7 ms·

Computational Thinking Benefits Society (2014)

70 points by sonabinu 10y ago

booleandilemma 10y ago
I never imagined how much focus and fascination society would place on computer science when I chose it as my major over a decade ago. There were under 5 CS majors in my graduating class of hundreds of students. This has me wondering about the future. What will be the next big thing with which we will see articles claiming "Soandso is the first president to do X"[0]? or "...X will be a fundamental skill—just like reading, writing, and arithmetic..."[1] Are there any so-called fundamental skills left for us to discover? [0]: https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2014/12/10/president-obama-first-president-write-line-code https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2014/12/10/president-obama-f... [1]: http://socialissues.cs.toronto.edu/index.html%3Fp=279.html http://socialissues.cs.toronto.edu/index.html%3Fp=279.html
- Jtsummers 10y ago
  It's probably time for us to rediscover logic as a fundamental skill. But that's a prerequisite or corequisite to computational thinking.
  - zingermc 10y ago
    Yes! Propositional logic and conditional/indirect proof strategies should be taught before any kinds of "proofs" are taught to students (I'm looking at you, trigonometry).
    - Jtsummers 10y ago
      Right. It's briefly introduced in geometry (or used to be) in the typical US high school curriculum, but not thoroughly and not as a distinct concept from geometry. It deserves its own sequence of material, and it should be applied to multiple areas so students can see the value of it more easily. When the only application is geometry, and they hate geometry, they won't care about the "tool" being used.
      - ooqr 10y ago
        Aristotelian logic can and should be taught at the elementary school level. Bring back the Socratic method while we're at it! And Euclid's Elements! The Greeks contributed well to education.
  - internaut 10y ago
    Used to be taught in the 19th century and early 20th century, along with rhetoric and the classics. I think we made a great mistake by getting rid of them.
  - js8 10y ago
    No, the fundamental skill is the ability to convince other people that you have the fundamental skill.
    - Jtsummers 10y ago
      I didn't say the, I said a. What you refer to would be an aspect of rhetoric, another fundamental skill.
      - js8 10y ago
        Coming from a language that doesn't really have articles, I was wondering if I should use "the" or "a". I think I could use both, because it cannot be proven that there is only fundamental skill with that property, or that they cannot support each other. Anyway, my comment was a social commentary - it doesn't seem that pure logic is really what ultimately matters in human society, sadly. That is, if some other people are using logic wrong, you will also gain if you use it wrong in order to convince them. Although I would also say that empiricism is much more important to rationalism (logic). There are many ideas that seem very logical, yet they are very bad, because people intuitively misunderstand some aspect of reality in their model.
- ekr 10y ago
  I reckon rationality/rational thinking, decision theory, bayesianism, being aware of cognitive biases inherent in the human brain, in a word lesswrongiansm.
carapace 10y ago
(Tiny thin grey sans-serif font!? What the point? Why bother writing an article, why not just use lorem ipsum!? Do you hate my eyes?) I think they're making a very important point, although the definition they give of "computational thinking" is woeful.
- neves 10y ago
  Try this bookmarklet: https://www.readability.com/bookmarklets https://www.readability.com/bookmarklets It will allow you to read almost anything in the web. Also you can use the "Article mode" of your favorite browser (like Firefox). But, I don't know why, it doesn't always appear.
  - carapace 10y ago
    Cheers! I usually hit just F12 and turn off the offending CSS rules.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
Everhusk 10y ago
"Abstraction gives us the power to scale and deal with complexity". Until things are abstracted to the point where the human brain has literally no ability to understand what is actually going on. Other interesting parallels to this post in this talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/kevin_slavin_how_algorithms_shape_our_world?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/kevin_slavin_how_algorithms_shape_...
unabst 10y ago
Thinking is already computation. Computational is redundant. We just need to incorporate what we've begun to understand through computer science into our own common sense. This is the correct approach, except, it is the only approach and is and will happen anyway. It happened as we better understood objectivity and subjectivity, as we understood mathematics and logic, and as we understood science and factuality. With computers, it's abstractions and execution of languages, expressions of logic, etc. The beauty of it is it's more relevant to how we compute, so it's like understanding how we understand. And that's the field of AI. Give kids a computer and things to build, and they will naturally learn from the experience. No need to bring up the term thinking, or science, or even computers. We think, we learn, we understand. Saying we need to somehow do these things is redundant. Encouraging more open source open hardware computers in classrooms is what we need to be doing.
- the_af 10y ago
  > Thinking is already computation. Computational is redundant. I don't think this is obviously true. At least superficially it isn't: the human brain doesn't work like a formal system, as far as we know. Most definitions of computational thinking I've read do not equate it to thinking.
  - unabst 10y ago
    But I think we're getting there. To say the brain doesn't work like a formal system and to say how the brain works cannot be formalized are two distinct statements. Natural language may not be a formal language, but the process of building natural language systems is that of formalizing how it works. And our progress is evidence.
    - the_af 10y ago
      I don't know if we're getting there. There is no evident natural progression to this conclusion. Maybe the brain just doesn't work in ways that can be formalized, and maybe it does. I don't think the evidence so far points unambiguously towards a model of the brain as a formal computing device. It may very well turn out to be a dead-end. What is true, however, is that it's not redundant to speak of "computational thinking", because it's not been proven a synonym for thinking in general.
js8 10y ago
It would benefit society if people understood that people are not computers. There are so many processes for humans that are based on assumptions that humans have large and perfect memory, that there is no cognitive overhead in task switching, and that humans can repeat the same task exactly over and over. On the other hand, I also see foolish people who try to automate processes designed for humans with computers, for example, manual entry of data into database.
- Jtsummers 10y ago
  Computers are any thing that computes. People are quite capable of computing. To restrict the concept to machines (and only certain classes) makes it difficult to talk about the fundamentals and models of computation.
  - js8 10y ago
    See - that's exactly what I point out in my other comment. It's perfectly logical (or rational) to think of humans as computers, yet doing so in practice is a terrible idea. You're basically advocating a certain model because it is simple, disregarding that it is a bad model of reality. It's one of the reasons why so much of economics really sucks.

