12 ms·

The camel doesn't have two humps: Programming “aptitude test” canned

77 points by Smaug123 11y ago

optforfon 11y ago
The title seems to intentionally misrepresent the retraction to push an agenda (or the author has some issues with basic logic) The retraction is that the strong/definitive proof that "the camel has two humps" was fabricated/exaggerated. The converse - that it has one hump hasn't been proven. From the quote, Richard Bornat doesn't say that they re-crunched the numbers and now there is proof of one hump. The camel has gone back to having an unknown number of humps
- _pmf_ 11y ago
  > The camel has gone back to having an unknown number of humps Some sources even go as far as saying there is no camel involved at all, and might have never been.
- braythwayt 11y ago
  In the absence of that paper, we had plenty of reasonable hypotheses about the ability to program. Like “Put 10,000 hours into it, and you’ll master it.” Or “It follows a distribution similar to other skills involving mathematics.” The paper presented an unusual hypotheses, that there was this sharp distinction between those who can program and those who never will, and that this distinction was somewhat orthogonal to other measures of scholarship. So for example, one might be a good architect but never get good at programming no matter how much one tried. You’re right we haven’t disproven this hypothesis, but given its novelty, the burden of proof is on "the camel has two humps." With the paper retracted, we do not presume it has an unknown number of humps, we presume that skill writing programs is going to be similar to other skills we observe. As this article observes, unusual outcomes in attempting to teach programming may just as easily be explained by the fact that in a young field, we may not know how to teach programming. If we’re going to chase ‘humps,’ perhaps we should look for unusual distributions in the skill of teaching programming. We may be terrible at it, and perhaps the skill we are really observing is the skill of learning to program in spite of didactic and structural obstacles.
  - jkot 11y ago
    Paper is here: http://wiki.t-o-f.info/uploads/EDM4600/The%20camel%20has%20two%20humps.pdf http://wiki.t-o-f.info/uploads/EDM4600/The%20camel%20has%20t...
    - Smaug123 11y ago
      "In the absence of the paper" meant "now that the paper has been retracted" rather than "I couldn't find the paper".
  - venomsnake 11y ago
    In my class there were people that groked recursion in half an hour, and the other needed a week. And not a big gap in between. It is anecdotal evidence, but there are people with innate ability. Also - natural distribution makes the one hump camel the default hypothesis.
    - braythwayt 11y ago
      A one-hump camel is a fine hypothesis. But multiple humps, implying “muggles and wizards,” is not.
    - jrochkind1 11y ago
      Or perhaps the people who understood recursion in a week had been writing code since they were 12, and those that didn't were new to it. Or something else we haven't thought of, that is still not innate aptitude. Or the people who understood recursion easily will not be the same people who understand, say, continuations easily. Still, I'd assume that with programming like I assume for most skills (music, athletics, lawyering, foreign language, whatever), some people start out with more aptitude than others, and find it easier than the others. I wouldn't assume it's a markedly more pronounced or separated distribution in CS/programming than for other things though. (Also, I have actually been programming since I was 12, and additionally believe I do have some aptitude for it that makes it easier for me than for some others, I'm pretty good at it -- and I still remember how hard it was for me to understand pointers in Pascal when I first learned them, which seem so straightforward to me now I have no idea why it was challenging at first! And I'm glad I had good teachers in formal coursework.)
- venomsnake 11y ago
  Politics. Science is always better accepted when it conforms or is spun to conform to the current zeitgeist. So it with bad science, no science and pull out of someone's ass (pseudo) science. And right now the zeitgeist in tech is to increase diversity.
  - douche 11y ago
    Shh, you can't possibly suggest that different people might have the slightest difference of innate aptitudes! That's super-extra-double-badthink! You don't want to be the subject of the next Two Minutes Hate?
  - SolaceQuantum 11y ago
    By this rhetorical implication, you're saying that not only are current demographics in tech (majority male, white, upper middle class) that way because those demographics are more skilled than other demographics, but also that any studies implying as such as stomped out by political pseudoscience proposing less effective diversity measures. And of course, I can't ask you for a source that studies are getting stomped out by political pseudoscience, because those sources will also have been stomped out. So I should instead ask you: how did you get this impression?
    - 8127612981 11y ago
      Just look at the differences inside your purportedly "privileged" "white male" group if you aren't capable of suppressing your ideologies otherwise. In fact, all studies should do so to avoid endless blathering on the Internet.
      - SolaceQuantum 11y ago
        I do apologize. I didn't imply any privilege here and apologize if I came off as trying to treat this is a privilege perspective. My confusion comes from the rhetorical implication that current demographics in computer science are that way because those demographics are somehow just better at it than others, and also that any proof of this us stomped out by political pseudoscience. I'm asking where gp gets this impression. I'm also curious what you mean by 'all studies should do so'. Do what, exactly? Analyze the demographic of white heterosexual upper middle class differently? I'm sure that might be interesting, but it's already a very specific demographic that fits class, sexuality, race, and gender identity. What other categories are being neglected that are skewing the view of demographic majorities in the technology industry?
