11 ms·

We see something that works, and then we understand it

224 points by surprisetalk 6mo ago

vlovich123 6mo ago
> As a teacher, I can tell you that students get really angry if you put a question on an exam that requires a concept not explicitly covered in class. Of course, if you work as an engineer and you’re stuck on a problem and you tell your boss it cannot be solved with the ideas you learned in college… you’re going to look like a fool. Very flawed comparison. At work I get to go off and do research, experiments, can collaborate with peers and people who might have more expertise in a given sub problem, and generally have much more time. An exam trying to test you on material you haven’t studied is supposed to test for what? Your ability to synthesize knowledge out of thin air. The rest of the article is well written and correct, but this particular aside felt weird.
- andai 6mo ago
  I think it depends on the question. If it's not a question of the form explicitly presented before, but answerable with a minute of thinking using the knowledge the student has already mastered, then it makes sense. A time limited exam is probably the wrong place for that, though, due to the stress interfering with that kind of thinking. It would be better for a homework assignment. If ChatGPT didn't exist. Okay, maybe in class, on paper is the right place for that.
- sdenton4 6mo ago
  The while premise of "learn some stuff them take an exam on exactly that stuff" is pretty flawed, and that's the point. So much of the academic structure is about what's convenient for evaluation, rather than what's best for learning. Why not get rid of the exam and replace it with something else entirely? Who says we have to have exams at all?
  - noworriesnate 6mo ago
    > So much of the academic structure is about what's convenient for evaluation, rather than what's best for learning Academia is going to have to focus on the latter anyway because we have AI, which is exactly the same: it’s only useful when you can evaluate the output for accuracy independently. But how do you do this without throwing out objectivity entirely? Maybe we need to move to apprenticeships?
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
- dosisking 6mo ago
  From my experience, the boss is usually a complete moron, so who cares. It also creates this unhealthy assumption that the engineer is subservient to the boss.
  - bryanrasmussen 6mo ago
    From my experience the boss does not know things you know, that does not make them a complete moron because they probably know things you don't. Here's an example, consulting at a large Danish company, every Friday morning all departments in this big building would share breakfast and the bosses would say some things. So this one morning they explained that in the coming months people should register time in a particular way because of accounting and how it related to a particular government grant and money that needed to be used up by a particular time in order to get to the next step of blah blah blah. I realized as my eyes glazed over, damn this is just the same reaction people who don't understand browser rendering engines get when I start telling them about different events. I also noticed other clueless people gamely trying to question these finance nerds on how things worked, and the patient finance nerds explaining some detailed bit and the clueless person clearly out of their depth with that "uuuuhhhh, hope they don't ask me if I understand" look on their face. Now, if it hadn't been for them explaining this stuff I would have gone around thinking the boss is a complete moron. I once saw him mistake a nail gun for a drill! He doesn't understand how search engines work and why stemming and decompounding might be important, I know because I tried to explain to the idiot one time!! But since he actually talked about his work for a bit I realized he just happens to know stuff I don't. I'm betting most of the morons you know are maybe not quite so stupid, although probably not as forthcoming as why things need to be done in a certain way to those who work under them.
    - dijksterhuis 6mo ago
      yeah. someone, somewhere, at some point, will think i’m a clueless idiot. we’re all clueless idiots at the end of the day.
    - airstrike 6mo ago
      that's a great story and a remarkable level of self-awareness. thank you for sharing
- from_memory 6mo ago
  I feel like it's an argument for the benefits of abstract reasoning. I don't think they are saying it'll be like that in the real world, I think they just want to test how you do under adverse conditions. Stress testing the student's academic prowess, if you will.
- noduerme 6mo ago
  >> Your ability to synthesize knowledge out of thin air As someone who graduated high school, I'd hope my more accomplished peers would know the difference between hypothesis, theory and proof. It is entirely possible, and useful, to test someone's ability to form a cogent hypothesis. If you were faced with a question beyond the scope of the ideas you were taught, and could not rely on any assistance, the only useful thing to know about you is how well you would handle it yourself. If you would synthesize knowledge out of thin air, that would be a failing grade.
