anything of anything about how hard programming is.
EDIT: footnotes...
(1) Compiler error messages can certainly be improved, but they are, in the context of the article, a distraction.
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Wait, the article mentions Hypertalk in passing! That deserves at least a half bonus Blakeypoint.
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@Steve_The_Cynic said in Denial of Senses:
Block-based programming
What's really funny is that they present BBP as something that makes programming easier. Which, yeah, just further demonstrates your point that these guys have no clue about programming and what's hard about it.
Most of their examples of things that make programming "easier" seem to be in the context of small classroom / homework type exercises. Yeah, sure, solving some small problems in isolation doesn't have to be super difficult. Now deal with all the stuff a real system that people actually use to try to get things done and let us know that you realize how clueless you were when writing this article.
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I think everyone who recommends such solutions should play Human Resources Machine, then 7 Billion Humans and then come back to me so I can tell them - those things you just solved? That's 10 lines of code. Now imagine what happens when I write 1,000 lines. Or 10,000 lines.
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@Arantor said in Denial of Senses:
those things you just solved? That's 10 lines of code. Now imagine what happens when I write 1,000 lines. Or 10,000 lines.
Why would you do that when you can solve anything in 10 lines?
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@HardwareGeek I then explain to people how long the lines are and they sort of freak out.
Besides, minified code is usually just one line
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TFA article said:
What is the empirical evidence that programming, broadly speaking, is inherently hard, or harder than possible analogs such as calculus in mathematics?
Um, who the hell claims that? The types of people for whom programming is "inherently" hard have a large overlap with those who find mathematics hard. The joke literally is "math is hard, let's go shopping." How do you conclude that "math is easy, so why is programming hard?"
Do tech companies and hiring managers depend on the image of programming being tough and elite?
Tech companies want programming to be as easy and programmers to be as cheap and replaceable as possible.
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@topspin also note that they compare calculus, a teeny tiny part of all mathematics, with the entirety of programming, a field as broad as all mathematics. Is programming so easy a 1st grader can do it? Yes, just like maths. Is programming so hard that only a few people on the entire planet can do it? Also yes, just like maths. Depending on which specific part of programming/maths you mean.
Most people are sufficiently exposed to maths to know that asking "is maths hard" is an ill-formed question. The same isn't true for programming. We still live in a world where people think a job in software engineering means you know how to fix their printer.
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@Steve_The_Cynic said in Denial of Senses:
What's hard about programming is constructing the conceptual model of the problem space (the real world thing you're programming for), and then translating that into the solution space (the programming language and associated systems).
That and accounting for all the failure modes and mismatches in models between various bits. It's not just holding one model in your head that's truly hard, but holding many, lots of which are made by other people…
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@dkf and that's just basics. What differentiates a good programmer from a bad one is how quickly they can code it all up and adapt to requirements changes (over the entire lifetime of the project, which is often measured in decades if the owning company doesn't go bankrupt.)
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@topspin said in Denial of Senses:
The types of people for whom programming is "inherently" hard have a large overlap with those who find mathematics hard. The joke literally is "math is hard, let's go shopping."
How do you conclude that "math is easy, so why is programming hard?"
Some people find logic reasoning hard.
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@boomzilla said in Denial of Senses:
@Steve_The_Cynic said in Denial of Senses:
Block-based programming
What's really funny is that they present BBP as something that makes programming easier. Which, yeah, just further demonstrates your point that these guys have no clue about programming and what's hard about it.
In 2011 I completed my PhD in High Performance Heterogeneous Computing with the UCD Heterogeneous Computing Laboratory. I also hold an MSc in Computational Science from the UCD School of Computer Science and the School of Mathematics and Statistics. My undergraduate degrees are a BA (Cum Laude) in Computer Science and a BA (Cum Laude) in Physics from Drew University (NJ, USA), where I also earned a minor degree in Mathematics. I completed a masters-level certificate in Teaching and Learning at Griffith College Dublin in 2012. In 2015 I completed a MA in Higher Education at the Learning, Teaching and Technology Centre at the Dublin Institute of Technology, researching the effects of enhanced compiler syntax error messages on novice programmer behaviour.
And that guy gets a an article in one of the oldest peer-reviewed CS journals.
Most of their examples of things that make programming "easier" seem to be in the context of small classroom / homework type exercises. Yeah, sure, solving some small problems in isolation doesn't have to be super difficult. Now deal with all the stuff a real system that people actually use to try to get things done and let us know that you realize how clueless you were when writing this article.
