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This is a really great resource that introduces some fairly sophisticated ideas. I'm about to be negative but I genuinely mean that; I'm planning to go back to

This is a really great resource that introduces some fairly sophisticated ideas. I'm about to be negative but I genuinely mean that; I'm planning to go back to it. I was finding it took time to take in the ideas about C^2. However > Presented in a new mnemonic medium which makes it almost effortless to remember what you read This is just nonsense and quite distracting, even irritating. Quantum computing and quantum mechanics is hard and involves sophisticated concepts. The spaced repetition questions are utterly superficial and represent unhelpful dumbing down. Apologies for the rant and slightly silly comparison between quantum physics and a programming language but the same goes for the Rust book. Rust is a hard language with sophisticated ideas. Despite the best intentions of the nice people at Mozilla, no amount of dumbing down changes that. And patronizing readers does not make the resource more approachable to women and under-represented minorities, unless you believe that those groups need to be patronized. > The set of curly brackets, {}, is a placeholder: think of {} as little crab pincers that hold a value in place.

newswasboring 6y ago
> And patronizing readers does not make the resource more approachable to women and under-represented minorities, unless you believe that those groups need to be patronized. That came out of the blue. Am I missing something? Did mozilla make such an attempt to patronize minorities?
- steveklabnik 6y ago
  I think your parent is suggesting that this whimsical example is patronizing. Some fun history here: Ruby uses #{} for string interpolation. I used to teach Ruby to folks as a job, and I believe that my boss, Jeff Casimir, said that they looked like lobster pincers in one of our classes. (If Jeff reads this and that's incorrect, my apologies!) Years later, when I was writing this part of the book, I remembered this analogy, and we had the whole crab thing going on with Rust, and I thought it was a fun thing. So I put it in the book. Some people find whimsy inherently patronizing or something. I dunno. It's an offhanded fun comment, not some sort of desire to "dumb things down" for anyone. We don't write anything with the intention of dumbing things down.
  - da39a3ee 6y ago
    Hi Steve, thanks for the comments and for reading my somewhat grumpy post! I expect you've heard it all before. It's true, I do believe that Rust is basically a programming language for adult brains, and so it's a bit weird for the Rust book to contain sentences that sound like they're aimed at younger teenagers. I know there are teenagers learning Rust! And that's great. But when they're doing that, they're exercising quite an adult part of their personalities and I think they'd respond better to being treated as adults while they are bravely entering an adult world. It's also true that I worry that the whimsical sentences that seem designed for children are somehow connected with what is often called the "Diversity and Inclusion" movement. In my company, the diversity and inclusion initiatives were characterized by childish activities, such as writing "motivational phrases" on post-its in colored pens and posting them on the walls of the office. The women I've spoken to about this really resented the fact that engaging with pro-women-in-tech initiatives meant having to behave childishly, and they resented even more strongly the implication that childishness was appealing to women and under-represented minorities.
    - jerf 6y ago
      "In my company, the diversity and inclusion initiatives were characterized by childish activities" You may have some wires understandably crossed. Companies frequently end up hiring in people for all sorts of initiatives that end up doing some really childish stuff. Diversity and inclusion do not particularly stick out on this front. This is where we end up with the mockery around "trust falls" and that sort of thing, which are childish "team-building" activities, and have you ever seen a corporate presentation on how to do better sales? Yeowzers. It's not specifically a diversity/inclusion thing, it's all the corporations. On the other side, there is a solid reason to use whimsical, or more accurately, highly visual and emotional analogies for that sort of thing: They're the things our brains remember. You'll