- scotty79 11y ago
  > The camel has gone back to having an unknown number of humps Camel has gone back to be assumed to be typical gaussian camel as for many camels we don't know much about.
- MustardTiger 11y ago
  >The title seems to intentionally misrepresent the retraction to push an agenda (or the author has some issues with basic logic) Almost certainly the former. Notice the dismissal of scientific evidence because they dislike the implications. Every study on the subject has shown clear racial IQ differences. That is not "pseudo-science". Arguing about why that observation exists is fine, but pretending the observation itself must be wrong because it hurts ones feelings is not reasonable. >The retraction is that the strong/definitive proof that "the camel has two humps" was fabricated/exaggerated. It isn't even that. The bimodal distribution is very clearly there, the "retraction" is just to the claim that this is an innate characteristic. Something which was widely repeated, but which the actual paper never even claimed. >The camel has gone back to having an unknown number of humps It still has two humps, we just don't know why. But we never knew that in the first place.
peterjmag 11y ago
Down for me, but Google's cache caught it: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Aretractionwatch.com%2F2014%2F07%2F18%2Fthe-camel-doesnt-have-two-humps-programming-aptitude-test-canned-for-overzealous-conclusion%2F&oq=cache%3Aretractionwatch.com%2F2014%2F07%2F18%2Fthe-camel-doesnt-have-two-humps-programming-aptitude-test-canned-for-overzealous-conclusion%2F&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58.1622j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Aretra...
PaulHoule 11y ago
This is one of the few times I've seen SSRIs blamed for jackass behavior.
- possibility 11y ago
  Bipolar depression rapidly gives way to mania if you try to treat it like unipolar depression with standard antidepressants. The chances of this happening are greatly increased if you've never been diagnosed as bipolar. It happened to someone I know, and it was pretty ugly. The jackass behavior is an unfortunate part of the medical condition. It's common for the shame felt after coming down from a manic episode to throw you right back into depression. You can search for "ssri mania" if you want to learn more, it's a well-known phenomenon.
- drunken-serval 11y ago
  I'm going to second what possibility said. Bipolar depression is a very different animal from standard clinical depression. Mania is ugly, it turns someone you know into someone you don't.
  - PaulHoule 11y ago
    Until recently we were living with a maniac who didn't need SSRIs to go manic. It is astonishing how ugly it gets, I've still got a broken mirror on the floor in the other room that we haven't cleaned up yet.
_Codemonkeyism 11y ago
1. Interesting. 2. I still wonder why around 30% of people with programming experience who have applied to a job when I was recruiting couldn't solve FizzBuzz[1] or string reverse. All of them either University MSc or years of programming experience. The article hints at using the wrong teaching methods. [1] Given the written instructions: 'Write a program that prints the numbers from 1 to 100. But for multiples of three print “Fizz” instead of the number and for the multiples of five print “Buzz”. For numbers which are multiples of both three and five print “FizzBuzz”.'
- p0nce 11y ago
  The problem is that Fizzbuzz and string reversing are a kind of trick questions. Either you have already done them or not. Good people will fail at trick questions very easily in interviews. Since they don't represent real work and aren't statistically significant, why are we using them? They are merely adding random noise in the interview process.
  - _Codemonkeyism 11y ago
    Not sure how FizzBuzz is a 'trick question'. Given these instructions at an interview: 'Write a program that prints the numbers from 1 to 100. But for multiples of three print “Fizz” instead of the number and for the multiples of five print “Buzz”. For numbers which are multiples of both three and five print “FizzBuzz”.' It spells out in words what needs to be written in code. String reverse is: Write a method/function that returns the reverse of it's argument. Would be interested to learn how these are trick questions.
    - imtringued 11y ago
      Not everyone has the entire unicode spec in their head.
      - _Codemonkeyism 11y ago
        I usually go with ascii. If the solution is fine, I ask were they see problems. Some mention UTF-8/16. I'm happy if someone tells me this is tricky and there is a working solution in library X or they would google for a solution that works with UTF-8/16.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
panic 11y ago
This retraction shows we have to be extra critical of things that reinforce our beliefs. Working as a programmer, it can be easy to believe that some people just aren't cut out for it. That doesn't mean a publication written using official-sounding words and methods that happens to match this belief is true at all.
- splintercell 11y ago
  But the retraction is super terrible. Imagine someone writes an article which makes a lot of sense, now that person writes a retraction which simply says "oh I was in great mental and psychological trouble when I wrote that". No, if you want to retract it, then make a case why this is not true. We don't believe that article because we trust the author.
  - hyperpape 11y ago