  - ordu 6mo ago
    > If you were faced with a question beyond the scope of the ideas you were taught Who knows the scope of the ideas I was taught? I mean, I could use derivatives and sometimes to integrate in 8th grade, should I get a failing grade if I used them in a test? I see the point of your post, it is important to distinguish between what you know, and what you don't know, but maybe suspect. School tasks are built in a way, that the very form of the task can be used to make good guesses that may help you to solve the tasks. It doesn't work in reality, but it works in school. But the solution is to add questions without answers, not questions with answers beyond someone's knowledge. Like "what was Mozart's opinion on pineapple pizza?" or "what size was Julius Caesar?". Well, tests needs less obviously unanswerable questions than these, but you got the drift. Edit: Thought it will be tricky with math. For example: "Alice has 3 apples, and Bob has 2. How many oranges they have?". School math problems have a convention, which means that if oranges where not mentioned, then they have 0 oranges. Compare with "Alice has 3 apples and Bob has 2 oranges". If the problem doesn't mention Alice's oranges, then Alice has 0 oranges. It is implied and these implicit rules are the first difficulty kids face when starting with math.
- jrowen 6mo ago
  I found the whole article to be a bit heavy on anti-academia. And I went to industry after undergrad. It's a false dichotomy between the "thinkism" bogeyman (actually reading books and papers and putting work into theoretical design is just bad now? Have they tried building anything in the physical world? Checked in with nuclear physics, ever?) and hands-on experience. Both are important. It should be about balance, not trashing an incredibly valuable set of tools because others exist...
  - mettamage 6mo ago
    I am team academia more than hands-on experience. And I have 5 years of experience. To me, it felt like most SWE things could eventually be solved by what I learned at school. Not everything I did I learned at school, such as navigating codebases with more than a million lines of code. But most things? Yea. With that said, I am curious how people say that they learned much more through experience, what did you specifically learn?
    - bsrhng 6mo ago
      I find that many people can learn a lot by doing but then at some point hit a wall and really struggle to recognize that another kind of learning needs to take place to understand a deeper concept.
    - ttoinou 6mo ago
      Could you tell us what you learned at school that is useful for your SWE career? Im sure there is a lot of us that learned 0 at school and learned everything ourselves as kids on the internet
      - vladms 6mo ago
        The problem with "learned everything ourselves" is that you might have niche interests and you miss things. Things I learned that probably I wouldn't have by done by myself: computer architecture (memory, buses, cpu-s, instruction set), and related VHDL/Verilog; how complex is synchronization (implementing from scratch synchronization libraries); different programming paradigms (functional languages); compilers & operating systems (kernel modules, etc.); various types of maths (dsp); algorithm complexity analysis. Some I ended up using more during my career than others, but knowing more definitely reduced my tendency to think "ah, that should be easy".
- zipy124 6mo ago
  I agree that it's a flawed comparison but it does touch on a very real issue in the workplace. The difference between employees who I can send away on a problem and they'll encounter issues and try to solve them, vs those who come back to the senior at any problem, presents a serious ceiling on the level those employees can work at.
  - lazyasciiart 6mo ago
    Perhaps the example should be a homework assignment, not an exam.
    - lukan 6mo ago
      Even then I would call it bad teaching, as the usual mode is: New stuff gets explained in class by the teacher - the details are for self study. This is how it was communicated to me in school, so I would call it part of the "contract". But giving a homework on a fundamental new subject without explicitely telling that this is what it is about, will rightfully confuse, as the normal mode is different. And when it happened to me, it always happened because the teacher messed up and got confused themself what they had and have not teached before. Teaching to self study is a valuable skill in itself that should not be taught by accident, but with a clear pedagogic concept.
  - kaashif 6mo ago
    As a leader, I can just tell people literally that: if you can't go away and work independently on a problem, it puts a ceiling on how well you're going to do. Then I ask people what they've tried before asking me. Just being upfront with people can break low performance patterns of behavior.
- rukuu001 6mo ago
  I think it’s largely there to set up the point that comes after, which is that it would be absurd in a professional setting to pronounce a problem unsolvable because the entirety of your university education doesn’t provide enough information to solve the problem.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 6mo ago
  I took an exam once and there was a question on it that wasn't covered. I had vaguely remembered something from somewhere else and was able to piece together the formula and actually got the correct answer. When the test marks came back, the prof apologized about the question and didn't count it in the grades. Myself and two other people in the class who got the answer were held after class and accused of cheating. That is the school system. They do not reward creativity or ingenuity.
  - Kheyas 6mo ago
    Sounds like the synthesis problem could be the difference between a 8-9/10 and a 10/10 score. It would work in an accuracy grading system instead of a hedge against stupidity system.