70 points by sonabinu 10y ago

I never imagined how much focus and fascination society would place on computer science when I chose it as my major over a decade ago. There were under 5 CS majors in my graduating class of hundreds of students. This has me wondering about the future. What will be the next big thing with which we will see articles claiming "Soandso is the first president to do X"[0]? or "...X will be a fundamental skill—just like reading, writing, and arithmetic..."[1] Are there any so-called fundamental skills left for us to discover? [0]: https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2014/12/10/president-obama-first-president-write-line-code https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2014/12/10/president-obama-f... [1]: http://socialissues.cs.toronto.edu/index.html%3Fp=279.html http://socialissues.cs.toronto.edu/index.html%3Fp=279.html

Jtsummers 10y ago
It's probably time for us to rediscover logic as a fundamental skill. But that's a prerequisite or corequisite to computational thinking.
- zingermc 10y ago
  Yes! Propositional logic and conditional/indirect proof strategies should be taught before any kinds of "proofs" are taught to students (I'm looking at you, trigonometry).
  - Jtsummers 10y ago
    Right. It's briefly introduced in geometry (or used to be) in the typical US high school curriculum, but not thoroughly and not as a distinct concept from geometry. It deserves its own sequence of material, and it should be applied to multiple areas so students can see the value of it more easily. When the only application is geometry, and they hate geometry, they won't care about the "tool" being used.
    - ooqr 10y ago
      Aristotelian logic can and should be taught at the elementary school level. Bring back the Socratic method while we're at it! And Euclid's Elements! The Greeks contributed well to education.
- internaut 10y ago
  Used to be taught in the 19th century and early 20th century, along with rhetoric and the classics. I think we made a great mistake by getting rid of them.
- js8 10y ago
  No, the fundamental skill is the ability to convince other people that you have the fundamental skill.
  - Jtsummers 10y ago
    I didn't say the, I said a. What you refer to would be an aspect of rhetoric, another fundamental skill.
    - js8 10y ago
      Coming from a language that doesn't really have articles, I was wondering if I should use "the" or "a". I think I could use both, because it cannot be proven that there is only fundamental skill with that property, or that they cannot support each other. Anyway, my comment was a social commentary - it doesn't seem that pure logic is really what ultimately matters in human society, sadly. That is, if some other people are using logic wrong, you will also gain if you use it wrong in order to convince them. Although I would also say that empiricism is much more important to rationalism (logic). There are many ideas that seem very logical, yet they are very bad, because people intuitively misunderstand some aspect of reality in their model.
ekr 10y ago
I reckon rationality/rational thinking, decision theory, bayesianism, being aware of cognitive biases inherent in the human brain, in a word lesswrongiansm.

