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Whenever I hear "Socratic dialog", I reach for my revolver. Is there any other form of teaching so irritating and patronising? You might have a brilliant store

• ergothus 7y ago
  I completely understand and almost always share your reaction. Socratic CAN be done well - The novel Starship Troopers is actually like that...the arguments may not be your first pick, but you consider them all reasonable, and then you discover you're supporting fascism! It requires you to back up and find where you made a false connection. Unfortunately, the most common usage is at best ineffective, for as you say, they will dictate some logical jump I don't agree with, so when they disprove it in favor of their point I remain unconvinced as my own argument hasn't been addressed at all. At worst, it's infuriating.
  • mamon 7y ago
    Socratic method is supposed to be done in person, between professor and students, with professor choosing next question based on student's answers that typically reveal gaps in their knowledge. Doing it in form of made-up conversation in a book is a travesty.
    • zcid 7y ago
      Have you read Starship Troopers? It's one of Heinlein's finest novels.
• thom 7y ago
  The only thing more annoying is when people ape Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby and you have to follow the adventures of some tedious otter as it meets the rabbit people who ultimately explain pointers in a way which takes a thousand too many words.
  • ci5er 7y ago
    Have you ever come across anything that explains why pointers are hard for some people? I find it difficult to explain pointers to people because I don't understand what they are missing. I could use some help understanding their lack of understanding. When they don't get "indirect reference to the address of a data structure or object in memory", I'm stuck on how to proceed. Pointing people to the very elegant treatment of this topic in the old K&R doesn't always do the trick. Somehow.
    • tomrod 7y ago
      I don't think I understand pointers. Maybe we can help each other. My mental model of pointers is a map: lat/long identify the object of interest (the local coffee shop), but not what is interesting about it (their menu and hours).
      • jdmichal 7y ago
        To use that analogy: The coordinates tell you where the restaurant is (pointer), but you still have to go to the actual restaurant to get some food (data).
      • ci5er 7y ago
        Hmmm. Interesting. I'm going to have to roll that around in my brain for a day-or-so to see if I can make that compute for me. (Which means I may be back here in a day to check back in!) Maybe it's because I started in assembly language, but to me, data exists at an address in memory. Or starting at an address in memory. That data might be on integer, a float, a character, the beginning of a string, the head of an object/data-struct, OR an address of data somewhere else (which may be any of the above again). Pointers, to me, are simply an address of an address of a data thingie. Why would you want to use these? One reason is that pushing large data-objects back-and-forth across function calls is expensive (pointers are usually just 32-bit or 64-bit numbers). Another is that one can have a pool of resources (think polygons in a large 3d scene), that are marked "used" or "unused". This gets a large performance boost from not having to do the whole malloc/free thing on lots and lots of small objects. Another (this is related to the first), the function can receive a data-structure, and modify it (side effects!) without having to copy it and pass the modified copy back. I'm intrigued by your mental model. Having not thought it through - it seems as if lat/long is appropriate, but maybe even the idea that it is a coffee shop that you will find there is undetermined. (That is: the fact that it is a coffee shop is one of the things that is interesting about it, like the menu and hours. Again, I need to think this through). Thanks!
• syndacks 7y ago
  You're not Socrates, Uncle Bob.
• chongli 7y ago
  Is there any other form of teaching so irritating and patronising? It's only patronizing to people who are motivated self-learners, such as you. To people who are unmotivated and/or struggling with the concepts (such as high school students), it works better than most other styles I've tried. I've spent a lot of time tutoring high school and elementary school students. Many of them are so frustrated that they just want you to give them the answer. But then if you do they write it down and declare "problem solved." In the long run, students who continually weasel the answers out of their tutors end up far, far behind those who work with a Socratic teacher and are persuaded to try to think of the answers for themselves.
  • evancordell 7y ago
    Is there a difference between using the Socratic method interactively and transcribing a socratic discourse that never occurred?
    • chongli 7y ago
      A huge difference. Interactively, you can both ask and answer questions and you can steer the dialogue toward the pupil's areas of ignorance. As a form of writing, you're left to guess at what your pupil might be thinking. Apart from Plato, few people have ever managed to succeed at this.
      • abecedarius 7y ago
        Plato succeeded if you judge by his historical rep, but I can't stand the guy, for reasons not entirely unlike the complaint starting this thread. Though good dialogs do exist (I like Raymond Smullyan's).
