6 ms·

> I suppose because it's so easily quantified. I wonder what's being quantified.. intelligence or obedience. This would be like rating a strong-man competitio

by smokeyj 10y ago

> I suppose because it's so easily quantified. I wonder what's being quantified.. intelligence or obedience. This would be like rating a strong-man competition by how much time was spent in the gym and how much unnecessary pain was self-inflicted. It's like there's a culture of "pain enthusiasts". They do things like talk about running until it hurts, they tend to get injured often, and of course they have nothing to show for their dedication. I'm realizing that there's a mentality about these people. The idea of working smarter and not harder literally offends them. The idea that the amount of work is less important than the effectiveness of work offends them. These are often the same people that voice their concerns about working from home and why it can't work. My suspicion is because their value is measured by "time in the gym" rather than tangible real-world results.

jartelt 10y ago
Given that students are almost always graded on how well they do on assignments/exams rather than how long they studied, your strong-man competition analogy doesn't make much sense.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- Qwertious 10y ago
  You're implying that grades are an objective metric of value. This is often false, because the metrics for grading are oriented around what's easily testable, rather than what's actually a sign of good work. Kind of like hours spent in a gym, actually.
  - jartelt 10y ago
    No, I am just arguing that someone's grade on a test is directly linked to how well they do on the test and not necessarily on how much studying they did. If you don't like university tests, that is fine (I do not believe they are perfect either). But, they do a decent job of determining if a student knows a specific set of facts and can solve a specific set of problems. I have graded these tests before and no where during the process do I ask myself how long someone studied (because I don't know how long people studied). Very smart people can ace tests with minimal studying. Some people do poorly after studying a lot.
    - Retric 10y ago
      The problem is final GPA means almost nothing. High School Valedictorians are an interesting population because they tend to do poorly in life. Prodigies similarly underperform vs expected results. So, when you look objectively you find the most highly paid author has zero relevant accolades. in academic terms, gave the appearance of doing what was necessary".[18] Rowling recalls doing little work, preferring to listen to The Smiths and read Dickens and Tolkien
      - selestify 10y ago
        > The problem is final GPA means almost nothing. High School Valedictorians are an interesting population because they tend to do poorly in life. Prodigies similarly underperform vs expected results. Interesting, do we have any explanations for this phenomena?
        Retric 10y ago
        Not sure how much research backs this up, but I think it's a change in what's important. A 10 year old who copies someone else brilliantly is praised, an adult doing the same thing makes minim wage. "Even prodigies who avoid burnout and resist social pressures are unlikely to make a big splash as an adult. The problem, notes giftedness researcher Ellen Winner, is that to make a major contribution in the arts, and even the sciences "you need a rebellious spirit and the type of mind that can see new things." Most prodigies, however, are acclaimed not for their innovation but "for doing something that's already been done, like playing the violin in the style of Itzhak Perlman." Only prodigies who can reinvent themselves as innovators, she says, are likely to leave a lasting mark during adulthood." https://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200511/why-prodigies-fail https://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200511/why-prodigie...
        crazy2be 10y ago
        Well, I guess it all depends on what you mean by do poorly in life. High school valedictorians and child prodigies (especially the former) are disproportionately likely to hold positions of societal power. Just read the bio of any president of the IMF or the World Bank or the Federal Reserve. Essentially all of them graduate university summa cum laude or magna cum laude. Innovative scientists and people who move the world forward? Perhaps less likely to come from this group, for a variety of reasons.
  - wfo 10y ago