You're missing the point. "Programming is hard" is a very common statement, "carpentry is hard" or "childcare is hard" is hardly ever heard. The question is why. Sure, people have been doing the latter for literally ever, the former at least since the neolithic, and some illiterate klutzes from the middle ages are said to have been pretty good at it so how hard can it be? Well, how about you work with a computer that has the potential to cripple you for life if you make a mistake, like a carpenter? Or with an ill-specified and opaque machine where any change you make may or may not be permanent, like an educator?
Yes, he's concerned with barriers to entry, not how hard some areas may be—I guess he has a pretty good idea that High Performance Heterogeneous Computing is not for everybody. If nobody tells me "carpentry is hard" because there are few people who'll ever come close to making a something like a Ming dynasty mother-of-pearl inlaid cabinet and doing a decent job on a table is considered fine, maybe we shouldn't get beginners started with statements like that about programming either.
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@LaoC said in Denial of Senses:
Yes, he's concerned with barriers to entry, not how hard some areas may be—I guess he has a pretty good idea that High Performance Heterogeneous Computing is not for everybody. If nobody tells me "carpentry is hard" because there are few people who'll ever come close to making a something like a Ming dynasty mother-of-pearl inlaid cabinet and doing a decent job on a table is considered fine, maybe we shouldn't get beginners started with statements like that about programming either.
The problem, for me, though, is that he presents those barriers to entry as if they are the entirety of what makes programming hard, but my experience says that the hard stuff is nothing to do with the barriers to entry.
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@Steve_The_Cynic said in Denial of Senses:
@LaoC said in Denial of Senses:
Yes, he's concerned with barriers to entry, not how hard some areas may be—I guess he has a pretty good idea that High Performance Heterogeneous Computing is not for everybody. If nobody tells me "carpentry is hard" because there are few people who'll ever come close to making a something like a Ming dynasty mother-of-pearl inlaid cabinet and doing a decent job on a table is considered fine, maybe we shouldn't get beginners started with statements like that about programming either.
The problem, for me, though, is that he presents those barriers to entry as if they are the entirety of what makes programming hard,
I don't think so. He says "programming is hard" is a blanket statement that's not really justified.
but my experience says that the hard stuff is nothing to do with the barriers to entry.
Exactly. Just like in most other fields where "X is hard" would be equally justified if you looked only at the advanced stuff.
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@LaoC said in Denial of Senses:
"Programming is hard" is a very common statement, "carpentry is hard" or "childcare is hard" is hardly ever heard. The question is why.
I fully agree, and I propose an answer: the real problem is that the organization (management, if you want) is hard. It's extremely hard to correctly divide the work, separate the "easy" parts from the "hard" parts and then assign them to different people with different capabilities. Many have tried, and sometimes there is some success, but at the terrible price (as we can regularly see on www.thedailywtf.com).
In the end, there is only one successful management technique: get a team of people who are all masters, capable of handling hard tasks and self-organization. Some might be better than others, but that just mean that the "others" should be able to get help with some really hard problem. But even recognizing that some problem is above one's level is not easy. Also, everyone needs to handle the "easy" task and the only successful model of delegation is tooling (from compilers and build tools to IDEs).
So there is no place for people doing just the easier or even mediocre stuff.
Compare that to the "carpenter" model, where the medieval (and ancient) guilds had a very clear distinction between masters, journeymen and apprentices. Or the modern manufacturing process with its specialization.
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Is programming inherently hard? Although worthy of discussion, this Viewpoint is not concerned with explicitly answering this question.
The article should have ended here. It conveys no useful information whatsoever.
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Comment under the article sums up my thoughts perfectly:
@Dan_Sutton wrote:
Programming isn't hard: it's either obvious or impossible, depending on who you are. My observations over the last forty years spent programming lead me to believe that the ability to program is inbuilt: you can't teach someone to have it - they either do or don't: it's a specific type of madness.
You can't teach a person to program: you can merely show them the syntax and how it works - past that point, they can either do it or not. Writing a program to generate prime numbers is either fascinating, leading to a sense of deep satisfaction, or it isn't. It's not possible to make that fascinating; it's not possible to make someone derive enjoyment from sitting in front of a screen, obsessing over the same, esoteric concept for hours at a time; it's not possible to make someone's brain operate with the peculiarly lateral-yet-rational type of proto-schizophrenia a programmer's brain employs: the art of lateral thinking fused with the science of rational thinking: programming is the only art form which has definite right and wrong answers: cast your mind out irrationally in order to latch onto rational ideas.
