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He wants educators to instead teach “how do you think and how do you decompose problems” Ahmen! I attend this same church. My favorite professor in engineerin

• qsort 1y ago
  Isn't that happening already? Half the usual CS curriculum is either math (analysis, linear algebra, numerical methods) or math in anything but name (computability theory, complexity theory). There's a lot of very legitimate criticism of academia, but most of the times someone goes "academia is stupid, we should do X" it turns out X is either: - something we've been doing since forever - the latest trend that can be picked up just-in-time if you'll ever need it
  • Loughla 1y ago
    I've worked in education in some form or another for my entire career. When I was in teacher education in college . . . some number of decades ago . . . the number one topic of conversation and topic that most of my classes were based around was how to teach critical thinking, effective reasoning, and problem solving. Methods classes were almost exclusively based on those three things. Times have not changed. This is still the focus of teacher prep programs.
  • deleted 1y ago
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  • fumeux_fume 1y ago
    Parent comment is literally praising an experience they had in higher education, but your only takeaway is that it must be facile ridicule of academia.
    • qsort 1y ago
      Was directed at TFA, not parent comment.
  • ghaff 1y ago
    In CS, it's because it came out of math departments in many cases and often didn't even really include a lot of programming because there really wasn't much to program.
    • Uehreka 1y ago
      Right but a looot of the criticism online is based on assumptions (either personal or inherited from other commenters) that haven’t been updated since 2006.
      • ghaff 1y ago
        Well, at more elite schools at least, the general assumption is that programming is mostly something you pick up on your own. It's not CS. Some folks will disagree of course but I think that's the reality. I took an MIT Intro to Algorithms/CS MOOC course a few years back out of curiosity and there was a Python book associated with the course but you were mostly on your own with it.
• rodrigodlu 1y ago
  A professor in my very first semester called "crazy finger syndrome" the attempts to go straight to the code without decomposing the problem from a business or user perspective. It was a long time ago. It was a CS curriculum I miss her jokes against anxious nerds that just wanted to code :( Don't forget the rise of boot camps where some educators are not always aligned with some sort of higher ethical standards.
  • bob1029 1y ago
    I make a point to solve my more difficult problems with pen and paper drawings and/or narrative text before I touch the PC. The computer is an incredibly distracting medium to work with if you are not operating under clear direction. Time spent on this forum is a perfect example.
  • jawilson2 1y ago
    > "crazy finger syndrome" - the attempts to go straight to the code without decomposing the problem from a business or user perspective Years ago I started on a new team as a senior dev, and did weeks of pair programming with a more junior dev to intro me to the codebase. His approach was maddening; I called it "spray and pray" development. He would type out lines or paragraphs of the first thing that came to mind just after sitting down and opening an editor. I'd try to talk him into actually taking even a few minutes to think about the problem first, but it never took hold. He'd be furiously typing, while I would come up with a working solution without touching a keyboard, usually with a whiteboard or notebook, but we'd have to try his first. This was c++/trading, so the type-compile-debug cycle could be 10's of minutes. I kept relaying this to my supervisor, but after a few months of this he was let go.
• roxolotl 1y ago
  When I was in college the philosophy program had the marketing slogan: “Thinking of a major? Major in thinking”. Now as a hiring manager I’ll say I regularly find that those who’ve had humanities experience are way more capable and the hard parts of analysis and understanding. Of course I’m biased as a dual cs/philosophy major but it’s very rare I’m looking for someone who can just write a lot of code. Especially juniors as analytical thinking is way harder to teach than how to program.
  • reaperducer 1y ago
    On a related note, the most accomplished people I've met didn't have degrees in the fields where they excelled and won awards. They were all philosophy majors. Teaching people to think is perhaps the world's most under-rated skill.
    • thechao 1y ago
      I think good historians are on the same foot as philosophers in the arena of "thinking really fucking hard and making an airtight analysis".
    • Lalabadie 1y ago
      My otherwise ordinary school applied the mentality that students must "Learn to learn", and that mix of skills and mindset has never stopped helping me.
    • JustExAWS 1y ago
      Well, yes but the other 90%+ just need to get a job out of college to support their addiction to food and shelter not to be a “better citizen of the world” unless they have parents to subsidize their livelihood either through direct transfers of money or by letting them stay at home. I told both of my (step)sons that I would only help them pay for college or trade school - their choice - if they were getting a degree in something “useful”. Not philosophy, not Ancient Chinese Art History etc. I also told them that they would have to get loans in their own names and I would help them pay off the loans once they graduated and started working gainfully.