    They are pretty objective, but you're right they are oriented around what's testable. This mostly is true in large intro classes -- specialized grad courses (well really qualifiers), advanced undergrad courses with 10 students, they're testing good work. But what's testable is generally straightforward and pretty easy. So if a student can't even do well on what's testable they don't have a prayer at moving farther than that. Excepting for students with special needs, learning disabilities, etc. It's like if we wanted to test someone's ability to run a mile but had no way to measure time. We'd still test them to see if they could complete it, and if they can't, well they certainly can't do it quickly. But anyone competent can most certainly pass that basic test. Grades aren't an opportunity to show off, they're an opportunity to express basic competence.
- jacobolus 10y ago
  The assignments are often (even typically) crafted to be straightforward but require significant amounts of time to complete, and often graded more for diligence than understanding. Exams are sometimes more about flattering the grader or following a fixed procedure than developing an interesting argument and defending it well or solving novel difficult problems. Add course attendance and participation on top, and what you get is grades that generally correlate more to time spent than to competence per se. Obviously someone clever can figure out how to get away with putting in less effort than the average student while still scoring well, but that’s more about learning to play the school game than learning how to think according to the methods of inquiry whatever field is ostensibly being studied. It makes sense that school takes this form: instructor time is much more scalable to many students when assignments and exams are simple and uniform. Mentoring students who are working on real research problems takes much more time and effort.
  - akinalci 10y ago
    This doesn't hold in my experience with an engineering education. The objective is for students to gain and demonstrate basic competence in fundamental concepts of their field, and straightforward answers to straightforward questions suffice. There's not a lot of room here for novel arguments, and the objective is not to solve novel problems; that comes later. This is time consuming because, for most of us, learning a new concept and applying it takes some time. It's not a sinister plot by the system to waste our time. Regarding mentoring students to work on real research problems: yes, this doesn't scale to huge number of undergrads. But most undergrads don't yet have the drive or the fundamental knowledge required to tackle real research questions. That said, if a student does well in a class and shows interest, a lot of professors will give an undergrad a chance to work with their research lab.
    - jacobolus 10y ago
      Who ever said there was a “sinister plot” involved? The best (most time efficient) way to learn factual knowledge is using some kind of spaced repetition. The best (most time efficient for the student) way to learn mechanical or conceptual tools to mastery is to be presented with a problem which needs the tool, struggle with it for a while and develop some personal familiarity with the problem and personal ad-hoc methods; then have the standard tool presented, then go back and struggle some more using the standard tool to solve various types of problems and combinatorially trying the new tool out with various old tools to see what it can do and how they all relate. Then after basic competence is achieved, continuing to occasionally apply the tool to new problems over the course of months or years, including problems which require unusual uses of the tool or unexpected combinations with other tools, generalizations of the tool, etc. This is all generally much faster and more effective with some amount of 1-on-1 tutoring/mentorship between the student and a subject expert than with any other known arrangement, whether the tool in question is a pair of scissors, argument analysis, google search, rhetoric, regular expressions, or complex multiplication. The best way to learn methods of inquiry or creative work which characterize various human endeavors (history, journalism, physics, graphic design, ethnography, mechanical engineering, pure mathematics, philosophy, literary criticism, acting, technical illustration, sales, ....) is to spend time actually doing real or realistic work, watching experts do real work, and looking at lots of finished work. Unfortunately it’s hard to make 1-on-1 tutoring or research project mentorship scale to a classroom. Strategies like putting the students into groups to solve project-type problems of a variety of scopes, “flipping” the classroom by presenting lectures via video outside of class, mixing up assignments to include a mix of easy small-scope problems of the new material combined with harder problems highlighting past material, and so on can help, but there is a huge gap still between (even average quality) 1-on-1 tutoring and the best alternative method, which educators and education researchers would love to know how to fill.
pjc50 10y ago