    Did you look at the actual retraction? It explains what the original data demonstrated and references further work by him, his student, and other researchers that helps show what the test can and can't show. Here's the retraction: http://www.eis.mdx.ac.uk/staffpages/r_bornat/papers/camel_hump_retraction.pdf http://www.eis.mdx.ac.uk/staffpages/r_bornat/papers/camel_hu...
smoyer 11y ago
I have a really good way of separating candidates into those who will be successful and those who won't - During the interview I ask how they became interested in computer science, programming, etc as well as asking them to provide information on "pet projects" or other significant work they've accomplished. If someone describes staying up all night as a 13 year-old because they had to finish the code they were working on, that's someone who was passionate about programming before they found out it's one of the better paying professions. If someone points to finished projects (especially side projects or OSS), then they also have the ability to focus. If someone points to a bunch of barely started projects, they might have great ideas but in a business you also need to execute. So ... passion and focus, plus a reasonable amount of domain knowledge will make a great employee.
- panic 11y ago
  How do you know your method works? Have you compared it side-by-side with other methods, including a control where you decide to hire or not completely at random?
- pjc50 11y ago
  If someone describes staying up all night as a 13 year-old So, you're explicitly selecting by class background and upbringing? This particular metric also tends to select against women, if you have any applying.
  - moron4hire 11y ago
    I know a lot of women who were up all night at 13 years old to write code they just had to finish. Gender bias is about those people getting passed over for jobs, not code-boot-camp churn-outs.
    - smoyer 11y ago
      I never said everyone not meeting this "rule of thumb" should be discarded ... And the hypothetical 13 year-old was only one example of "displaying passion".
regularfry 11y ago
(2014)
- JoBrad 11y ago
  And yet, people in these comments are still clinging to it. Internet memes are the new afterlife.
  - MustardTiger 11y ago
    Ironic, since the "people clinging to it" seem to have read and understood the retraction and you seem to be repeating a deliberately misleading headline. The two humps are still there, the retraction was only of the claimed innateness of this distribution, not of the distribution observed.
  - vorg 11y ago
    Perhaps the people in these comments have had many programming experiences working with people who have great trouble coding, no matter how patiently we explain something to them. As a result, programming workplaces are often structured so one 3x programmer looks after a group of -0.5x programmers, cleaning up after them, while another group of 2x programmers are siloed off doing some real work, unencumbered by any -0.5x programmers and not threatened by the 3x programmer. This is the double hump in action. Despite working in these types of place, I still got a shock, though, when I started doing freebie work on open source software and worked out that such an aptitude-less programmer was managing a large open source project developing a programming language. Perhaps some people doubting the double hump are from places like Google where all engineers are vetted via Computer Sciences degrees, and they don't have repeated everyday experience of it.
PaulHoule 11y ago
Psychologists would reject any kind of test that doesn't come out as more or less normally distributed out of hand. A common complaint about oddball tests such as the Meyers-Briggs test or Hubbard's OCA is that they have not been validated to "behave well". This may well be to due the fact that psychologists have been using parametric statistics instead of nonparametric statistics. In a lot of cases us nonparametric types have given up a little statistical power for "cheap and cheerful" methods that are harder to get wrong. Psychs and medicals find it very expensive to treat thousands and thousands of patients correctly and carefully observe the results. This is why those Cochrane reviews for the case for almost any drug or other treatment are so depressing -- maybe they need all the statistical power they can get.
- aidenn0 11y ago
  I think you have that wrong. One major criticism of Meyers-Briggs is that it measures things that are normally distributed, and assigns them categories. For an easy example of why (if true) this would be a valid criticism, consider IQ, which is normally distributed. I will give you an IQ test and assign you into one of two categories: smart or dumb. If you are below the median, you're dumb, if you're above the median, your smart. It should be obvious why this makes little sense; the large number of people very close to the median are divided in two and put in the same category of those with either very low or very high IQs. To assign people to one of two categories, one would want to see a distinct bimodal distribution, then there would be a small number of people for whom which distribution they belong to is ambiguous, and the majority could be confidently assigned to one or the other.
aidenn0 11y ago
I always thought the data from "the camel has two humps" merely demonstrated the lack of good pedagogy in the field of programming.
- cb18 11y ago