A programmer doesn't sit there, trying to get a machine to perform a task: he sits there, explaining to a friend what's on his mind - and that friend is partly the computer, but mostly himself (hence the schizophrenia), the computer being merely a mandala which allows him to concentrate his thoughts properly.
In short, past the point of writing ten-line test programs as class exercises, a person can either program or they can't: their brains either work that way or they don't - long before they ever encounter a computer or a programming language
Yep, you either can juggle machines built out of abstraction in your head, or you can't, and no amount of BBP will change that.
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@MrL I also thought that an extremely pertinent comment.
I suppose that there's one key way in which programming is hard in the same way that mathematics is hard; with both, you have to actually understand what you mean to make any kind of progress. People whose understanding of… well, anything really, those people have intense problems with both coding and math. (Maybe they'd be better in the arts, where being able to slide meanings together easily may be much more of an advantage?)
FWIW, there are other ways in which programming and math are alike. For example, a correct program is simultaneously a constructive proof of a theorem (albeit usually not a very useful one if you're not interested in the program itself).
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@dkf said in Denial of Senses:
I suppose that there's one key way in which programming is hard in the same way that mathematics is hard
Programming is hard in the same way as mathematics in that both require precise and coldly logical thinking with no assumptions or context beyond what is explicitly stated, and humans are fundamentally very bad at that. It requires a certain mindset that's very alien to most people, and that's also the reason why people from these disciplines often tend to struggle with social interaction.
I do believe however that this can be taught, at least no less so than other skills. Of course there's people with more or less innate talent for it but that's true for just about anything. The problem is much more that the teaching focuses on the mechanics and practical aspects of it, while neglecting to train people in acquiring this mindset that's fundamental to it.
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@Kamil-Podlesak said in Denial of Senses:
assign them to different people with different capabilities
GASP! HERETIC! EVERYBODY IS THE SAME! (continue with other inane slogans)
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@LaoC said in Denial of Senses:
"Programming is hard" is a very common statement, "carpentry is hard" or "childcare is hard" is hardly ever heard.
Are you sure this is true?
I hear both of these plenty.
I probably do more carpentry than the average WTDWTFer, but carpenters think carpentry is a hard skill to learn. If you're not around a lot of carpenters, I can understand how you'd miss this.
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@MrL quoted in Denial of Senses:
My observations over the last forty years spent programming lead me to believe that the ability to program is inbuilt: you can't teach someone to have it - they either do or don't: it's a specific type of madness.
I disagree with this. Sure, there are some innate traits that make picking up programming easier, just like some people are more naturally predisposed to sports. But it's a totally learnable thing. It just takes lots and lots and lots and lots of practice, something few people can afford and even less can be bothered with. I've personally witnessed several people going from having no idea what's going on despite trying to being fairly competent developers, some of them becoming professional developers.
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@Gąska said in Denial of Senses:
no idea what's going on despite trying to being fairly competent developers, some of them becoming professional developers
My experience is that competence has no correlation with whether people enter it as professionals, and that the proportion of those in the profession are borderline-at-best competent.
What we can safely say is that we don't know how to effectively teach the disciplines required yet, because to some degree we're still figuring some of the disciplines out.
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@Arantor said in Denial of Senses:
@Gąska said in Denial of Senses:
no idea what's going on despite trying to being fairly competent developers, some of them becoming professional developers
My experience is that competence has no correlation with whether people enter it as professionals
Yes but what I meant is that they've learned it enough to hold a job and do alright at it. Which, if the "programming is unlearnable" theory is correct, should be impossible.
What we can safely say is that we don't know how to effectively teach
the disciplines required yet,FTFY. So far we've only really nailed language teaching and repetitive mechanical tasks. The entire rest of education is half flailing around blindly and half cargo culting. Every single scientific study of every single teaching methodology of the last 60 years had inconclusive results.
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@Gąska I was willing to assume we'd figured something out in terms of teaching but you're right, we're absolutely guessing at it.
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@Arantor you know the rules 1 & 2 of dating? It seems similar thing applies to education. There's only ever been one consistent trend across all studies, and it's that every teacher can become a successful teacher if they follow two simple rules:
- Have smart students.
- Don't have dumb students.
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@Gąska And that trend tells us it doesn't matter how effective the teacher is.
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@Arantor There seems to be a minimum threshold below which it matters. But once you're above that, the abilities and attitudes of the students are dominant.