The dark side of the "protestant work ethic".
tyoverby 10y ago
"time in the gym" is way easier to measure than tangible improvement. It's not surprising that people try to optimize things that are the easiest to graph in Excel :P
- maloney 10y ago
  Really? Lifting more weight, running a faster mile or losing weight are just as easy to measure.
  - Verdex_2 10y ago
    You're right I think, but what's actually interesting (I think at least) is that time in the gym is more likely to make you a significant social member of a certain group (gym => office, lab, bar, etc). Time spent present is easy for the social group to measure. Everyone might be impressed by the guy running the 4 minute mile, but after he leaves we're much more interested in Greg improving from his 7 minute mile to a 6:30 minute mile and that 4 minute mile guy was kind of a jerk anyways. Finding a way to get a 4 minute mile without the trackmaster 2000 and the protein shakes, who does he think he is.
ExcilSploft 10y ago
In tech/development culture, working smarter equates to something like "I did this in 3 lines of Node". God help the maintainer or ops person when left pad is pulled or the performance suffers.
- dasil003 10y ago
  Mm, you're talking about a microcosm of the buy-vs-build question. Only junior developers would obliquely state that using a library is always "working smarter". A much bigger aspect of working smarter is deciding that you don't need to build something at all because it's the wrong approach to solve a business problem.
  - moftz 10y ago
    At my job, we have a mix of stuff we do in house and stuff we contract out. We could have our in-house subject matter expert spend all of his time developing a component or we could hire a company that already makes the component and has a great track record. Sometimes things are cheaper to do in house, especially when a one-off just needs to get built and quality control isn't a major issue. But in my line of work, quality control can be a major thing sometimes. Sometimes it's cheaper to go with a component that's been fully tested and has the documentation to go with it. If we want to implement the component in our product line, we then develop it in-house after the first run is completed. A lot of our vendors are our competitors for certain components so there is always a discussion when we need to buy something from them.
    - dasil003 10y ago
      Sure, me too. These are huge decisions. At my previous company I greenlit building our own CDN on bare metal. Sounds crazy right? But factor in limited content library, on-the-fly DRM and packaging, and long tail of global users all of a suddent it is not so crazy. The fact is whether to use some random NPM library is a strawman, in the case of left-pad it's trivial either way. The more interesting question is how you assess the stability risk of NPM.
twoquestions 10y ago
There is also people who enjoy finding out how much pain they can endure, where masochism is the point. For me, max-weight deadlifting is a measure of how much I can grit my teeth through the pain and how much I can pull off the ground. I know it's not terribly effective in how much progress I make as I do it so I keep it to a minimum, but it is fun to get a new high score!
- cmahler7 10y ago
  that's sounds like a trip to snap city waiting to happen. I was a D1 athlete and saw way too many people wreck their back doing heavy deadlifts, not for me.
- dvtv75 10y ago
  I did something similar, unfortunately gritting my teeth... well, the dentist had to repair one of my teeth that cracked slightly. Both figuratively and literally, be very careful how hard you grit your teeth. They (and you) can break.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  Keep in mind though that that max effort pull is a tangible measure of what you can accomplish and your progress toward goals. Your training, and time-in-gym particularly, is only partially related to that. Train on a stupid program (squat-rack curls, sets of 100 reps), and you're not going to progress. Use a properly periodised training schedule, with complementary and auxiliary lifts that work toward your goal, mind your time between lifts, avoid overtraining, etc., and you can make rapid progress. Powerlifting's easy, from a measurement perspective, because the end result is so tangible and measureable: legal lift, known weight, success or fail. Speed events, whether sprint or endurance, likewise. Direct contests, whether competition (tennis, darts, rugby), or fighting sports (MMA, wrestling, boxing) largely the same, though some subjectivity of scoring may come into play. Determining who is the better programmer or systems administrator from a 15 minute assessment is all but impossible if the contestents are even remotely evenly matched: the criteria for drawing judgements are much more complex, and may not become apparent for months or years.