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• bitwize 1y ago
  Everyone going through STEM needs to see the movie Hidden Figures for a variety of reasons, but one bit stands out as poignant: I believe it was Katherine Johnson, who is asked to calculate some rocket trajectory to determine the landing coordinates, thinks on it a bit and finally says, "Aha! Newton's method!" Then she runs down to the library to look up how to apply Newton's method. She had the conceptual tools to find a solution, but didn't have all the equations memorized. Having all the equations in short term memory only matters in a (somewhat pathological) school setting.
  • deleted 1y ago
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• Workaccount2 1y ago
  Being resourceful is an extremely valuable skill in the real world, and basically shut out of the education world. Unlike my teachers, none of my bosses ever put me in an empty room with only a pencil and a sheet of paper to solve given problems.
• simpaticoder 1y ago
  In undergrad I took an abstract algebra class. It was very difficult and one of the things the teacher did was have us memorize proofs. In fact, all of his tests were the same format: reproduce a well-known proof from memory, and then complete a novel proof. At first I was aghast at this rote memorization - I maybe even found it offensive. But an amazing thing happened - I realized that it was impossible to memorize a proof without understanding it! Moreover, producing the novel proofs required the same kinds of "components" and now because they were "installed" in my brain I could use them more intuitively. (Looking back I'd say it enabled an efficient search of a tree of sequences of steps). Memorization is not a panacea. I never found memorizing l33t code problems to be edifying. I think it's because those kinds of tight, self-referential, clever programs are far removed from the activity of writing applications. Most working programmers do not run into a novel algorithm problem but once or twice a career. Application programming has more the flavor of a human-mediated graph-traversal, where the human has access to a node's local state and they improvise movement and mutation using only that local state plus some rapidly decaying stack. That is, there is no well-defined sequence for any given real-world problem, only heuristics.
  • MattPalmer1086 1y ago
    Hmmm... It's the other way around for me. I find it hard to memorise things I don't actually understand. I remember being given a proof of why RSA encryption is secure. All the other students just regurgitated it. It made superficial sense I guess. However, I could not understand the proof and felt quite stupid. Eventually I went to my professor for help. He admitted the proof he had given was incomplete (and showed me why it still worked). He also said he hadn't expected anyone to notice it wasn't a complete proof.
    • jghn 1y ago
      > Hmmm... It's the other way around for me. I find it hard to memorise things I don't actually understand. I think you two are agreeing. GP said that they found they couldn't memorize something until they actually understood it
• duxup 1y ago
  Speaking with a relative who is a doctor recently it’s interesting how much each of our jobs are “troubleshooting”. Coding, doctors, plumber… different information, often similar skill sets. I worked a job doing tech support for some enterprise level networking equipment. It was the late 1990s and we were desperate for warm bodies. Hired a former truck driver who just so happened to do a lot of woodworking and other things. Great hire.
• PhantomHour 1y ago
  It's the core problem facing the hiring practices in this field. Any truly competent developer is a generalist at heart. There is value to be had in expertise, but unless you're dealing with a decade(s) old hellscape of legacy code or are pushing the very limits of what is possible, you don't need experts. You'd almost certainly be better off with someone who has experience with the tools you don't use, providing a fresh look and cover for weaknesses your current staff has. A regular old competent developer can quickly pick up whatever stack is used. After all, they have to; Every company is their own bespoke mess of technologies. The idea that you can just slap "15 years of React experience" on a job ad and that the unicorn you get will be day-1 maximally productive is ludicrous. There is always an onboarding time. But employers in this field don't "get" that. For regular companies they're infested by managers imported from non-engineering fields, who treat software like it's the assembly line for baking tins or toilet paper. Startups, who already have fewer resources to train people with, are obsessed with velocity and shitting out an MVP ASAP so they can go collect the next funding round. Big Tech is better about this, but has it's own problems going on and it seems that the days of Big Tech being the big training houses is also over. It's not even a purely collective problem. Recruitment is so expensive, but all the money spent chasing unicorns & the opportunity costs of being understaffed just get handwaved. Rather spend $500,000 on the hunt than $50,000 on training someone into the role. And speaking of collective problems. This is a good example of how this field suffers from having no professional associations that can stop employers from sinking the field with their tragedies of the commons. (Who knows, maybe unions will get more traction now that people are being laid off & replaced with outsourced workers for no legitimate business reason.)