encounter that sort of thing in a lot of foreign language courses, memorizing alphabets or symbols with mnemonics meant to engage emotional and visual memories around the item as a bootstrap towards remembering what it is. That said, it is true these whimsical analogies travel poorly, because your cognitive association network will be different than everybody else's. I've got some mnemonics in my language I'm studying around my kid's pet bird and my wife's interactions with her parents; obviously they wouldn't be very meaningful to you if I tried to give them to you to use as your own association. You ought to make them up yourself for maximum effect. But, my main point here is that they aren't intrinsically silly, they are a legitimate way to remember otherwise difficult-to-remember things. After a decade of programming the meaning of curly braces may be obvious, but it isn't at first.
montyevans 6y ago
I don't think the central focus of this resource is to teach Quantum Mechanics, but rather to test a new teaching method - the relative importance of yet another Intro to Quantum Mechanics course is tiny compared to developing methods potentially applicable across the entire space of online learning. As you say, the SRS questions could be better, but the idea of embedding them into an online essay / course is, to my mind, novel, potentially enormously valuable, and worth highlighting. Is it the notion of embedding SRS questions into the medium per se. that you find superficial and unhelpful, or just the specific questions that Andy and Michael chose? If the latter, would you suggest any alternative questions that might be less patronizing / more effective?
- sarbaz 6y ago
  Approximately half the math textbooks I study from basically do this already. It works very well, but IMO mostly because the questions are not easy. You actually have to stop and think for a few minutes before moving on.
- whatshisface 6y ago
  They should be testing it on something that involves more remembering and less thinking, like microbiology. Physics is the absolute worst subject to test any new book-writing method in, because the book practically doesn't matter; it's all in what happens inside the student's head as they do the exercises. The fact that the Moore method has half a chance of working for topology students shows beyond a shadow of a doubt that for highly logic-based fields like physics and math that the book matters so little that the absence of any book or lecture at all will still result in the material being taught!
waynesonfire 6y ago
> Quantum computing and quantum mechanics is hard and involves sophisticated concepts. It's comments like these that in high school made me avoid calculus. Just wanted to let you know that you are discouraging. The youngsters reading this that are still developing their critical thinking skills are being scared away because of your projections. Frame it different, take responsibility for your inadequacies.
- matvore 6y ago
  > Just wanted to let you know that you are discouraging. It didn't strike me as discouraging at all. Discouraging would be something like "QM is so hard that 80% of people reading this are too stupid to learn it" (which I don't think is true, FWIW, so don't be discouraged by that) Just because youngsters don't have critical thinking skills does not mean they will read words that aren't even there. If anyone does that, it's on them, the reader, and no psycho-analytical word smithing will fix that.
- da39a3ee 6y ago
  People of the age you're talking about aren't stupid and they're not taken in by people giving them saccharine messages about how things aren't hard and anyone can do them. OK. If you are a student reading this then, well, firstly I'm not at all sure you're feeling discouraged from learning about the nature of reality and potentially world-changing computing frontiers because someone on the internet said it was a hard subject! But if you were, please don't be. Here's why. Firstly, a lot of incredibly valuable and interesting things do require a bit of concentration and effort. I'm sure you know this. But there are reasons to be optimistic! Here are some things to do: 1. Stay calm! Don't give up. 2. It's not at all obvious how to read technical stuff to start off with. Basically, the secret is to read the same paragraph a LOT of times! Everyone does that. No-one can understand it by reading it through once like a novel. If you find yourself reading the same paragraph 100 times you're on the right path because it means that you KNOW you haven't quite grasped all the ideas yet, and so you are becoming your own teacher in a way; setting your own standards for yourself. 