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@GuyWhoKilledBear said in Denial of Senses:
@LaoC said in Denial of Senses:
"Programming is hard" is a very common statement, "carpentry is hard" or "childcare is hard" is hardly ever heard.
Are you sure this is true?
I hear both of these plenty.
I probably do more carpentry than the average WTDWTFer, but carpenters think carpentry is a hard skill to learn. If you're not around a lot of carpenters, I can understand how you'd miss this.
And if it wasn't so relatable, the "Mother's Little Helper" meme wouldn't have caught on as much as it did.
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@Gąska said in Denial of Senses:
FTFY. So far we've only really nailed language teaching and repetitive mechanical tasks. The entire rest of education is half flailing around blindly and half cargo culting.
Not even language teaching, at least beyond "start as young as possible and make it immersive".
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@Watson said in Denial of Senses:
@GuyWhoKilledBear said in Denial of Senses:
@LaoC said in Denial of Senses:
"Programming is hard" is a very common statement, "carpentry is hard" or "childcare is hard" is hardly ever heard.
Are you sure this is true?
I hear both of these plenty.
I probably do more carpentry than the average WTDWTFer, but carpenters think carpentry is a hard skill to learn. If you're not around a lot of carpenters, I can understand how you'd miss this.
And if it wasn't so relatable, the "Mother's Little Helper" meme wouldn't have caught on as much as it did.
Obviously pretty much everybody who knows a fair bit about their specialty will tell you it's hard to be good at it—what kind of self image would you project anyway by saying "I have worked with this for 20 years and I'm not world-class at it, but really it's trivial to master"? Thing is, I don't think kids who need career advice ever get an "oh, that's really hard" if they say they'd like to become a kindergarten teacher or a carpenter. It's just not the general image.
"Mother's Little Helper" is more about drag and boredom, isn't it?
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@LaoC said in Denial of Senses:
"Mother's Little Helper" is more about drag and boredom, isn't it?
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@Watson said in Denial of Senses:
@LaoC said in Denial of Senses:
"Mother's Little Helper" is more about drag and boredom, isn't it?
Yeah, the nickname is from a Stones song though.
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@LaoC said in Denial of Senses:
I don't think kids who need career advice ever get an "oh, that's really hard" if they say they'd like to become a kindergarten teacher or a carpenter. It's just not the general image.
I think you're overstating how much "oh, that's really hard" is the general image of the job that the article is talking about.
Think about the meme about "learning to code". In the non-pejorative sense, there's a lot of educational stuff floating around premised on the fact that people will be better rounded adults if they're taught a foundation in programming as children.
And then in the perjorative, it boils down to "These people that I look down on because they're dumb because they work in a dying industry? They could get jobs as programmers and make something of their lives doing something more valuable than what they're doing now. Despite the fact that they're not as smart as me and I look down on them.
Have you ever heard of the book Rocket Boys or October Sky? It's one book, published simultaneously with two titles and it was made into a film with the latter title. It's a memoir written about a guy's high school experience growing up in a small West Virginia coal mining town in the late 1950s, and specifically about the experimental rockets the author and his friends taught themselves how to build in the aftermath of The Soviets launching Sputnik.
A big part of the book is about the relationship between the guy and his father, who's the most senior foreman of the mine and who's in a leadership position over most of the workers in the mine (thus occasionally putting him at odds with the author's friends' fathers), but he's not considered management, so to speak.
Early on in the book, the author's parents recognize that they don't want their sons to be coal miners. The author's older brother is a high school football star, and so will presumably go on to go to college on a football scholarship. They recognize that the author is mechanically inclined, in part because of the rocket stuff.
To this end, one day, the father takes the author into the mine. The father thinks that the rocket stuff is dumb, but being an engineer is a real job where you can make a good living, so he wants to show his son that being an engineer means designing practical things that his employer needs. So he starts pointing at things in the mine that company engineers designed or set up, and explaining what they're for and how they work and how he helped the engineer come up with them.
In the course of the explanation, the author recognizes that his father knows more about mining and what the mine needs than the engineers. So he asks his father if he's an engineer. The father insists that he's not, "because in order to be an engineer, you need to have a college degree."
I've always seen the job the article is taking about as kind of the same way. Most people who have that job are engineers, after a fashion, and like any other kind of engineering, it's a hard-but-not-insurmountable task to become one.
The article calls the job it's taking about "programming," but I've deliberately not been calling it that for two reasons.
The first is that the job description that I was hired to in my current job is "Computer Scientist," which is also what it says on my degree. However, my business card and my email signature list my job title as "Software Engineer" because they let me pick the exact wording in those places and I feel it more accurately describes what I actually do.