  • mschuster91 1y ago
    > Rather spend $500,000 on the hunt than $50,000 on training someone into the role. Capex vs opex, that's the fundamental problem at heart. It "looks better on the numbers" to have recruiting costs than to have to set aside a senior developer plus paying the junior for a few months. That is why everyone and their dog only wants to hire seniors, because they have the skillset and experience that you can sit their ass in front of any random semi fossil project and they'll figure it out on their own. If the stonk analysts would go and actually dive deep into the numbers to look at hiring side costs (like headhunter expenses, employee retention and the likes), you'd see a course change pretty fast... but this kind of in-depth analysis, that's only being done by a fair few short-sellers who focus on struggling companies and not big tech. In the end, it's a "tragedy of the commons" scenario. It's fine if a few companies do that, it's fine if a lot of companies do that... but when no one wants to train juniors any more (because they immediately get poached by the big ones), suddenly society as a whole has a real and massive problem. Our societies are driven into a concrete wall at full speed by the financialization of every tiny aspect of our lives. All that matters these days are the gods of the stonk market - screw the economy, screw the environment, screw labor laws, all that matters is appearing "numbers go up" on the next quarterly.
• techpineapple 1y ago
  While there’s no reasonable way to disagree with the sentiment, I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who can “think and decompose problems” who isn’t also widely read, and knows a lot of things. Forcing kids to sit and memorize facts isn’t suddenly going to make them a better thinker, but much of my process of being a better thinker is something akin to sitting around and memorizing facts. (With a healthy dose of interacting substantively and curiously with said facts)
• yodsanklai 1y ago
  > My favorite professor in engineering school always gave open book tests. My experience as a professor and a student is that this doesn't make any difference. Unless you can copy verbatim the solution to your problem from the book (which never happens), you better have a good understanding of the subject in order to solve problems in the allocated time. You're not going to acquire that knowledge during your test.
  • VBprogrammer 1y ago
    Isn't this an argument for why you should allow open book tests rather than why you shouldn't? It certainly removes some pressure to remember some obscure detail or formula.
  • mh- 1y ago
    Isn't that just an argument for always doing open book tests, then? Seems like there's no downside, and as already mentioned, it's closer to how one works in the real world.
  • jqpabc123 1y ago
    My experience as a professor and a student is that this doesn't make any difference. Exactly the point of his test methodology. What he asked of students on a test was to *apply* knowledge and information to *unique* problems and create a solution that did not exist in any book. I only brought 4 things to his tests --- textbook, pencil, calculator and a capable, motivated and determined brain. And his tests revealed the limits of what you could achieve with these items.
• bluGill 1y ago
  Memorization and closed book tests are important for some areas. When seconds are counting the ER doctor cannot go look up how to treat a heart attack. That doctor also needs to know now only how to treat the common heart attack, but how to recognize this isn't the common heart attack but the 1 in 10,000 not a heart attack but has exactly the same symptoms as a heart attack case and give it the correct treatment. However most of us are not in that situation. It is better for us to just look up those details as we need them because it gives us more room to handle a broader variety of situations.
  • flatb 1y ago
    Humans will never outcompete ai in that regard however. Industry will eventually optimize for humans and ai separately: ai will know a lot and think quickly, humans will provide judgement and legal accountability. We’re already on this path.
• mnky9800n 1y ago
  My favorite professor in my physics program would say, "You will never remember the equations I teach. But if you learn how the relationships are built and how to ask questions of those relationships, then I have done my job." He died a few years ago. I never was able to thank him for his lessons.
  • sitkack 1y ago
    You just did.
• dirkc 1y ago
  I had a like minded professor in university, ironically in AI. Our big tests were all 3 day take home assignments. The questions were open ended, required writing code, processing data and analyzing results. I think the problem with this is that it requires the professor to mentally fully engage when marking assignments and many educators do not have the capacity and/or desire to do so.
  • michaelt 1y ago
    Sadly, I doubt 3-day take-home assignments have much future as a means of assessment in the age of LLMs.