  - irishcoffee 6mo ago
    I grew up poor. I thought my ticket to not being poor was an education. By the time I was applying for colleges (I had good grades) I realized that the education system was a joke. I got through college, a very well-regarded engineering program, putting in the bare minimum effort to graduate. I make a lot of money now, 20 years later. I attribute none of my success to public education or college, I didn’t learn anything besides our education system (in the US) is not what they tell kids it is growing up. We beat the drum of education because it seems like a nice simple solution to fix a lot of perceived problems. “Oh you mean if we just throw money at this problem it’ll fix it?!” Baltimore city gets some of the highest per-student federal funding in the country. My daughter is in a public middle school there, living with her mom. I’m in the burbs with my wife and kids. She told me just yesterday she wants to go to high school in my district because “well it just seems more normal than city schools” She also thought California was a country up until yesterday. Straight A student. At some point, probably too late, we’ll realize we did it a wrong. Floating kids through high school, dropping an anvil of debt around their neck for a college degree they won’t use. Met a fellow the other day, he has his masters in social work. Making very, very good money, as a regional manager of a car sales group, I forget the specifics. Said he never used his degree and he is very grateful he has a clear path to pay the debt off. I don’t know what the fix is, but I’ve seen enough to know what we do now, ain’t it.
- kakacik 6mo ago
  Nope, and nope. I've had tons of such questions during university in various courses, so what? Are they supposed to to babysit you and handle you only exact stuff they went over and over, to not upset some fragile minds? Such stuff is part of educational life. They expected to synthesize the knowledge out of other, related knowledge that was very directly covered, and use a bit of if-this-then-that. All in trivial manner if you actually grokked the subject well enough. I failed some, did well on others, felt a bit of unfairness emotions completely understandable for that young mind which just wanted to do the test and move on. But when looking back, they were good questions, testing my actual skills in topic I was studying.
- jb3689 6mo ago
  You have a deadline and scope (of solution) handed to you from product/management. It’s the same issue now at work.
- collabs 6mo ago
  Absolutely. I did this just last week. I couldn't figure out why I wasn't able to get out application to use a fileserver in a new test environment. I brought it to the team and got help from someone else. > As a teacher, I can tell you that students get really angry if you put a question on an exam that requires a concept not explicitly covered in class. Of course, if you work as an engineer and you’re stuck on a problem and you tell your boss it cannot be solved with the ideas you learned in college… you’re going to look like a fool. I really hope this kind of thinking dies away because the longer you wait the more money you waste, not just your own salary but the opportunity cost of time. And this person is a teacher?
- weinzierl 6mo ago
  Maybe the impression cones from a different understanding what "concept not explicitly covered in class" means. Of course you would not test a completely unrelated concept but where I grew up "Transfer of Learning" is supposed to be part of every test, with a proportion that increases as students progress through school. To test pupils ability of transfer of taught concepts means to let them apply information, strategies, and skills they have learned to a new situation or context.
  - ruszki 6mo ago
    My problem with my country of origin’s school system (Hungary) was that this “transfer of learning” was used solely during exams. It would have been really great, that after doing only simple, straightforward exercises during classes or home work, not the exam would have been the first time when students had encountered real world, way more complex exercises. (Btw the other really annoying exam type was when they tested your raw speed of recollection, in other words, whether you did that particular type of exercise a thousand times, and not that you understood or could you do it, like we would have practiced to ER or something where muscle memory can be life or death)
- chongli 6mo ago
  supposed to test for what? Your ability to synthesize knowledge out of thin air. Yes, actually. Synthesis is the penultimate level of Bloom's taxonomy [1]. Perhaps not appropriate for a first quiz on new material, but absolutely in scope for a final exam. I had many exams in university that challenged me to synthesize a proof to a hypothesis I'd never seen before. I had to bring together my knowledge of the material I'd learned in class with the bit of new material presented in the problem statement, and then devise a proof with one or more steps I'd never done before. Many of my fellow students in first year struggled mightily with questions like this. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth after the exams. In later years we'd all gotten used to it, and it was to be expected. That students in high school or younger years have been sheltered from synthesis-type problems on exams is a great disservice to them. Edit: I should also note that outside of upper-year pure mathematics courses, synthesis-type problems rarely accounted for more than a third of the grade on an exam. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom's_taxonomy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom's_taxonomy
  - knollimar 6mo ago
    Synthesis problems and time pressure don't feel fair together. I'd be furious to get some lofty theoretical synthesis problem on an engineering exam where the other problems are grindy analysis of "looks like concept you know but expand into a form you haven't seen and then will take 1/n time on your n question exam". I suppose these are already 1 extension in, so 1 more logical extension isn't that far off
    - chongli 6mo ago
      They're absolutely fair if you're given plenty of practice at them. If the only synthesis problem you see all year is on the final exam then you have a point. However, if you're doing novel (to you) proofs on assignments every week throughout the course, you should be used to the novelty by the time you reach the exam. Expecting a final exam consisting only of calculation and memorization type questions is wholly inappropriate in a mathematics course full of proofs.