  >All teachers of programming find that their results display a 'double hump'. It is as if there are two populations: those who can [program], and those who cannot [program], each with its own independent bell curve. Almost all research into programming teaching and learning have concentrated on teaching: change the language, change the application area, use an IDE and work on motivation. None of it works, and the double hump persists. We have a test which picks out the population that can program, before the course begins. We can pick apart the double hump. You probably don't believe this, but you will after you hear the talk. We don't know exactly how/why it works, but we have some good theories. >Despite the enormous changes which have taken place since electronic computing was invented in the 1950s, some things remain stubbornly the same. In particular, most people can't learn to program: between 30% and 60% of every university computer science department's intake fail the first programming course. Experienced teachers are weary but never oblivious of this fact; brighteyed beginners who believe that the old ones must have been doing it wrong learn the truth from bitter experience; and so it has been for almost two generations, ever since the subject began in the 1960s. http://blog.codinghorror.com/separating-programming-sheep-from-non-programming-goats/ http://blog.codinghorror.com/separating-programming-sheep-fr... emphasis:All teachers of programming find that their results display a 'double hump'. It is as if there are two population emphasis:Experienced teachers are weary but never oblivious of this fact; brighteyed beginners who believe that the old ones must have been doing it wrong learn the truth from bitter experience So the disparity has presented itself in all known historical forms of pedagogy. Some have learned while others haven't, some have even learned with entirely self-directed pedagogy. When a array of teachers has been giving it their all for decades but the disparity remains, should we really blame the teachers?
  - aidenn0 11y ago
    Harvey Mudd has had some success in increasing reenrollment in CS classes (there is a required first-year CS class there) by changing pedagogy. The search space of possible ways of teaching programming is so large, and the field so young, that I'm not convinced we're anywhere near optimal.
YeGoblynQueenne 11y ago
So, this discussion reminds me a lot of discussions in logic programmig circles about why so many programmers can't learn to program in Prolog, no matter what. There's papers dedicated to the question, people who had done research on the question back in the '90s when Prolog was still popular (yeah, it was, google it). The verdict: no verdict. Some few special and magical people seem to be able to learn to program in Prolog, but the majority can't. Well then, why not set the bar for who can program and who can't on who can code in Prolog, rather than who can write FizzBuzz? If the point is to sort out the men from the goats, or whatever uncle Joel said we're trying to sort out, surely using Prolog as the sorting tool would leave many, many fewer "real programmers" than FizzBuzz. Hell, we could even combine the two: FizzBuzz in Prolog! See how well you can do at that, internets! And why stop at Prolog? There's languages that are way, way harder to program in! Hey, if you're a Real Programmer you should be able to write FizzBuzz in, dunno, Ook. Brainfuck. Leboge? Mondrian? Perl, even? Or maybe, I don't know, we can start asking people to show us what they can do instead of trying to find things they can't? Does that make sense to anyone else? I'd personally love it if people who want to hire me took the time to check out my github and the git repository I'm serving off my public server, in order to get an idea of the things I have already done (and so demonstrably can do) rather than trying to catch me with my pants down in front of a whiteboard. Look. I write a lot of code. I go over a lot of code I've written. I'm an idiot 80% of the time, but the other 20% of the time I figure it out, fix my bugs and go to town. It works, OK? If interviews can't appreciate this balance then they 're useless.
URSpider94 11y ago
I think that people are completely misinterpreting the article and the retraction in this thread, whether willingly or not. I don't think anyone is seriously questioning the fact that some people have more aptitude or intelligence than others. That's pretty commonly accepted fact. However, the general belief is that intelligence follows a roughly Gaussian (bell curve) distribution, and that it's roughly continuous. Mechanistically, one can imagine that intelligence is a convolution of genetic and other factors that are so thoroughly mixed that there are no discrete steps. The theory behind a two-humped camel model of aptitude or intelligence would then be that some magic x-factor is so significant that it splits the underlying distribution in two, into the "cans" and the "can nots". While the existence of such an x-factor would be a really interesting finding, it wouldn't change the underlying fact that some people have more innate ability to program than others, just like some people have more innate ability to be doctors or lawyers or concert pianists than others. It would just tend to make that difference much starker. What it also wouldn't change is the fact that innate ability doesn't always correlate to success in a given career, or in life. Many other factors other than innate ability, such as drive and ability to collaborate with others, affect whether someone is going to be successful at their job. Also, people can learn. Even someone who doesn't have innate talent can become very skilled, if they work really hard at it. So, even if the study were valid, which it's not, the finding itself is more of an academic interest than an excuse to start treating coding job interviews as a "sword in the stone" test of whether you've got "it" or not.
ebrenes 11y ago
So, this article talks about the retraction of the 2006 paper, which the authors admitted had some failings. However, I fail to see much discussion about the subsequent paper [1] that addressed these failings and featured improved experiments that seem to still uphold the hypothesis. [1] http://www.eis.mdx.ac.uk/research/PhDArea/saeed/SD_PPIG_2009.pdf http://www.eis.mdx.ac.uk/research/PhDArea/saeed/SD_PPIG_2009...