by smokeyj 10y ago

jartelt 10y ago

Given that students are almost always graded on how well they do on assignments/exams rather than how long they studied, your strong-man competition analogy doesn't make much sense.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
Qwertious 10y ago
You're implying that grades are an objective metric of value. This is often false, because the metrics for grading are oriented around what's easily testable, rather than what's actually a sign of good work. Kind of like hours spent in a gym, actually.
- jartelt 10y ago
  No, I am just arguing that someone's grade on a test is directly linked to how well they do on the test and not necessarily on how much studying they did. If you don't like university tests, that is fine (I do not believe they are perfect either). But, they do a decent job of determining if a student knows a specific set of facts and can solve a specific set of problems. I have graded these tests before and no where during the process do I ask myself how long someone studied (because I don't know how long people studied). Very smart people can ace tests with minimal studying. Some people do poorly after studying a lot.
  - Retric 10y ago
    The problem is final GPA means almost nothing. High School Valedictorians are an interesting population because they tend to do poorly in life. Prodigies similarly underperform vs expected results. So, when you look objectively you find the most highly paid author has zero relevant accolades. in academic terms, gave the appearance of doing what was necessary".[18] Rowling recalls doing little work, preferring to listen to The Smiths and read Dickens and Tolkien
    - selestify 10y ago
      > The problem is final GPA means almost nothing. High School Valedictorians are an interesting population because they tend to do poorly in life. Prodigies similarly underperform vs expected results. Interesting, do we have any explanations for this phenomena?
      - Retric 10y ago
        Not sure how much research backs this up, but I think it's a change in what's important. A 10 year old who copies someone else brilliantly is praised, an adult doing the same thing makes minim wage. "Even prodigies who avoid burnout and resist social pressures are unlikely to make a big splash as an adult. The problem, notes giftedness researcher Ellen Winner, is that to make a major contribution in the arts, and even the sciences "you need a rebellious spirit and the type of mind that can see new things." Most prodigies, however, are acclaimed not for their innovation but "for doing something that's already been done, like playing the violin in the style of Itzhak Perlman." Only prodigies who can reinvent themselves as innovators, she says, are likely to leave a lasting mark during adulthood." https://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200511/why-prodigies-fail https://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200511/why-prodigie...
        crazy2be 10y ago
        Well, I guess it all depends on what you mean by do poorly in life. High school valedictorians and child prodigies (especially the former) are disproportionately likely to hold positions of societal power. Just read the bio of any president of the IMF or the World Bank or the Federal Reserve. Essentially all of them graduate university summa cum laude or magna cum laude. Innovative scientists and people who move the world forward? Perhaps less likely to come from this group, for a variety of reasons.
- wfo 10y ago
  They are pretty objective, but you're right they are oriented around what's testable. This mostly is true in large intro classes -- specialized grad courses (well really qualifiers), advanced undergrad courses with 10 students, they're testing good work. But what's testable is generally straightforward and pretty easy. So if a student can't even do well on what's testable they don't have a prayer at moving farther than that. Excepting for students with special needs, learning disabilities, etc. It's like if we wanted to test someone's ability to run a mile but had no way to measure time. We'd still test them to see if they could complete it, and if they can't, well they certainly can't do it quickly. But anyone competent can most certainly pass that basic test. Grades aren't an opportunity to show off, they're an opportunity to express basic competence.
jacobolus 10y ago
The assignments are often (even typically) crafted to be straightforward but require significant amounts of time to complete, and often graded more for diligence than understanding. Exams are sometimes more about flattering the grader or following a fixed procedure than developing an interesting argument and defending it well or solving novel difficult problems. Add course attendance and participation on top, and what you get is grades that generally correlate more to time spent than to competence per se. Obviously someone clever can figure out how to get away with putting in less effort than the average student while still scoring well, but that’s more about learning to play the school game than learning how to think according to the methods of inquiry whatever field is ostensibly being studied. It makes sense that school takes this form: instructor time is much more scalable to many students when assignments and exams are simple and uniform. Mentoring students who are working on real research problems takes much more time and effort.
- akinalci 10y ago
  This doesn't hold in my experience with an engineering education. The objective is for students to gain and demonstrate basic competence in fundamental concepts of their field, and straightforward answers to straightforward questions suffice. There's not a lot of room here for novel arguments, and the objective is not to solve novel problems; that comes later. This is time consuming because, for most of us, learning a new concept and applying it takes some time. It's not a sinister plot by the system to waste our time. Regarding mentoring students to work on real research problems: yes, this doesn't scale to huge number of undergrads. But most undergrads don't yet have the drive or the fundamental knowledge required to tackle real research questions. That said, if a student does well in a class and shows interest, a lot of professors will give an undergrad a chance to work with their research lab.
  - jacobolus 10y ago
    Who ever said there was a “sinister plot” involved? The best (most time efficient) way to learn factual knowledge is using some kind of spaced repetition. The best (most time efficient for the student) way to learn mechanical or conceptual tools to mastery is to be presented with a problem which needs the tool, struggle with it for a while and develop some personal familiarity with the problem and personal ad-hoc methods; then have the standard tool presented, then go back and struggle some more using the standard tool to solve various types of problems and combinatorially trying the new tool out with various old tools to see what it can do and how they all relate. Then after basic competence is achieved, continuing to occasionally apply the tool to new problems over the course of months or years, including problems which require unusual uses of the tool or unexpected combinations with other tools, generalizations of the tool, etc. This is all generally much faster and more effective with some amount of 1-on-1 tutoring/mentorship between the student and a subject expert than with any other known arrangement, whether the tool in question is a pair of scissors, argument analysis, google search, rhetoric, regular expressions, or complex multiplication. The best way to learn methods of inquiry or creative work which characterize various human endeavors (history, journalism, physics, graphic design, ethnography, mechanical engineering, pure mathematics, philosophy, literary criticism, acting, technical illustration, sales, ....) is to spend time actually doing real or realistic work, watching experts do real work, and looking at lots of finished work. Unfortunately it’s hard to make 1-on-1 tutoring or research project mentorship scale to a classroom. Strategies like putting the students into groups to solve project-type problems of a variety of scopes, “flipping” the classroom by presenting lectures via video outside of class, mixing up assignments to include a mix of easy small-scope problems of the new material combined with harder problems highlighting past material, and so on can help, but there is a huge gap still between (even average quality) 1-on-1 tutoring and the best alternative method, which educators and education researchers would love to know how to fill.