      - 6mo ago
- nkmnz 6mo ago
  Not of thin air, but of what you've studied so far. Of course some (many) teachers are imbeciles and just use the same exam they've used in the previous year, even if they haven't covered all the topics yet. But in general, it's a very good idea to have a small question that tests for real understanding, i.e. applying your knowledge to a problem not previously presented, versus mindless reproduction of memorized facts.
- jandrewrogers 6mo ago
  > Your ability to synthesize knowledge out of thin air. The skill the class is teaching is the ad hoc synthesis of knowledge from other building blocks. That kind of reasoning is most of the purpose of the class; the concepts they teach you are in some sense just a foil for teaching this. The derivation from the concepts you were explicitly taught is pretty trivial and you've had many opportunities to practice. This is common for any kind of systems-y domain. These types of questions were standard on my (physical) engineering exams.
cdavid 6mo ago
Did not know of the "thinkism" expression. When I was studying in France eng. school, I called that "the mythe du cerveau" (literaly "the brain myth", though does not roll on your tongue as well). It is guaranteed failure mode of large orgs. Curious to hear about more references on how to fight this at an organization level, besides the one given in the OT.
- qsera 6mo ago
  Yea, we just name things that we want to see destroyed... Not everything need to be made so easy to refer, like using three or four of words instead of one..
- kang 6mo ago
  try replacing the word with 'thinking'
andai 6mo ago
I call this, the way to learn stuff is by doin' stuff. Also buildin' stuff! (Which is the best type of doin'.)
FailMore 6mo ago
I liked the article and the term thinkism (which I hadn’t heard before). I think education should be radically changed to be about doism instead. I think it’s likely we have more engaged kids learning more valuable life skills.
- AdityaAnuragi 6mo ago
  I agree that doism should done more in all honesty Cuz in real life also its more about "doing" you're physically fixing a clock, or writing code, or designing a building Doism shouldn't be 100% but it certainly should be more
- vladms 6mo ago
  Reminds me of https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/ - and to avoid confusions: everybody has good intentions and think they know better. We definitely should try to improve and experiment with any system, including education, but I really doubt it is that easy to improve education and it will depend on objective, culture and political environment more than doing A or B.
- bitwize 6mo ago
  I think it was Hamming who said that some of the best researchers can only think well when they have a bench full of equipment in front of them.
JSR_FDED 6mo ago
As a kid I noticed that repairing things is the perfect way to combine experiential learning and "thinkism" - you have to develop a mental model of how something should work, what's broken, and how to fix it. Then you combine that with the physical sensations of how tight the nut is, or how hard you need to turn that wrench - which in turn feeds into the mental model and determination of next steps.
- SoftTalker 6mo ago
  > how hard you need to turn that wrench And learning what stripped threads are.... Part of learning to repair things is also learning how to not make them more broken.
- m463 6mo ago
  it helps to back the model with the theory. Screws and bolts have to be stretched to work. torque wrenches are used to enforce "just enough" tension without too much and that's why we use them. Over tensioning can break the bolt by snapping or strip the threads. What's frustrating to me is that I learned to repair things, but there is SO MUCH practical knowledge to fix your iphone font size, but it is much harder for you to run into the real practical knowledge of life, like how to turn a nut/bolt/screw. Wish there was a university of this stuff. how to use a wrench and when power tools. how to ask someone on a date. how to cook easily. how to choose cool clothes to wear.
AdityaAnuragi 6mo ago
Game developers are the best at this sort of stuff (especially valve and puzzle game designers) Portal (a puzzle game by valve) had levels built in such a way that it introduced the player to new mechanic, and only then building on top of that
kang 6mo ago
this misunderstands whats thinking is .. > Thinkism sets aside practice and experience thinking succeeds experience & precedes practise, its not apart from it
noduerme 6mo ago
The author is talking about two orthogonal problems. 1. "Thinkism": As described, over-engineering before writing code for a complex system and seeing where it takes you. Maybe decision by committee, or just overthinking. But its like one form of replacing on-the-ground adaptable, creative thinking, with a dumber process. 2. Which should be completely separate, it's saying that students are mad if they're forced to think for themselves. This is a complaint about underthinking and the tendency of inexperienced coders not to come up with a grand plan before writing a line of code. So which one is the problem? I'd say the problem is not knowing when to over or under-think something.