3. You've got to be, or become, the sort of person who can concentrate on reading something challenging, in a quiet room. Talking to others is going to help a lot also, but there's a private side to this. You can compare it to training to be on a sports team at a more competitive level. There are going to be times when you're doing fitness training or whatever, and you're on your own, and it hurts because you're exhausted. You know this was always part of the deal. 4. Don't listen to the people who tell you that it's "easy" and "anyone can do it". Yes, anyone can do it in in the sense that everyone has the biological potential to do it (they're human, they have a perfectly good brain). But you know perfectly well, just by looking around at your classmates that some people don't have, or at least don't currently have, the attitude that's going to let them do it. You don't have to be weird; you just need to let one side of your personality be a studious side, occupying some fraction of your time.
BeetleB 6y ago
> This is just nonsense and quite distracting, even irritating. Quantum computing and quantum mechanics is hard and involves sophisticated concepts. The spaced repetition questions are utterly superficial and represent unhelpful dumbing down. I can see why you would think that. However, consider the following points: 1. One of the authors is/was[1] one of the most well known experts on quantum computing, and he literally wrote the book on quantum computing. 2. He has written elsewhere on how spaced repetition really helped him understand new disciplines and read journal papers. So while you may not like spaced repetition, think twice before saying "unhelpful dumbing down", given that it really helped him, and he's very clearly not a dumb person. There's no harm in simply saying it doesn't work for you. I suggest you examine the need to justify that by making broad statements. Perhaps there's more to the Rust/Mozilla story that I don't know of, but going from the example you gave and connecting it to making things approachable to minorities is a giant leap I'm having trouble fathoming. And while the statement is annoying, I did not find it in the least patronizing. I don't doubt that it helps some people, and I think you need to realize that not all books are written for you, and that there likely won't be any book that is good for everyone. If you don't like it, find another book - don't expect the world to cater to you. When it comes to technical books, particularly math/physics text books, everyone has his/her own opinion and that's OK. There's no shortage of people who hate math books that give too many examples ("Just give me the theorems, proofs, and maybe one example!"), and there's no shortage of people who want examples and hate books that are "theorems/proofs". The same goes for pretty plots, color coding important theorems, etc. Yet not once in my time in academia and beyond did I hear someone say "These distracting elements and examples are dumbing things down and are patronizing, and it's because they're trying to appeal to women and minorities!" I really think you need to introspect about your world view that led you to these conclusions. You're being triggered, and you need to own your reactions. > Quantum computing and quantum mechanics is hard and involves sophisticated concepts. Although I didn't study quantum computing, I have done plenty of non-relativistic quantum mechanics at the grad level. It's hard for only two reasons: 1. Lots of introductory books start off with calculus-heavy problems (infinite square wells, harmonic oscillators, hydrogen atom, etc). 2. It differs from real world experience. Plenty of people have advocated that item 1 above is the problem, and it is not a good way to teach QM. You get lost in the calculus and don't focus on the QM. There are plenty of advocates (e.g. David Mermin) who think QM should first be taught using spin, because it involves no calculus, and the linear algebra is necessary (and not sophisticated). Almost all, if not all, the fundamentals of QM can be taught that way, and it's not that hard. Certainly a lot easier than much of your introductory physics material (mechanics, EM, etc). [1] I say "was" because he has left the quantum computing research world.
detaro 6y ago
What makes you think surprisingly-random memnonics are aimed at specific audiences?