pjc50 10y ago

The dark side of the "protestant work ethic".

tyoverby 10y ago

"time in the gym" is way easier to measure than tangible improvement. It's not surprising that people try to optimize things that are the easiest to graph in Excel :P

maloney 10y ago
Really? Lifting more weight, running a faster mile or losing weight are just as easy to measure.
- Verdex_2 10y ago
  You're right I think, but what's actually interesting (I think at least) is that time in the gym is more likely to make you a significant social member of a certain group (gym => office, lab, bar, etc). Time spent present is easy for the social group to measure. Everyone might be impressed by the guy running the 4 minute mile, but after he leaves we're much more interested in Greg improving from his 7 minute mile to a 6:30 minute mile and that 4 minute mile guy was kind of a jerk anyways. Finding a way to get a 4 minute mile without the trackmaster 2000 and the protein shakes, who does he think he is.

ExcilSploft 10y ago

In tech/development culture, working smarter equates to something like "I did this in 3 lines of Node". God help the maintainer or ops person when left pad is pulled or the performance suffers.

dasil003 10y ago
Mm, you're talking about a microcosm of the buy-vs-build question. Only junior developers would obliquely state that using a library is always "working smarter". A much bigger aspect of working smarter is deciding that you don't need to build something at all because it's the wrong approach to solve a business problem.
- moftz 10y ago
  At my job, we have a mix of stuff we do in house and stuff we contract out. We could have our in-house subject matter expert spend all of his time developing a component or we could hire a company that already makes the component and has a great track record. Sometimes things are cheaper to do in house, especially when a one-off just needs to get built and quality control isn't a major issue. But in my line of work, quality control can be a major thing sometimes. Sometimes it's cheaper to go with a component that's been fully tested and has the documentation to go with it. If we want to implement the component in our product line, we then develop it in-house after the first run is completed. A lot of our vendors are our competitors for certain components so there is always a discussion when we need to buy something from them.
  - dasil003 10y ago
    Sure, me too. These are huge decisions. At my previous company I greenlit building our own CDN on bare metal. Sounds crazy right? But factor in limited content library, on-the-fly DRM and packaging, and long tail of global users all of a suddent it is not so crazy. The fact is whether to use some random NPM library is a strawman, in the case of left-pad it's trivial either way. The more interesting question is how you assess the stability risk of NPM.

twoquestions 10y ago

There is also people who enjoy finding out how much pain they can endure, where masochism is the point. For me, max-weight deadlifting is a measure of how much I can grit my teeth through the pain and how much I can pull off the ground. I know it's not terribly effective in how much progress I make as I do it so I keep it to a minimum, but it is fun to get a new high score!

cmahler7 10y ago
that's sounds like a trip to snap city waiting to happen. I was a D1 athlete and saw way too many people wreck their back doing heavy deadlifts, not for me.
dvtv75 10y ago
I did something similar, unfortunately gritting my teeth... well, the dentist had to repair one of my teeth that cracked slightly. Both figuratively and literally, be very careful how hard you grit your teeth. They (and you) can break.
dredmorbius 10y ago
Keep in mind though that that max effort pull is a tangible measure of what you can accomplish and your progress toward goals. Your training, and time-in-gym particularly, is only partially related to that. Train on a stupid program (squat-rack curls, sets of 100 reps), and you're not going to progress. Use a properly periodised training schedule, with complementary and auxiliary lifts that work toward your goal, mind your time between lifts, avoid overtraining, etc., and you can make rapid progress. Powerlifting's easy, from a measurement perspective, because the end result is so tangible and measureable: legal lift, known weight, success or fail. Speed events, whether sprint or endurance, likewise. Direct contests, whether competition (tennis, darts, rugby), or fighting sports (MMA, wrestling, boxing) largely the same, though some subjectivity of scoring may come into play. Determining who is the better programmer or systems administrator from a 15 minute assessment is all but impossible if the contestents are even remotely evenly matched: the criteria for drawing judgements are much more complex, and may not become apparent for months or years.