iceman28 6mo ago
Like everything there’s always a balance. Sometimes building something and seeing how it works might have a higher cost to “correct” once built. Other times, it’s much faster to build.
genghot 6mo ago
[flagged]
rustybolt 6mo ago
Nobody said it better than von Neumann: "Young man, in mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them"
ninalanyon 6mo ago
> As a teacher, I can tell you that students get really angry if you put a question on an exam that requires a concept not explicitly covered in class. Well then I think you omitted a rather important topic in your teaching: that the purpose of teaching is to provide a toolkit with which the student can extend their abilities.
immanuwell 6mo ago
[dead]
joshuahedlund 6mo ago
> thinkism Thank you for this term. In my view, the belief that AGI singularly will rapidly destroy us because it will think 10,000 times faster than us is a form of thinkism.
mikekutzma 6mo ago
Similar to the ideas in ‘On Practice’. A dialectic is required between practice and theory. https://archive.org/details/onpractice00maoz/mode/1up https://archive.org/details/onpractice00maoz/mode/1up
- renticulous 6mo ago
  Working experiments constrain our thinking from spiralling out. This is the true hindsight bais, a good one at that. When we have a working prototype, we can try to break it in many and find out lot about the underlying theory. Theoretical Physicists do this all the time with toy models.
flimflamm 6mo ago
We humans have a really good system to do this in practice. We use _imagination_ to simulate how things work and ... then we understand it.
kayo_20211030 6mo ago
Yes. There's an adage in medicine. See one, do one, teach one. I think it applies generally.
tardedmeme 6mo ago
Some programming teachers think students should learn all the abstract concepts of programming and then write perfect programs. This is wrong. They should start with hello world, and then hello myname, and they should experiment and write programs that don't work, and after being frustrated for a little while with something just beyond their ability to solve, they should be shown the trick that solves it. Repeat until expertise.
maxsich 6mo ago
> Stop expecting an AI to cure all diseases or solve all problems just because it can read all the scholarship and “think” for a very long time. No matter how much an AI “knows,” it is always too little. AI improves our problem solving in another way though! E.g. I can now quickly spin up frameworks to test/eval my hypotheses. This speeds up our ability to trial-and-error towards progress.

224 points by surprisetalk 6mo ago

> As a teacher, I can tell you that students get really angry if you put a question on an exam that requires a concept not explicitly covered in class. Of course, if you work as an engineer and you’re stuck on a problem and you tell your boss it cannot be solved with the ideas you learned in college… you’re going to look like a fool. Very flawed comparison. At work I get to go off and do research, experiments, can collaborate with peers and people who might have more expertise in a given sub problem, and generally have much more time. An exam trying to test you on material you haven’t studied is supposed to test for what? Your ability to synthesize knowledge out of thin air. The rest of the article is well written and correct, but this particular aside felt weird.

andai 6mo ago
I think it depends on the question. If it's not a question of the form explicitly presented before, but answerable with a minute of thinking using the knowledge the student has already mastered, then it makes sense. A time limited exam is probably the wrong place for that, though, due to the stress interfering with that kind of thinking. It would be better for a homework assignment. If ChatGPT didn't exist. Okay, maybe in class, on paper is the right place for that.
sdenton4 6mo ago
The while premise of "learn some stuff them take an exam on exactly that stuff" is pretty flawed, and that's the point. So much of the academic structure is about what's convenient for evaluation, rather than what's best for learning. Why not get rid of the exam and replace it with something else entirely? Who says we have to have exams at all?
- noworriesnate 6mo ago
  > So much of the academic structure is about what's convenient for evaluation, rather than what's best for learning Academia is going to have to focus on the latter anyway because we have AI, which is exactly the same: it’s only useful when you can evaluate the output for accuracy independently. But how do you do this without throwing out objectivity entirely? Maybe we need to move to apprenticeships?
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
dosisking 6mo ago
From my experience, the boss is usually a complete moron, so who cares. It also creates this unhealthy assumption that the engineer is subservient to the boss.