77 points by Smaug123 11y ago

The title seems to intentionally misrepresent the retraction to push an agenda (or the author has some issues with basic logic) The retraction is that the strong/definitive proof that "the camel has two humps" was fabricated/exaggerated. The converse - that it has one hump hasn't been proven. From the quote, Richard Bornat doesn't say that they re-crunched the numbers and now there is proof of one hump. The camel has gone back to having an unknown number of humps

_pmf_ 11y ago
> The camel has gone back to having an unknown number of humps Some sources even go as far as saying there is no camel involved at all, and might have never been.
braythwayt 11y ago
In the absence of that paper, we had plenty of reasonable hypotheses about the ability to program. Like “Put 10,000 hours into it, and you’ll master it.” Or “It follows a distribution similar to other skills involving mathematics.” The paper presented an unusual hypotheses, that there was this sharp distinction between those who can program and those who never will, and that this distinction was somewhat orthogonal to other measures of scholarship. So for example, one might be a good architect but never get good at programming no matter how much one tried. You’re right we haven’t disproven this hypothesis, but given its novelty, the burden of proof is on "the camel has two humps." With the paper retracted, we do not presume it has an unknown number of humps, we presume that skill writing programs is going to be similar to other skills we observe. As this article observes, unusual outcomes in attempting to teach programming may just as easily be explained by the fact that in a young field, we may not know how to teach programming. If we’re going to chase ‘humps,’ perhaps we should look for unusual distributions in the skill of teaching programming. We may be terrible at it, and perhaps the skill we are really observing is the skill of learning to program in spite of didactic and structural obstacles.
- jkot 11y ago
  Paper is here: http://wiki.t-o-f.info/uploads/EDM4600/The%20camel%20has%20two%20humps.pdf http://wiki.t-o-f.info/uploads/EDM4600/The%20camel%20has%20t...
  - Smaug123 11y ago
    "In the absence of the paper" meant "now that the paper has been retracted" rather than "I couldn't find the paper".
- venomsnake 11y ago
  In my class there were people that groked recursion in half an hour, and the other needed a week. And not a big gap in between. It is anecdotal evidence, but there are people with innate ability. Also - natural distribution makes the one hump camel the default hypothesis.
  - braythwayt 11y ago
    A one-hump camel is a fine hypothesis. But multiple humps, implying “muggles and wizards,” is not.
  - jrochkind1 11y ago
    Or perhaps the people who understood recursion in a week had been writing code since they were 12, and those that didn't were new to it. Or something else we haven't thought of, that is still not innate aptitude. Or the people who understood recursion easily will not be the same people who understand, say, continuations easily. Still, I'd assume that with programming like I assume for most skills (music, athletics, lawyering, foreign language, whatever), some people start out with more aptitude than others, and find it easier than the others. I wouldn't assume it's a markedly more pronounced or separated distribution in CS/programming than for other things though. (Also, I have actually been programming since I was 12, and additionally believe I do have some aptitude for it that makes it easier for me than for some others, I'm pretty good at it -- and I still remember how hard it was for me to understand pointers in Pascal when I first learned them, which seem so straightforward to me now I have no idea why it was challenging at first! And I'm glad I had good teachers in formal coursework.)
venomsnake 11y ago
Politics. Science is always better accepted when it conforms or is spun to conform to the current zeitgeist. So it with bad science, no science and pull out of someone's ass (pseudo) science. And right now the zeitgeist in tech is to increase diversity.
- douche 11y ago
  Shh, you can't possibly suggest that different people might have the slightest difference of innate aptitudes! That's super-extra-double-badthink! You don't want to be the subject of the next Two Minutes Hate?
- SolaceQuantum 11y ago
  By this rhetorical implication, you're saying that not only are current demographics in tech (majority male, white, upper middle class) that way because those demographics are more skilled than other demographics, but also that any studies implying as such as stomped out by political pseudoscience proposing less effective diversity measures. And of course, I can't ask you for a source that studies are getting stomped out by political pseudoscience, because those sources will also have been stomped out. So I should instead ask you: how did you get this impression?
  - 8127612981 11y ago
    Just look at the differences inside your purportedly "privileged" "white male" group if you aren't capable of suppressing your ideologies otherwise. In fact, all studies should do so to avoid endless blathering on the Internet.
    - SolaceQuantum 11y ago
      I do apologize. I didn't imply any privilege here and apologize if I came off as trying to treat this is a privilege perspective. My confusion comes from the rhetorical implication that current demographics in computer science are that way because those demographics are somehow just better at it than others, and also that any proof of this us stomped out by political pseudoscience. I'm asking where gp gets this impression. I'm also curious what you mean by 'all studies should do so'. Do what, exactly? Analyze the demographic of white heterosexual upper middle class differently? I'm sure that might be interesting, but it's already a very specific demographic that fits class, sexuality, race, and gender identity. What other categories are being neglected that are skewing the view of demographic majorities in the technology industry?
scotty79 11y ago
> The camel has gone back to having an unknown number of humps Camel has gone back to be assumed to be typical gaussian camel as for many camels we don't know much about.
MustardTiger 11y ago
>The title seems to intentionally misrepresent the retraction to push an agenda (or the author has some issues with basic logic) Almost certainly the former. Notice the dismissal of scientific evidence because they dislike the implications. Every study on the subject has shown clear racial IQ differences. That is not "pseudo-science". Arguing about why that observation exists is fine, but pretending the observation itself must be wrong because it hurts ones feelings is not reasonable. >The retraction is that the strong/definitive proof that "the camel has two humps" was fabricated/exaggerated. It isn't even that. The bimodal distribution is very clearly there, the "retraction" is just to the claim that this is an innate characteristic. Something which was widely repeated, but which the actual paper never even claimed. >The camel has gone back to having an unknown number of humps It still has two humps, we just don't know why. But we never knew that in the first place.