newswasboring 6y ago

> And patronizing readers does not make the resource more approachable to women and under-represented minorities, unless you believe that those groups need to be patronized. That came out of the blue. Am I missing something? Did mozilla make such an attempt to patronize minorities?

steveklabnik 6y ago
I think your parent is suggesting that this whimsical example is patronizing. Some fun history here: Ruby uses #{} for string interpolation. I used to teach Ruby to folks as a job, and I believe that my boss, Jeff Casimir, said that they looked like lobster pincers in one of our classes. (If Jeff reads this and that's incorrect, my apologies!) Years later, when I was writing this part of the book, I remembered this analogy, and we had the whole crab thing going on with Rust, and I thought it was a fun thing. So I put it in the book. Some people find whimsy inherently patronizing or something. I dunno. It's an offhanded fun comment, not some sort of desire to "dumb things down" for anyone. We don't write anything with the intention of dumbing things down.
- da39a3ee 6y ago
  Hi Steve, thanks for the comments and for reading my somewhat grumpy post! I expect you've heard it all before. It's true, I do believe that Rust is basically a programming language for adult brains, and so it's a bit weird for the Rust book to contain sentences that sound like they're aimed at younger teenagers. I know there are teenagers learning Rust! And that's great. But when they're doing that, they're exercising quite an adult part of their personalities and I think they'd respond better to being treated as adults while they are bravely entering an adult world. It's also true that I worry that the whimsical sentences that seem designed for children are somehow connected with what is often called the "Diversity and Inclusion" movement. In my company, the diversity and inclusion initiatives were characterized by childish activities, such as writing "motivational phrases" on post-its in colored pens and posting them on the walls of the office. The women I've spoken to about this really resented the fact that engaging with pro-women-in-tech initiatives meant having to behave childishly, and they resented even more strongly the implication that childishness was appealing to women and under-represented minorities.
  - jerf 6y ago
    "In my company, the diversity and inclusion initiatives were characterized by childish activities" You may have some wires understandably crossed. Companies frequently end up hiring in people for all sorts of initiatives that end up doing some really childish stuff. Diversity and inclusion do not particularly stick out on this front. This is where we end up with the mockery around "trust falls" and that sort of thing, which are childish "team-building" activities, and have you ever seen a corporate presentation on how to do better sales? Yeowzers. It's not specifically a diversity/inclusion thing, it's all the corporations. On the other side, there is a solid reason to use whimsical, or more accurately, highly visual and emotional analogies for that sort of thing: They're the things our brains remember. You'll encounter that sort of thing in a lot of foreign language courses, memorizing alphabets or symbols with mnemonics meant to engage emotional and visual memories around the item as a bootstrap towards remembering what it is. That said, it is true these whimsical analogies travel poorly, because your cognitive association network will be different than everybody else's. I've got some mnemonics in my language I'm studying around my kid's pet bird and my wife's interactions with her parents; obviously they wouldn't be very meaningful to you if I tried to give them to you to use as your own association. You ought to make them up yourself for maximum effect. But, my main point here is that they aren't intrinsically silly, they are a legitimate way to remember otherwise difficult-to-remember things. After a decade of programming the meaning of curly braces may be obvious, but it isn't at first.

montyevans 6y ago

I don't think the central focus of this resource is to teach Quantum Mechanics, but rather to test a new teaching method - the relative importance of yet another Intro to Quantum Mechanics course is tiny compared to developing methods potentially applicable across the entire space of online learning. As you say, the SRS questions could be better, but the idea of embedding them into an online essay / course is, to my mind, novel, potentially enormously valuable, and worth highlighting. Is it the notion of embedding SRS questions into the medium per se. that you find superficial and unhelpful, or just the specific questions that Andy and Michael chose? If the latter, would you suggest any alternative questions that might be less patronizing / more effective?

sarbaz 6y ago
Approximately half the math textbooks I study from basically do this already. It works very well, but IMO mostly because the questions are not easy. You actually have to stop and think for a few minutes before moving on.
whatshisface 6y ago
They should be testing it on something that involves more remembering and less thinking, like microbiology. Physics is the absolute worst subject to test any new book-writing method in, because the book practically doesn't matter; it's all in what happens inside the student's head as they do the exercises. The fact that the Moore method has half a chance of working for topology students shows beyond a shadow of a doubt that for highly logic-based fields like physics and math that the book matters so little that the absence of any book or lecture at all will still result in the material being taught!

waynesonfire 6y ago

> Quantum computing and quantum mechanics is hard and involves sophisticated concepts. It's comments like these that in high school made me avoid calculus. Just wanted to let you know that you are discouraging. The youngsters reading this that are still developing their critical thinking skills are being scared away because of your projections. Frame it different, take responsibility for your inadequacies.