    • dirkc 1y ago
      Might be true, idk? For all we know that professor now gives a 2.5-day take home assignments where they are allowed to use LLMs, and then assess them in an 1 hour oral exam where they need to explain approach, results and how they ensure that their results are accurate? I don't think the 3-day take home is the key. It's supporting educators to have the intention, agency and capacity to improvise assessment.
• koliber 1y ago
  Each one of us has a mental toolbox that we use to solve problems. There are many more tools that we don’t have in our heads that we can look up if we know how. The bigger your mental toolbox the more effective you will be at solving the problems. Looking up a tool and learning just enough to use it JIT is much slower than using a handy tool that you already masterfully know how to use. This is as true for physical tools as for programming concepts like algorithms and data structures. In the worst case you won’t even know to look for a tool and will use whatever is handy, like the proverbial hammer.
• deleted 1y ago
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• turnsout 1y ago
  Even more broadly, it's "critical thinking," which definitely seems to be on the decline (though I'm sure old people have said this for millennia)
• Waterluvian 1y ago
  Yeah. Memorization and trivial knowledge is an optimization mechanism.
• tomrod 1y ago
  During some of the earlier web service development days, one would find people at F500 skating by in low-to-mid level jobs just cutting and pasting between spreadsheets, things would take them hours could be done in seconds, and with lower error rates, with a proper data interface. Very anecdotally, but I hazard that most of these types of low-hanging fruit, low-value add roles are much less common since they tended to be blockers for operational improvement. Six-sigma, Lean, various flavors of Agile would often surface these low performers up and they either improved or got shown the door between 2005 - 2020. Not that everyone is 100% all the time, every day, but what we are left with is often people that are highly competent at not just their task list but at their job.
• mclau157 1y ago
  Have there been studies about abilities of different students to memorize information? I feel this is under-studied in the world of memorizing for exams
• movpasd 1y ago
  I agree with the overall message, but I will say that there is still a great deal of value in memorisation. Memorising things gives you more internal tools to think in broader chunks, so you can solve more complicated problems. (I do mean memorisation fairly broadly, it doesn't have to mean reciting a meaningless list of items.)
• laveur 1y ago
  Same here! I always like to say that software engineering is 50% knowing the basics (How to write/read code, basic logic) and 50% having great research skills. So much of our time is spent finding documentation and understanding what it actually means as opposed to just writing code.
• Herring 1y ago
  Talk is cheap. Good educators cost money, and America famously underpays (and under-appreciates) its teachers. Does he also support increasing taxes on the wealthy?
• mvkel 1y ago
  > Everyone has full access to all of the available data and information Ahh, but this is part of the problem. Yes, they have access, but there is -so much- information, it punches through our context window. So we resort to executive summaries, or convince ourselves that something that's relevant is actually not. At least an LLM can take full view of the context in aggregate and peel out signal. There is value there, but no jobs are being replaced
  • bnug 1y ago
    >but no jobs are being replaced I agree that an LLM is a long way from replacing most any single job held by a human in isolation. However, what I feel is missed in this discussion is that it can significantly reduce the total manpower by making humans more efficient. For instance, the job of a team of 20 can now be done by 15 or maybe even 10 depending on the class of work. I for one believe this will have a significant impact on a large number of jobs. Not that I'm suggesting anything be "stopped". I find LLM's incredibly useful, and I'm excited about applying them to more and more of the mundane tasks that I'd rather not do in the first place, so I can spend more time solving more interesting problems.
• proee 1y ago
  Also, some problems don't have enough data for a solution. I had a professor that gave tests where the answer was sometimes "not solvable." Taking these tests was like sweating bullets because you were not sure if you're just too dumb to solve the problem, or there was not enough data to solve the problem. Good times!
• thewebguyd 1y ago
  Agreed coming from the ops world also. I've had a frustrating experience the past few years trying to hire junior sysadmins because of a real lack of problem solving skills once something went wrong outside of various playbooks they memorized to follow. I don't need someone who can follow a pre-written playbook, I have ansible for that. I need someone that understands theory, regardless of specific implementations, and can problem solve effectively so they can handle unpredictable or novel issues. To put another way, I can teach a junior the specifics of bind9 named.conf, or the specifics of our own infrastructure, but I shouldn't be expected to teach them what DNS in general is and how it works. But the candidates we get are the opposite - they know specific tools, but lack more generalized theory and problem solving skills.
