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I will wax a touch philosophical here, but I believe perfect systems do not exist unless they are purely within thought. Implementations will experience failure

by _gmax0 4y ago

I will wax a touch philosophical here, but I believe perfect systems do not exist unless they are purely within thought. Implementations will experience failure due to both its physical and logical components, logical in the sense due to unforeseen n-th degree effects. This is when expert knowledge is needed, unless you have already designed such a generalized model that captures, taxonomizes, reacts, and optimizes for all events until the end of time. From an educational standpoint, who cares if you know how to add a node to a binary tree using C++. It's not the technical details but the struggle to understand recursion until it finally clicks. It's the sculpting of the computational mind. Until the essence of controlling and directing computation by computational machines themselves is satisfactorily solved (for then you've become god), then no, expert humans will always be needed, just not in abundance. Throwback to Keynes forecasting that we'd all be working 15 hour work weeks.

dinkumthinkum 4y ago
But if you can’t understand how to add a node to a binary tree that what does having a “computational mind” even mean. It sounds like feel-good happy-talk nonsense.
- _gmax0 4y ago
  Apologies, I didn't proofread my comment. The point I'm trying to make is that for certain technical concepts (mathematics, programming, etc.), it's not the technical detail that must be remembered. Sure, you forget exactly the syntactical details of implementation, but you do remember (assuming you understood it at the start): 1 - How do I traverse the tree? 2 - Is there any ordering required among the nodes so that my traversal is 'correct'? 3 - How do I maintain such an ordering and establish correctness after my new node is added? 4 - Can I make any improvements so that locating the position of the to-be-added node doesn't take forever? You don't begin to touch on these higher level "computationally minded" ideas until you can understand the primitive action of adding a node. And once you've grasped it, you forget the primitive details, only the essential concept remains. The author seems to suggest that the next generation doesn't need to make an attempt to understand the fundamentals. I argue that unless you're a genius, you need to first add a node to a binary tree before labeling yourself a computational thinker.

by _gmax0 4y ago

dinkumthinkum 4y ago

But if you can’t understand how to add a node to a binary tree that what does having a “computational mind” even mean. It sounds like feel-good happy-talk nonsense.

_gmax0 4y ago
Apologies, I didn't proofread my comment. The point I'm trying to make is that for certain technical concepts (mathematics, programming, etc.), it's not the technical detail that must be remembered. Sure, you forget exactly the syntactical details of implementation, but you do remember (assuming you understood it at the start): 1 - How do I traverse the tree? 2 - Is there any ordering required among the nodes so that my traversal is 'correct'? 3 - How do I maintain such an ordering and establish correctness after my new node is added? 4 - Can I make any improvements so that locating the position of the to-be-added node doesn't take forever? You don't begin to touch on these higher level "computationally minded" ideas until you can understand the primitive action of adding a node. And once you've grasped it, you forget the primitive details, only the essential concept remains. The author seems to suggest that the next generation doesn't need to make an attempt to understand the fundamentals. I argue that unless you're a genius, you need to first add a node to a binary tree before labeling yourself a computational thinker.