        • nercht12 7y ago
          Plato didn't imagine his audience to be idiots. He really debated with himself or with questions he'd probably heard other people actually make (since he was with lots of other philosophers). He's harder to appreciate if you don't think like him or his companions and thus don't follow his line of thought. In a way though, Plato tries to tell a story rather than blabber away facts. It allows for the introduction of stupid or "less-intelligent" questions rather than setting up obvious straw men. .02
• OJFord 7y ago
  Could it really be that bad? I followed the link, it's so much worse. Worse? Yes. How much worse? So much.
  • EGreg 7y ago
    How much?
    • mirceal 7y ago
      Much worse
      • EGreg 7y ago
        So much! Egad you’re right Socrates! PS: Sherlock Holmes was based partly on Socrates
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
• kljhsdfkhjdf 7y ago
  It's really difficult to read. I was actually interested in the author's opinion, but the writing style is far too tedious.
• andrepd 7y ago
  Ironically, this comment in turn reeks of arrogance itself. Why so aggressive, we get it doesn't work for you you but maybe it suits other people?
• ValleyOfTheMtns 7y ago
  I got a few lines down and couldn't keep going. It's such an irritating way of making an argument.
  • avmich 7y ago
    I've read all, and got both interesting points - useful to me angles of view - and certain statements and conclusions from then which I don't agree with. 1) Author says object and data structure are different things basing on stated difference, but doesn't explain why this couldn't be a different point of view on the same thing. 2) When author says "adding a class is easy when you need a new entity, while adding a function is easy when you deal with data structures" he doesn't mention that only "packaging" of code - into switch cases or separate methods - is different. To add Triangle, one still has to add both fields which contain Triangle data and all the methods which work with that data - area, perimeter, center. Similarly, adding data structure "Triangle" also needs all those additions - and only them - but in a different form. And many derivations from this perceived difference are, um, questionable. Yet I like author's explanation of impedance mismatch. True, data storage has to satisfy many needs (roughly, we don't want to copy data - normalization), while logic may focus on specific goal at hand.
• cheesymuffin 7y ago
  You have a revolver? That's awesome!
• CodeMage 7y ago
  To be fair, actual Socratic dialogue can be very effective and rewarding, without being patronizing. What you're describing there -- what the blog post is like -- that's just as awful as you said, or worse. I couldn't get much further past this: What is an object? An object is a set of functions that operate upon encapsulated data elements. ...what?
  • avmich 7y ago
    Maybe we should try to be patient here and assume some valid point of view - even if possibly unusual for a personal experience. That is, can we try to justify this approach? It's like HN guidelines - "assume good intent".
    • CodeMage 7y ago
      We can try, but we won't get as far as you might like. I gave the post a second chance and pushed myself past the point I originally criticized and past all such points. I could write an in-depth critique of the whole post, but it's 5:30 pm and I would rather focus on finishing my work so I can go home and be with my family. So instead of that, I'll just give you a summary of what I think about the post: 1) The post essentially compares two different approaches: a specific variant of object-oriented programming and a specific variant of functional programming. 2) There are various points in the post where the author plays fast and loose with definitions of certain concepts, in order to make them fit his narrative. 3) The Socratic dialogue format does not help make the reasoning clearer, it just makes the readers uncomfortably aware that they're being railroaded into reaching certain conclusions. 4) The conclusions reached in the post are a mixed bag of: a) useful and interesting, b) correct but incomplete, and c) correct only under very specific circumstances, rendering them potentially dangerous.
• ravenstine 7y ago
  Yeah, I actually was convinced that it was a great idea and tried to apply it a bunch of times when trying to help teach others. It always worked out really badly. The Socratic approach can be great when everyone's on the same page, but if you are teaching people from the ground up then all you'll really do is come off as a jerk.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• magpi3 7y ago
  As a teacher, it's a necessary tool. But you are right that it can be abused by teachers who are both attempting to inspire critical thinking AND trying to navigate their students to the "correct" answer at the same time. If a teacher wants to convey a specific opinion or viewpoint, they should just share it. But if a teacher is genuinely willing to listen and wants to get their students to think critically about a topic -- without a desire to navigate the students in a specific direction -- then the Socratic method is very useful. But the teacher has to be truly willing to listen to their students. And that is hard for some teachers.
• yters 7y ago
  When Socratic dialogue is done well, it is pretty helpful. When I read some article, I have questions in my head as the author makes her points. If the author is good enough, they can anticipate the reader's questions and write directly to the internal dialogue occurring in my head. Plato merely makes this process explicit in his Socratic dialogues. So, the existence of poorly thought out or agenda driven dialogues do not in themselves show the method is a bad one, just like bad musicians do not discredit music as a whole.
• lacampbell 7y ago
  I'm going to write you off as insufferable before the fawning moron you have as proxy for your audience utters You must admit, you're throwing stones from a glass house when you write like that :p