In my experience, very little of the job the article is talking about is spent actually "programming" or "coding" - i.e. sitting down in front of an IDE and typing computer code in. Much more of the time spent deciding what the code is actually supposed to do. Translating it from "algorithm written in pseudocode on a whiteboard" to "C++ that compiles correctly" is the easy part.
The second reason I don't call the job "programming" is out of respect for my father, who insists on the distinction. He'd tell you that he's a programmer because he has an associates' degree in "Computer Programming" (about 18 months instruction in a job training program) that he got about a decade after he spent one year in a bachelor's degree program in history before dropping out of college. His colleagues all command a higher salary and have options to move into management because they have real degrees and he does not.
My father is kind of grandfathered into being a programmer. (As my mother keeps reminding my wife, not quite in the literal sense. Yet.) He's been doing it for 30 years now, all with the same firm. But him aside, the job of "programmer" doesn't really exist in the US anymore. Any company that needs a bunch of non-degreed programmers to implement someone else's plan will probably outsource it.
But there are jobs for engineers who are doing the planning in the first place. And for academics, the actual "computer scientists," to design algorithms that get implemented as part of standard libraries for engineers to use.
When I read the article, my thought was that it was confusing "programming is hard" with "being a programmer [i.e. a software engineer] is hard." Very little of the job it's talking about consists of actual programming, and also 0% of the parts of the job that are actually hard.
There's all kinds of good reasons to teach students who won't grow up to become software engineers about programming. Both in the sense of "How do I think through a problem algorithmically?" and "How do I translate this pseudocode algorithm into actual code my compiler understands?"
Getting back to the mechanical engineering example, we expose high schoolers to fundamental principles behind mechanical engineering, even though most of them won't really get jobs as engineers and those that do will need significantly more training than they get in high school to actually get a job in the field.
Nobody complains that engineering gets an unjustified reputation for being incredibly difficult. Engineering has a reputation of being hard-but-not-insurmountable.
I guess I don't see why the article's author is treating computer science/software engineering/programming as if its reputation is different.
As an aside, probably some of the problem that the article is taking about is that We As A Society humor people who describe themselves as "bad at computers" when they mean bad at using Microsoft Word or bad at remembering their Facebook password.
Neither of those are "programming," but I bet the article's author gives more credibility to those people's view of "How hard is programming?" than they really deserve.
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@LaoC said in Denial of Senses:
Yeah, the nickname is from a Stones song though.
What a drag it is getting old
‘Kids are different today,’ I hear ev'ry mother say
Mother needs something today to calm her down
And though she’s not really ill
There's a little yellow pill
She goes running for the shelter of a mother’s little helper
And it helps her on her way, gets her through her busy day
—Jagger/Richards, 1965
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@GuyWhoKilledBear said in Denial of Senses:
As an aside, probably some of the problem that the article is taking about is that We As A Society humor people who describe themselves as "bad at computers" when they mean bad at using Microsoft Word or bad at remembering their Facebook password.
We humour them because we don't want to be overtly rude to them. On Saturday I went to see the tattooist who's going to ink my next tattoo (long story), and while she's clearly good at inking people, ... well ...
I had sent an email describing what we had discussed, with links to some pictures, but I hadn't had an answer, so I went in anyway to confirm everything and put down a deposit. She remembered receiving the email, but couldn't quickly find it because ...
She couldn't find the icon for the email app on her smartphone because she couldn't remember what colour it was.
The expression on my face was probably a bit more pasted-on than normal.
Neither of those are "programming," but I bet the article's author gives more credibility to those people's view of "How hard is programming?" than they really deserve.
The worst part about the article is that if the author had stuck to describing how awful the current barriers to entry are, as barriers to entry, I'd probably have agreed with him, although I remain deeply skeptical about the value of Block-Based Programming as a barrier-reducer.
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@HardwareGeek said in Denial of Senses:
@Arantor said in Denial of Senses:
those things you just solved? That's 10 lines of code. Now imagine what happens when I write 1,000 lines. Or 10,000 lines.
Why would you do that when you can solve anything in 10 lines?
Back in school, some 40+ years ago. There was only a shared five-and-quarter-inch disk drive for all the computers, so you could take a look at what others had on their disks.
Oh, look, Bernie has such a large program on his disk. I must copy it!The program was actually easy:
10 PRINT "This program is nonsense" 20 PRINT "This program is nonsense" 30 PRINT "This program is nonsense" 40 PRINT "This program is nonsense" ...Repeated often enough to fill up the computer's memory (wasn't so much back then).