carapace 10y ago

(Tiny thin grey sans-serif font!? What the point? Why bother writing an article, why not just use lorem ipsum!? Do you hate my eyes?) I think they're making a very important point, although the definition they give of "computational thinking" is woeful.

neves 10y ago
Try this bookmarklet: https://www.readability.com/bookmarklets https://www.readability.com/bookmarklets It will allow you to read almost anything in the web. Also you can use the "Article mode" of your favorite browser (like Firefox). But, I don't know why, it doesn't always appear.
- carapace 10y ago
  Cheers! I usually hit just F12 and turn off the offending CSS rules.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

Everhusk 10y ago

"Abstraction gives us the power to scale and deal with complexity". Until things are abstracted to the point where the human brain has literally no ability to understand what is actually going on. Other interesting parallels to this post in this talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/kevin_slavin_how_algorithms_shape_our_world?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/kevin_slavin_how_algorithms_shape_...

unabst 10y ago

Thinking is already computation. Computational is redundant. We just need to incorporate what we've begun to understand through computer science into our own common sense. This is the correct approach, except, it is the only approach and is and will happen anyway. It happened as we better understood objectivity and subjectivity, as we understood mathematics and logic, and as we understood science and factuality. With computers, it's abstractions and execution of languages, expressions of logic, etc. The beauty of it is it's more relevant to how we compute, so it's like understanding how we understand. And that's the field of AI. Give kids a computer and things to build, and they will naturally learn from the experience. No need to bring up the term thinking, or science, or even computers. We think, we learn, we understand. Saying we need to somehow do these things is redundant. Encouraging more open source open hardware computers in classrooms is what we need to be doing.

the_af 10y ago
> Thinking is already computation. Computational is redundant. I don't think this is obviously true. At least superficially it isn't: the human brain doesn't work like a formal system, as far as we know. Most definitions of computational thinking I've read do not equate it to thinking.
- unabst 10y ago
  But I think we're getting there. To say the brain doesn't work like a formal system and to say how the brain works cannot be formalized are two distinct statements. Natural language may not be a formal language, but the process of building natural language systems is that of formalizing how it works. And our progress is evidence.
  - the_af 10y ago
    I don't know if we're getting there. There is no evident natural progression to this conclusion. Maybe the brain just doesn't work in ways that can be formalized, and maybe it does. I don't think the evidence so far points unambiguously towards a model of the brain as a formal computing device. It may very well turn out to be a dead-end. What is true, however, is that it's not redundant to speak of "computational thinking", because it's not been proven a synonym for thinking in general.

js8 10y ago

It would benefit society if people understood that people are not computers. There are so many processes for humans that are based on assumptions that humans have large and perfect memory, that there is no cognitive overhead in task switching, and that humans can repeat the same task exactly over and over. On the other hand, I also see foolish people who try to automate processes designed for humans with computers, for example, manual entry of data into database.

Jtsummers 10y ago
Computers are any thing that computes. People are quite capable of computing. To restrict the concept to machines (and only certain classes) makes it difficult to talk about the fundamentals and models of computation.
- js8 10y ago
  See - that's exactly what I point out in my other comment. It's perfectly logical (or rational) to think of humans as computers, yet doing so in practice is a terrible idea. You're basically advocating a certain model because it is simple, disregarding that it is a bad model of reality. It's one of the reasons why so much of economics really sucks.