- bryanrasmussen 6mo ago
  From my experience the boss does not know things you know, that does not make them a complete moron because they probably know things you don't. Here's an example, consulting at a large Danish company, every Friday morning all departments in this big building would share breakfast and the bosses would say some things. So this one morning they explained that in the coming months people should register time in a particular way because of accounting and how it related to a particular government grant and money that needed to be used up by a particular time in order to get to the next step of blah blah blah. I realized as my eyes glazed over, damn this is just the same reaction people who don't understand browser rendering engines get when I start telling them about different events. I also noticed other clueless people gamely trying to question these finance nerds on how things worked, and the patient finance nerds explaining some detailed bit and the clueless person clearly out of their depth with that "uuuuhhhh, hope they don't ask me if I understand" look on their face. Now, if it hadn't been for them explaining this stuff I would have gone around thinking the boss is a complete moron. I once saw him mistake a nail gun for a drill! He doesn't understand how search engines work and why stemming and decompounding might be important, I know because I tried to explain to the idiot one time!! But since he actually talked about his work for a bit I realized he just happens to know stuff I don't. I'm betting most of the morons you know are maybe not quite so stupid, although probably not as forthcoming as why things need to be done in a certain way to those who work under them.
  - dijksterhuis 6mo ago
    yeah. someone, somewhere, at some point, will think i’m a clueless idiot. we’re all clueless idiots at the end of the day.
  - airstrike 6mo ago
    that's a great story and a remarkable level of self-awareness. thank you for sharing
from_memory 6mo ago
I feel like it's an argument for the benefits of abstract reasoning. I don't think they are saying it'll be like that in the real world, I think they just want to test how you do under adverse conditions. Stress testing the student's academic prowess, if you will.
noduerme 6mo ago
>> Your ability to synthesize knowledge out of thin air As someone who graduated high school, I'd hope my more accomplished peers would know the difference between hypothesis, theory and proof. It is entirely possible, and useful, to test someone's ability to form a cogent hypothesis. If you were faced with a question beyond the scope of the ideas you were taught, and could not rely on any assistance, the only useful thing to know about you is how well you would handle it yourself. If you would synthesize knowledge out of thin air, that would be a failing grade.
- ordu 6mo ago
  > If you were faced with a question beyond the scope of the ideas you were taught Who knows the scope of the ideas I was taught? I mean, I could use derivatives and sometimes to integrate in 8th grade, should I get a failing grade if I used them in a test? I see the point of your post, it is important to distinguish between what you know, and what you don't know, but maybe suspect. School tasks are built in a way, that the very form of the task can be used to make good guesses that may help you to solve the tasks. It doesn't work in reality, but it works in school. But the solution is to add questions without answers, not questions with answers beyond someone's knowledge. Like "what was Mozart's opinion on pineapple pizza?" or "what size was Julius Caesar?". Well, tests needs less obviously unanswerable questions than these, but you got the drift. Edit: Thought it will be tricky with math. For example: "Alice has 3 apples, and Bob has 2. How many oranges they have?". School math problems have a convention, which means that if oranges where not mentioned, then they have 0 oranges. Compare with "Alice has 3 apples and Bob has 2 oranges". If the problem doesn't mention Alice's oranges, then Alice has 0 oranges. It is implied and these implicit rules are the first difficulty kids face when starting with math.
jrowen 6mo ago
I found the whole article to be a bit heavy on anti-academia. And I went to industry after undergrad. It's a false dichotomy between the "thinkism" bogeyman (actually reading books and papers and putting work into theoretical design is just bad now? Have they tried building anything in the physical world? Checked in with nuclear physics, ever?) and hands-on experience. Both are important. It should be about balance, not trashing an incredibly valuable set of tools because others exist...
- mettamage 6mo ago
  I am team academia more than hands-on experience. And I have 5 years of experience. To me, it felt like most SWE things could eventually be solved by what I learned at school. Not everything I did I learned at school, such as navigating codebases with more than a million lines of code. But most things? Yea. With that said, I am curious how people say that they learned much more through experience, what did you specifically learn?
  - bsrhng 6mo ago
    I find that many people can learn a lot by doing but then at some point hit a wall and really struggle to recognize that another kind of learning needs to take place to understand a deeper concept.
  - ttoinou 6mo ago
    Could you tell us what you learned at school that is useful for your SWE career? Im sure there is a lot of us that learned 0 at school and learned everything ourselves as kids on the internet
    - vladms 6mo ago
      The problem with "learned everything ourselves" is that you might have niche interests and you miss things. Things I learned that probably I wouldn't have by done by myself: computer architecture (memory, buses, cpu-s, instruction set), and related VHDL/Verilog; how complex is synchronization (implementing from scratch synchronization libraries); different programming paradigms (functional languages); compilers & operating systems (kernel modules, etc.); various types of maths (dsp); algorithm complexity analysis. Some I ended up using more during my career than others, but knowing more definitely reduced my tendency to think "ah, that should be easy".
zipy124 6mo ago
I agree that it's a flawed comparison but it does touch on a very real issue in the workplace. The difference between employees who I can send away on a problem and they'll encounter issues and try to solve them, vs those who come back to the senior at any problem, presents a serious ceiling on the level those employees can work at.