matvore 6y ago
> Just wanted to let you know that you are discouraging. It didn't strike me as discouraging at all. Discouraging would be something like "QM is so hard that 80% of people reading this are too stupid to learn it" (which I don't think is true, FWIW, so don't be discouraged by that) Just because youngsters don't have critical thinking skills does not mean they will read words that aren't even there. If anyone does that, it's on them, the reader, and no psycho-analytical word smithing will fix that.
da39a3ee 6y ago
People of the age you're talking about aren't stupid and they're not taken in by people giving them saccharine messages about how things aren't hard and anyone can do them. OK. If you are a student reading this then, well, firstly I'm not at all sure you're feeling discouraged from learning about the nature of reality and potentially world-changing computing frontiers because someone on the internet said it was a hard subject! But if you were, please don't be. Here's why. Firstly, a lot of incredibly valuable and interesting things do require a bit of concentration and effort. I'm sure you know this. But there are reasons to be optimistic! Here are some things to do: 1. Stay calm! Don't give up. 2. It's not at all obvious how to read technical stuff to start off with. Basically, the secret is to read the same paragraph a LOT of times! Everyone does that. No-one can understand it by reading it through once like a novel. If you find yourself reading the same paragraph 100 times you're on the right path because it means that you KNOW you haven't quite grasped all the ideas yet, and so you are becoming your own teacher in a way; setting your own standards for yourself. 3. You've got to be, or become, the sort of person who can concentrate on reading something challenging, in a quiet room. Talking to others is going to help a lot also, but there's a private side to this. You can compare it to training to be on a sports team at a more competitive level. There are going to be times when you're doing fitness training or whatever, and you're on your own, and it hurts because you're exhausted. You know this was always part of the deal. 4. Don't listen to the people who tell you that it's "easy" and "anyone can do it". Yes, anyone can do it in in the sense that everyone has the biological potential to do it (they're human, they have a perfectly good brain). But you know perfectly well, just by looking around at your classmates that some people don't have, or at least don't currently have, the attitude that's going to let them do it. You don't have to be weird; you just need to let one side of your personality be a studious side, occupying some fraction of your time.

BeetleB 6y ago

> This is just nonsense and quite distracting, even irritating. Quantum computing and quantum mechanics is hard and involves sophisticated concepts. The spaced repetition questions are utterly superficial and represent unhelpful dumbing down. I can see why you would think that. However, consider the following points: 1. One of the authors is/was[1] one of the most well known experts on quantum computing, and he literally wrote the book on quantum computing. 2. He has written elsewhere on how spaced repetition really helped him understand new disciplines and read journal papers. So while you may not like spaced repetition, think twice before saying "unhelpful dumbing down", given that it really helped him, and he's very clearly not a dumb person. There's no harm in simply saying it doesn't work for you. I suggest you examine the need to justify that by making broad statements. Perhaps there's more to the Rust/Mozilla story that I don't know of, but going from the example you gave and connecting it to making things approachable to minorities is a giant leap I'm having trouble fathoming. And while the statement is annoying, I did not find it in the least patronizing. I don't doubt that it helps some people, and I think you need to realize that not all books are written for you, and that there likely won't be any book that is good for everyone. If you don't like it, find another book - don't expect the world to cater to you. When it comes to technical books, particularly math/physics text books, everyone has his/her own opinion and that's OK. There's no shortage of people who hate math books that give too many examples ("Just give me the theorems, proofs, and maybe one example!"), and there's no shortage of people who want examples and hate books that are "theorems/proofs". The same goes for pretty plots, color coding important theorems, etc. Yet not once in my time in academia and beyond did I hear someone say "These distracting elements and examples are dumbing things down and are patronizing, and it's because they're trying to appeal to women and minorities!" I really think you need to introspect about your world view that led you to these conclusions. You're being triggered, and you need to own your reactions. > Quantum computing and quantum mechanics is hard and involves sophisticated concepts. Although I didn't study quantum computing, I have done plenty of non-relativistic quantum mechanics at the grad level. It's hard for only two reasons: 1. Lots of introductory books start off with calculus-heavy problems (infinite square wells, harmonic oscillators, hydrogen atom, etc). 2. It differs from real world experience. Plenty of people have advocated that item 1 above is the problem, and it is not a good way to teach QM. You get lost in the calculus and don't focus on the QM. There are plenty of advocates (e.g. David Mermin) who think QM should first be taught using spin, because it involves no calculus, and the linear algebra is necessary (and not sophisticated). Almost all, if not all, the fundamentals of QM can be taught that way, and it's not that hard. Certainly a lot easier than much of your introductory physics material (mechanics, EM, etc). [1] I say "was" because he has left the quantum computing research world.

detaro 6y ago

What makes you think surprisingly-random memnonics are aimed at specific audiences?