peterjmag 11y ago

Down for me, but Google's cache caught it: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Aretractionwatch.com%2F2014%2F07%2F18%2Fthe-camel-doesnt-have-two-humps-programming-aptitude-test-canned-for-overzealous-conclusion%2F&oq=cache%3Aretractionwatch.com%2F2014%2F07%2F18%2Fthe-camel-doesnt-have-two-humps-programming-aptitude-test-canned-for-overzealous-conclusion%2F&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58.1622j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Aretra...

PaulHoule 11y ago

This is one of the few times I've seen SSRIs blamed for jackass behavior.

possibility 11y ago
Bipolar depression rapidly gives way to mania if you try to treat it like unipolar depression with standard antidepressants. The chances of this happening are greatly increased if you've never been diagnosed as bipolar. It happened to someone I know, and it was pretty ugly. The jackass behavior is an unfortunate part of the medical condition. It's common for the shame felt after coming down from a manic episode to throw you right back into depression. You can search for "ssri mania" if you want to learn more, it's a well-known phenomenon.
drunken-serval 11y ago
I'm going to second what possibility said. Bipolar depression is a very different animal from standard clinical depression. Mania is ugly, it turns someone you know into someone you don't.
- PaulHoule 11y ago
  Until recently we were living with a maniac who didn't need SSRIs to go manic. It is astonishing how ugly it gets, I've still got a broken mirror on the floor in the other room that we haven't cleaned up yet.

_Codemonkeyism 11y ago

1. Interesting. 2. I still wonder why around 30% of people with programming experience who have applied to a job when I was recruiting couldn't solve FizzBuzz[1] or string reverse. All of them either University MSc or years of programming experience. The article hints at using the wrong teaching methods. [1] Given the written instructions: 'Write a program that prints the numbers from 1 to 100. But for multiples of three print “Fizz” instead of the number and for the multiples of five print “Buzz”. For numbers which are multiples of both three and five print “FizzBuzz”.'

p0nce 11y ago
The problem is that Fizzbuzz and string reversing are a kind of trick questions. Either you have already done them or not. Good people will fail at trick questions very easily in interviews. Since they don't represent real work and aren't statistically significant, why are we using them? They are merely adding random noise in the interview process.
- _Codemonkeyism 11y ago
  Not sure how FizzBuzz is a 'trick question'. Given these instructions at an interview: 'Write a program that prints the numbers from 1 to 100. But for multiples of three print “Fizz” instead of the number and for the multiples of five print “Buzz”. For numbers which are multiples of both three and five print “FizzBuzz”.' It spells out in words what needs to be written in code. String reverse is: Write a method/function that returns the reverse of it's argument. Would be interested to learn how these are trick questions.
  - imtringued 11y ago
    Not everyone has the entire unicode spec in their head.
    - _Codemonkeyism 11y ago
      I usually go with ascii. If the solution is fine, I ask were they see problems. Some mention UTF-8/16. I'm happy if someone tells me this is tricky and there is a working solution in library X or they would google for a solution that works with UTF-8/16.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

panic 11y ago

This retraction shows we have to be extra critical of things that reinforce our beliefs. Working as a programmer, it can be easy to believe that some people just aren't cut out for it. That doesn't mean a publication written using official-sounding words and methods that happens to match this belief is true at all.