- lazyasciiart 6mo ago
  Perhaps the example should be a homework assignment, not an exam.
  - lukan 6mo ago
    Even then I would call it bad teaching, as the usual mode is: New stuff gets explained in class by the teacher - the details are for self study. This is how it was communicated to me in school, so I would call it part of the "contract". But giving a homework on a fundamental new subject without explicitely telling that this is what it is about, will rightfully confuse, as the normal mode is different. And when it happened to me, it always happened because the teacher messed up and got confused themself what they had and have not teached before. Teaching to self study is a valuable skill in itself that should not be taught by accident, but with a clear pedagogic concept.
- kaashif 6mo ago
  As a leader, I can just tell people literally that: if you can't go away and work independently on a problem, it puts a ceiling on how well you're going to do. Then I ask people what they've tried before asking me. Just being upfront with people can break low performance patterns of behavior.
rukuu001 6mo ago
I think it’s largely there to set up the point that comes after, which is that it would be absurd in a professional setting to pronounce a problem unsolvable because the entirety of your university education doesn’t provide enough information to solve the problem.
Eddy_Viscosity2 6mo ago
I took an exam once and there was a question on it that wasn't covered. I had vaguely remembered something from somewhere else and was able to piece together the formula and actually got the correct answer. When the test marks came back, the prof apologized about the question and didn't count it in the grades. Myself and two other people in the class who got the answer were held after class and accused of cheating. That is the school system. They do not reward creativity or ingenuity.
- Kheyas 6mo ago
  Sounds like the synthesis problem could be the difference between a 8-9/10 and a 10/10 score. It would work in an accuracy grading system instead of a hedge against stupidity system.
- irishcoffee 6mo ago
  I grew up poor. I thought my ticket to not being poor was an education. By the time I was applying for colleges (I had good grades) I realized that the education system was a joke. I got through college, a very well-regarded engineering program, putting in the bare minimum effort to graduate. I make a lot of money now, 20 years later. I attribute none of my success to public education or college, I didn’t learn anything besides our education system (in the US) is not what they tell kids it is growing up. We beat the drum of education because it seems like a nice simple solution to fix a lot of perceived problems. “Oh you mean if we just throw money at this problem it’ll fix it?!” Baltimore city gets some of the highest per-student federal funding in the country. My daughter is in a public middle school there, living with her mom. I’m in the burbs with my wife and kids. She told me just yesterday she wants to go to high school in my district because “well it just seems more normal than city schools” She also thought California was a country up until yesterday. Straight A student. At some point, probably too late, we’ll realize we did it a wrong. Floating kids through high school, dropping an anvil of debt around their neck for a college degree they won’t use. Met a fellow the other day, he has his masters in social work. Making very, very good money, as a regional manager of a car sales group, I forget the specifics. Said he never used his degree and he is very grateful he has a clear path to pay the debt off. I don’t know what the fix is, but I’ve seen enough to know what we do now, ain’t it.
kakacik 6mo ago
Nope, and nope. I've had tons of such questions during university in various courses, so what? Are they supposed to to babysit you and handle you only exact stuff they went over and over, to not upset some fragile minds? Such stuff is part of educational life. They expected to synthesize the knowledge out of other, related knowledge that was very directly covered, and use a bit of if-this-then-that. All in trivial manner if you actually grokked the subject well enough. I failed some, did well on others, felt a bit of unfairness emotions completely understandable for that young mind which just wanted to do the test and move on. But when looking back, they were good questions, testing my actual skills in topic I was studying.
jb3689 6mo ago
You have a deadline and scope (of solution) handed to you from product/management. It’s the same issue now at work.
collabs 6mo ago
Absolutely. I did this just last week. I couldn't figure out why I wasn't able to get out application to use a fileserver in a new test environment. I brought it to the team and got help from someone else. > As a teacher, I can tell you that students get really angry if you put a question on an exam that requires a concept not explicitly covered in class. Of course, if you work as an engineer and you’re stuck on a problem and you tell your boss it cannot be solved with the ideas you learned in college… you’re going to look like a fool. I really hope this kind of thinking dies away because the longer you wait the more money you waste, not just your own salary but the opportunity cost of time. And this person is a teacher?
weinzierl 6mo ago
Maybe the impression cones from a different understanding what "concept not explicitly covered in class" means. Of course you would not test a completely unrelated concept but where I grew up "Transfer of Learning" is supposed to be part of every test, with a proportion that increases as students progress through school. To test pupils ability of transfer of taught concepts means to let them apply information, strategies, and skills they have learned to a new situation or context.