Fun!
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@Kamil-Podlesak said in Denial of Senses:
recognizing that some problem is above one's level is not easy
Welcome, Dunning-Kruger!
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@Steve_The_Cynic said in Denial of Senses:
The worst part about the article is that if the author had stuck to describing how awful the current barriers to entry are, as barriers to entry, I'd probably have agreed with him, although I remain deeply skeptical about the value of Block-Based Programming as a barrier-reducer.
For the early stages of learning, when the actual key educational target is getting the student to know that the computer does what you tell it to, and that it does exactly what you actually tell it to and not what you thought about telling it to, BBP should be fine. That's a critical conceptual leap that you have to take in order to be able to program a computer.
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@ixvedeusi said in Denial of Senses:
I do believe however that this can be taught, at least no less so than other skills. Of course there's people with more or less innate talent for it but that's true for just about anything. The problem is much more that the teaching focuses on the mechanics and practical aspects of it, while neglecting to train people in acquiring this mindset that's fundamental to it.
There's a large difference between being able to program (mechanically) and being able to solve problems. I find that there tends to be a lot of focus on the former and not enough on the latter. The latter also includes being able to understand a problem/spec and being able to formulate a strategy to solving it.
In the end, there's a certain element to mastery that comes with spending a lot of time in certain programming languages. But despite this, a good programmer will be able to program (=solve problems) in languages other than their own relatively quickly - this is more down to the ability to process the problem at hand and formulate solutions than the specifics of how it's written down.
From my observations, as time passes, actually writing code becomes less and less of a challenge/problem. The real challenges and problems lie outside of that - there are a ton of decisions that need to be made from high-level to rather low-level that ultimately have much more impact than whether you express something with feature A or feature B in ${language} (something as simple as "spec doesn't say X, do I raise this with ${upstairs} or do I just do something sensible? What is sensible?" becomes much more of an issue; especially when you get to be ${upstairs} and need to figure out this kind of questions for other people).
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@LaoC said in Denial of Senses:
@Gąska said in Denial of Senses:
FTFY. So far we've only really nailed language teaching and repetitive mechanical tasks. The entire rest of education is half flailing around blindly and half cargo culting.
Not even language teaching, at least beyond "start as young as possible and make it immersive".
Actually, "start young" is cargo culting. When proper research was done, it was found an average adult is just as capable as an average child. But this myth will never die because it's such a convenient excuse to do nothing with your life.
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@Gąska said in Denial of Senses:
@LaoC said in Denial of Senses:
@Gąska said in Denial of Senses:
FTFY. So far we've only really nailed language teaching and repetitive mechanical tasks. The entire rest of education is half flailing around blindly and half cargo culting.
Not even language teaching, at least beyond "start as young as possible and make it immersive".
Actually, "start young" is cargo culting. When proper research was done, it was found an average adult is just as capable as an average child. But this myth will never die because it's such a convenient excuse to do nothing with your life.
What research is that? I've never heard of it, it would contradict literally everything I've read and taken to be "proper" research (this has a fairly good summary) and it would be the first learning capability that didn't decrease with age.
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@Gąska said in Denial of Senses:
Actually, "start young" is cargo culting. When proper research was done, it was found an average adult is just as capable as an average child. But this myth will never die because it's such a convenient excuse to do nothing with your life.
Young children are better at learning, as their brains have a higher level of plasticity than adults (with older children and youths being between), but everyone remains capable of it. A real key difference is that as you get into adulthood, the brain gets a lot better at pruning irrelevant connections, which manifests as becoming better at ignoring shit that doesn't matter.
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@dkf said in Denial of Senses:
the brain gets a lot better at pruning irrelevant connections, which manifests as becoming better at ignoring shit that doesn't matter.
The downside of this though is that the decision of what matters and what doesn't is based on what has mattered in the past, making it more difficult to learn truly novel things as you get older. [dubious - discuss]
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@Steve_The_Cynic said in Denial of Senses:
She couldn't find the icon for the email app on her smartphone because she couldn't remember what colour it was.
In her defense, it's likely an update changed the color! Graphic designers gotta graphic.
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@dcon said in Denial of Senses:
Graphic designers gotta graphic.
I approve what you've just stated through omission.
What Does Saying That ‘Programming Is Hard’ Really Say, and About Whom? – Communications of the ACM
Diazepam - Wikipedia