splintercell 11y ago
But the retraction is super terrible. Imagine someone writes an article which makes a lot of sense, now that person writes a retraction which simply says "oh I was in great mental and psychological trouble when I wrote that". No, if you want to retract it, then make a case why this is not true. We don't believe that article because we trust the author.
- hyperpape 11y ago
  Did you look at the actual retraction? It explains what the original data demonstrated and references further work by him, his student, and other researchers that helps show what the test can and can't show. Here's the retraction: http://www.eis.mdx.ac.uk/staffpages/r_bornat/papers/camel_hump_retraction.pdf http://www.eis.mdx.ac.uk/staffpages/r_bornat/papers/camel_hu...

smoyer 11y ago

I have a really good way of separating candidates into those who will be successful and those who won't - During the interview I ask how they became interested in computer science, programming, etc as well as asking them to provide information on "pet projects" or other significant work they've accomplished. If someone describes staying up all night as a 13 year-old because they had to finish the code they were working on, that's someone who was passionate about programming before they found out it's one of the better paying professions. If someone points to finished projects (especially side projects or OSS), then they also have the ability to focus. If someone points to a bunch of barely started projects, they might have great ideas but in a business you also need to execute. So ... passion and focus, plus a reasonable amount of domain knowledge will make a great employee.

panic 11y ago
How do you know your method works? Have you compared it side-by-side with other methods, including a control where you decide to hire or not completely at random?
pjc50 11y ago
If someone describes staying up all night as a 13 year-old So, you're explicitly selecting by class background and upbringing? This particular metric also tends to select against women, if you have any applying.
- moron4hire 11y ago
  I know a lot of women who were up all night at 13 years old to write code they just had to finish. Gender bias is about those people getting passed over for jobs, not code-boot-camp churn-outs.
  - smoyer 11y ago
    I never said everyone not meeting this "rule of thumb" should be discarded ... And the hypothetical 13 year-old was only one example of "displaying passion".

regularfry 11y ago

(2014)

JoBrad 11y ago
And yet, people in these comments are still clinging to it. Internet memes are the new afterlife.
- MustardTiger 11y ago
  Ironic, since the "people clinging to it" seem to have read and understood the retraction and you seem to be repeating a deliberately misleading headline. The two humps are still there, the retraction was only of the claimed innateness of this distribution, not of the distribution observed.
- vorg 11y ago
  Perhaps the people in these comments have had many programming experiences working with people who have great trouble coding, no matter how patiently we explain something to them. As a result, programming workplaces are often structured so one 3x programmer looks after a group of -0.5x programmers, cleaning up after them, while another group of 2x programmers are siloed off doing some real work, unencumbered by any -0.5x programmers and not threatened by the 3x programmer. This is the double hump in action. Despite working in these types of place, I still got a shock, though, when I started doing freebie work on open source software and worked out that such an aptitude-less programmer was managing a large open source project developing a programming language. Perhaps some people doubting the double hump are from places like Google where all engineers are vetted via Computer Sciences degrees, and they don't have repeated everyday experience of it.

PaulHoule 11y ago

Psychologists would reject any kind of test that doesn't come out as more or less normally distributed out of hand. A common complaint about oddball tests such as the Meyers-Briggs test or Hubbard's OCA is that they have not been validated to "behave well". This may well be to due the fact that psychologists have been using parametric statistics instead of nonparametric statistics. In a lot of cases us nonparametric types have given up a little statistical power for "cheap and cheerful" methods that are harder to get wrong. Psychs and medicals find it very expensive to treat thousands and thousands of patients correctly and carefully observe the results. This is why those Cochrane reviews for the case for almost any drug or other treatment are so depressing -- maybe they need all the statistical power they can get.

aidenn0 11y ago
I think you have that wrong. One major criticism of Meyers-Briggs is that it measures things that are normally distributed, and assigns them categories. For an easy example of why (if true) this would be a valid criticism, consider IQ, which is normally distributed. I will give you an IQ test and assign you into one of two categories: smart or dumb. If you are below the median, you're dumb, if you're above the median, your smart. It should be obvious why this makes little sense; the large number of people very close to the median are divided in two and put in the same category of those with either very low or very high IQs. To assign people to one of two categories, one would want to see a distinct bimodal distribution, then there would be a small number of people for whom which distribution they belong to is ambiguous, and the majority could be confidently assigned to one or the other.

aidenn0 11y ago

I always thought the data from "the camel has two humps" merely demonstrated the lack of good pedagogy in the field of programming.

