4 ms·
I cannot agree, that the troubles with a talent caused by some inherent complexity of tech. I got a bachelor degree in psychology, and generally I think that ps
by ordu 7y ago
I cannot agree, that the troubles with a talent caused by some inherent complexity of tech. I got a bachelor degree in psychology, and generally I think that psychology is a much more complex topic than tech. In tech if you do not understand something, you could read a book explaining things. In a psychology mostly you even do not know what you are not understand, because there is a layman's understanding of human mind that you have been learning for decades, and it needs a lot of effort to separate scientific knowledge from intiutive.
The most problem with tech is fast change rate. It leads to a troubles with devising good ways to teach. You know, if we look at any teaching process, we'll see that people teach other people by the way they'd learnt themselves. It comes naturally to any people, and therefore we could read that BASIC is the best language for novices: because those who recommend BASIC learn how to code with BASIC.
Normally this process of creating curriculum works, generation of professors after generation distill teaching methods. But it does not works with modern tech. If we tried to keep in the curriculum all the stuff we learnt in a college and than add some more, than in a mere 20 years we might come to a situation when students needs 10 more years to get a degree. So we need to throw things out, and no one really know how important rejected bits of knowledge. Because knowledge is not a state of mind, it is not a bunch of bits, it is a process evolving through education and experience. So to replicate knowledge of a person we need to replicate process from the birth.
First years of human life backed up by thousands years of parental experience, and they generally work. But the book about Rust was written a several years ago. Than it was rewritten. Maybe a decade more and it come to a state when ownership and borrowing is not difficult at all. There is nothing inherently complex in ownership and borrowing, it just our past experience gets in a way of understanding them. All we need is to create RASIC -- a rust version of BASIC, -- and teach kids to program in RASIC with an intent to introduce them Rust later. Then the next generation would be unable to understand our troubles with ownership and borrowing, they would think that C rules are dumb and they need a specially wicked creative mind to invent them. They would see C rules as we see Brainfuck: someone did his best to invent a language to make things difficult.
- CalderWhite 7y agoI agree with you in that the challenge is partially caused by the rapidly changing environment. However, I also believe the combination of the changing environment and the style which technology is taught creates the problem. It is taught in a more specific manner that promotes getting things to "just work". Or at least, that is what a young student might strive for. I am also not trying to compare the "complexity" of the subject to others. I am simply saying that technology is extremely interconnected. All the topics relate to one another. So, when getting something to "just work" without understanding multiple times, this compounds on itself to create a real challenge in the long run.
- pixl97 7y agoThe big problem with 'just work', is that is all that seems to be necessary for a viable product in many markets. You could spend a lot of time and effort getting it right, but in few situations is there adequate competition for that to significantly change the profitability of the end product. Even full blown data theft and remote command injection rarely cause the economic impact that demand market change.
- ordu 7y agoI agree, that there is a feedback loop between education and practice. But I meant that any attempt to change something needs to start from the root cause: the rapid pace of tech progress. This pace is a good thing, but it comes with a cost. > I am simply saying that technology is extremely interconnected. All the topics relate to one another. I believe that it is an artifact of our cognition: our understanding of tech is not crystallized enough. To draw borders between topics one needs a lot of time to think and to experiment. It is like developing software by splitting it into separate libraries: you need a lot of time to think to do it perfectly. But in a 10-20 years your separation of a problem domain will stop being perfect because the problem changed.
- Retric 7y agoTech is more than just learning a specific system. It’s like the difference between a musician learning a new instrument and someone starting from scratch learning the same instrument. The specifics of any one system are important, but rote memorization is only useful when you already have a lot of other skills.
- cljs-js-eval 7y agoThere's an ongoing replication crisis in psychology that suggests that most of the findings in the field are fatally flawed [1][2][3]. In light of this, it's not really fair to say that tech cannot be inherently complex because psychology is more complex, and they somehow manage. The psychologists have, empirically, not managed very well. [1]: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1745691615609918 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/17456916156099... [2]: https://osf.io/ezcuj/wiki/home/ https://osf.io/ezcuj/wiki/home/ [3]: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/349/6251/aac4716.full?ijkey=1xgFoCnpLswpk&keytype=ref&siteid=sci https://science.sciencemag.org/content/349/6251/aac4716.full...
- ordu 7y agoYeah, psychologists have managed worse than techies, because psychology have a more complex object to explore. They even cannot find a good methodology for 150+ years. There is an alternative explanation: psychologists are less intelligent than techies, but I do not believe in that. There are a lot of tech people in psychology research.
- astrange 7y agoThere's also no output to psychology, so there's nothing to validate you. Especially because it doesn't matter if you get psychology wrong - who cares if you don't know how your mind works? It doesn't care, it's going to keep thinking. But also, a psychology degree isn't used for becoming a "psychologist", right? That's either an academic or a kind of talk therapist. I think the people I know with that degree work in HR.