• sim7c00 1y ago
  wanted to chime in on the educational system. in the west, we have the 'banking system' which treat a student as a bank account and knowledge as currency, hence the dump more info into ppl to make them sm0rt attitude. in developing areas, they actually implement more modern models commonly, as its newer and free to implement newer things. those newer models focus more on exactly this. teach a person how to go through the process of finding solutions. rather than 'knowing a lot to enable the process of thinking'. not saying what is better or worse, but reading this comment and article it reminds me of this. a lot of people i see, they know tons of interesting things, but anything outside of their knowledge is a complete mystery. all the while ppl from developing areas learn to solve issues. alot of individuals from there also, get out of their poverty and do really well for themselves. ofcourse, this is a generalization and doesnt hold up in all cases. but i cant help think about it. a lot of my colleagues dont know how to solve problems simply because they dont RTFM. they rely on knowledge from their education which is already outdated before they even sign up.. i try to teach them to RTFM. it seems hopeless. they look at me , downwards, because i have no papers. but if shit hits the fan, they come to me. solve the prolbem. a wise guy i met once said (likely not his words). there are 2 type of ppl. those who think in problems, and those who think in solutions. id related that to education, not prebaked human properties.
• SkyBelow 1y ago
  It depends what level the education is happening at. Think of it like students being taught how to do for loops but are just copying and pasting AI output. That isn't learning. They aren't building the skills needed to debug when the AI gets something wrong with a more complicated loop, or understand the trade offs of loops vs recursion. Finding the correct balance for a given class it hard. Generally, the lower level the education, the more it should be closed books because the more it is about being able to manually solve the smaller challenges that are already well solved so you build up the skills needed to even tackle the larger challenges. The higher the education level, the more it is about being able to apply those skills to then tackle a problem, and one of those skills is being able to pull relevant formulas and such from the larger body of known formulas.
• herval 1y ago
  People have been saying that since the advent of formal education. Turns out standardized education is really hard to pull off and most systems focus on making the average good enough. It’s also hard to teach people “how to think” while at the same time teaching them practical skills - there’s only so many hours in a day, and most education is setup as a way to get as many people as possible into shape for taking on jobs where “thinking” isn’t really a positive trait, as it’d lead to constant restructuring and questioning of the status quo
• libraryatnight 1y ago
  One of my favorite things about Feynman interviews/lectures is often his responses are about how to think. Sometimes physicists ask questions in his lectures and his answer has little to do with the physics, but how they're thinking about it. I like thinking about thinking, so Feynman is soothing.
• _mu 1y ago
  Agree, hopefully this insight / attitude will become more and more prevalent. For anyone looking for resources, may we recommend: * The Art of Doing Science and Engineering by Richard Hamming (lectures are available on YouTube as well) * Measurement by Paul Lockhart (for teaching mindset)
• bakuninsbart 1y ago
  It is tough though, I'd like to think I learnt how to think analytically and critically. But thinking is hard, and often times I catch myself trying to outsource my thinking almost subconsciously. I'll read an article on HN and think "Let's go to the comment section and see what the opinions to choose from are", or one of the first instincts after encountering a problem is googling and now asking an LLM. Most of us are also old enough to have had a chance to develop taste in code and writing. Many of the young generation lack the experience to distinguish good writing from LLM drivel.
• kazinator 1y ago
  You cannot teach "how to to think". You have to give students thinking problems to actually train thinking. Those kinds of problems can increasingly be farmed off to AI, or at least certain subproblems in them. I meam, yes, to an extent you can teach how to think: critical thinking and logic are topics you can teach and people who take their teaching to heart can become better thinkers. However, those topics cannot impart creativity. Critical thinking is called exactly that because it's about tools and skills for separating bad thinking from good thinking. The skill of generating good thinking probably cannot be taught; it can only be improved with problem-solving practice.
• busyant 1y ago
  > In the real world of work, everyone has full access to all of the available data and information. In general, I also attend your church. However, as I preached in that church, I had two students over the years. * One was from an African country and told me that where he grew up, you could not "just look up data that might be relevant" because internet access was rare. * The other was an ex US Navy officer who was stationed on a nuclear sub. She and the rest of the crew had to practice situations where they were in an emergency and cut off from the rest of the world. Memorization of considerable amounts of data was important to both of them.