cb18 11y ago
>All teachers of programming find that their results display a 'double hump'. It is as if there are two populations: those who can [program], and those who cannot [program], each with its own independent bell curve. Almost all research into programming teaching and learning have concentrated on teaching: change the language, change the application area, use an IDE and work on motivation. None of it works, and the double hump persists. We have a test which picks out the population that can program, before the course begins. We can pick apart the double hump. You probably don't believe this, but you will after you hear the talk. We don't know exactly how/why it works, but we have some good theories. >Despite the enormous changes which have taken place since electronic computing was invented in the 1950s, some things remain stubbornly the same. In particular, most people can't learn to program: between 30% and 60% of every university computer science department's intake fail the first programming course. Experienced teachers are weary but never oblivious of this fact; brighteyed beginners who believe that the old ones must have been doing it wrong learn the truth from bitter experience; and so it has been for almost two generations, ever since the subject began in the 1960s. http://blog.codinghorror.com/separating-programming-sheep-from-non-programming-goats/ http://blog.codinghorror.com/separating-programming-sheep-fr... emphasis:All teachers of programming find that their results display a 'double hump'. It is as if there are two population emphasis:Experienced teachers are weary but never oblivious of this fact; brighteyed beginners who believe that the old ones must have been doing it wrong learn the truth from bitter experience So the disparity has presented itself in all known historical forms of pedagogy. Some have learned while others haven't, some have even learned with entirely self-directed pedagogy. When a array of teachers has been giving it their all for decades but the disparity remains, should we really blame the teachers?
- aidenn0 11y ago
  Harvey Mudd has had some success in increasing reenrollment in CS classes (there is a required first-year CS class there) by changing pedagogy. The search space of possible ways of teaching programming is so large, and the field so young, that I'm not convinced we're anywhere near optimal.

YeGoblynQueenne 11y ago

So, this discussion reminds me a lot of discussions in logic programmig circles about why so many programmers can't learn to program in Prolog, no matter what. There's papers dedicated to the question, people who had done research on the question back in the '90s when Prolog was still popular (yeah, it was, google it). The verdict: no verdict. Some few special and magical people seem to be able to learn to program in Prolog, but the majority can't. Well then, why not set the bar for who can program and who can't on who can code in Prolog, rather than who can write FizzBuzz? If the point is to sort out the men from the goats, or whatever uncle Joel said we're trying to sort out, surely using Prolog as the sorting tool would leave many, many fewer "real programmers" than FizzBuzz. Hell, we could even combine the two: FizzBuzz in Prolog! See how well you can do at that, internets! And why stop at Prolog? There's languages that are way, way harder to program in! Hey, if you're a Real Programmer you should be able to write FizzBuzz in, dunno, Ook. Brainfuck. Leboge? Mondrian? Perl, even? Or maybe, I don't know, we can start asking people to show us what they can do instead of trying to find things they can't? Does that make sense to anyone else? I'd personally love it if people who want to hire me took the time to check out my github and the git repository I'm serving off my public server, in order to get an idea of the things I have already done (and so demonstrably can do) rather than trying to catch me with my pants down in front of a whiteboard. Look. I write a lot of code. I go over a lot of code I've written. I'm an idiot 80% of the time, but the other 20% of the time I figure it out, fix my bugs and go to town. It works, OK? If interviews can't appreciate this balance then they 're useless.

URSpider94 11y ago

I think that people are completely misinterpreting the article and the retraction in this thread, whether willingly or not. I don't think anyone is seriously questioning the fact that some people have more aptitude or intelligence than others. That's pretty commonly accepted fact. However, the general belief is that intelligence follows a roughly Gaussian (bell curve) distribution, and that it's roughly continuous. Mechanistically, one can imagine that intelligence is a convolution of genetic and other factors that are so thoroughly mixed that there are no discrete steps. The theory behind a two-humped camel model of aptitude or intelligence would then be that some magic x-factor is so significant that it splits the underlying distribution in two, into the "cans" and the "can nots". While the existence of such an x-factor would be a really interesting finding, it wouldn't change the underlying fact that some people have more innate ability to program than others, just like some people have more innate ability to be doctors or lawyers or concert pianists than others. It would just tend to make that difference much starker. What it also wouldn't change is the fact that innate ability doesn't always correlate to success in a given career, or in life. Many other factors other than innate ability, such as drive and ability to collaborate with others, affect whether someone is going to be successful at their job. Also, people can learn. Even someone who doesn't have innate talent can become very skilled, if they work really hard at it. So, even if the study were valid, which it's not, the finding itself is more of an academic interest than an excuse to start treating coding job interviews as a "sword in the stone" test of whether you've got "it" or not.

ebrenes 11y ago

So, this article talks about the retraction of the 2006 paper, which the authors admitted had some failings. However, I fail to see much discussion about the subsequent paper [1] that addressed these failings and featured improved experiments that seem to still uphold the hypothesis. [1] http://www.eis.mdx.ac.uk/research/PhDArea/saeed/SD_PPIG_2009.pdf http://www.eis.mdx.ac.uk/research/PhDArea/saeed/SD_PPIG_2009...