- ruszki 6mo ago
  My problem with my country of origin’s school system (Hungary) was that this “transfer of learning” was used solely during exams. It would have been really great, that after doing only simple, straightforward exercises during classes or home work, not the exam would have been the first time when students had encountered real world, way more complex exercises. (Btw the other really annoying exam type was when they tested your raw speed of recollection, in other words, whether you did that particular type of exercise a thousand times, and not that you understood or could you do it, like we would have practiced to ER or something where muscle memory can be life or death)
chongli 6mo ago
supposed to test for what? Your ability to synthesize knowledge out of thin air. Yes, actually. Synthesis is the penultimate level of Bloom's taxonomy [1]. Perhaps not appropriate for a first quiz on new material, but absolutely in scope for a final exam. I had many exams in university that challenged me to synthesize a proof to a hypothesis I'd never seen before. I had to bring together my knowledge of the material I'd learned in class with the bit of new material presented in the problem statement, and then devise a proof with one or more steps I'd never done before. Many of my fellow students in first year struggled mightily with questions like this. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth after the exams. In later years we'd all gotten used to it, and it was to be expected. That students in high school or younger years have been sheltered from synthesis-type problems on exams is a great disservice to them. Edit: I should also note that outside of upper-year pure mathematics courses, synthesis-type problems rarely accounted for more than a third of the grade on an exam. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom's_taxonomy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom's_taxonomy
- knollimar 6mo ago
  Synthesis problems and time pressure don't feel fair together. I'd be furious to get some lofty theoretical synthesis problem on an engineering exam where the other problems are grindy analysis of "looks like concept you know but expand into a form you haven't seen and then will take 1/n time on your n question exam". I suppose these are already 1 extension in, so 1 more logical extension isn't that far off
  - chongli 6mo ago
    They're absolutely fair if you're given plenty of practice at them. If the only synthesis problem you see all year is on the final exam then you have a point. However, if you're doing novel (to you) proofs on assignments every week throughout the course, you should be used to the novelty by the time you reach the exam. Expecting a final exam consisting only of calculation and memorization type questions is wholly inappropriate in a mathematics course full of proofs.
    - 6mo ago
nkmnz 6mo ago
Not of thin air, but of what you've studied so far. Of course some (many) teachers are imbeciles and just use the same exam they've used in the previous year, even if they haven't covered all the topics yet. But in general, it's a very good idea to have a small question that tests for real understanding, i.e. applying your knowledge to a problem not previously presented, versus mindless reproduction of memorized facts.
jandrewrogers 6mo ago
> Your ability to synthesize knowledge out of thin air. The skill the class is teaching is the ad hoc synthesis of knowledge from other building blocks. That kind of reasoning is most of the purpose of the class; the concepts they teach you are in some sense just a foil for teaching this. The derivation from the concepts you were explicitly taught is pretty trivial and you've had many opportunities to practice. This is common for any kind of systems-y domain. These types of questions were standard on my (physical) engineering exams.

cdavid 6mo ago

Did not know of the "thinkism" expression. When I was studying in France eng. school, I called that "the mythe du cerveau" (literaly "the brain myth", though does not roll on your tongue as well). It is guaranteed failure mode of large orgs. Curious to hear about more references on how to fight this at an organization level, besides the one given in the OT.

qsera 6mo ago
Yea, we just name things that we want to see destroyed... Not everything need to be made so easy to refer, like using three or four of words instead of one..
kang 6mo ago
try replacing the word with 'thinking'

andai 6mo ago

I call this, the way to learn stuff is by doin' stuff. Also buildin' stuff! (Which is the best type of doin'.)

FailMore 6mo ago

I liked the article and the term thinkism (which I hadn’t heard before). I think education should be radically changed to be about doism instead. I think it’s likely we have more engaged kids learning more valuable life skills.

AdityaAnuragi 6mo ago
I agree that doism should done more in all honesty Cuz in real life also its more about "doing" you're physically fixing a clock, or writing code, or designing a building Doism shouldn't be 100% but it certainly should be more
vladms 6mo ago
Reminds me of https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/ - and to avoid confusions: everybody has good intentions and think they know better. We definitely should try to improve and experiment with any system, including education, but I really doubt it is that easy to improve education and it will depend on objective, culture and political environment more than doing A or B.
bitwize 6mo ago
I think it was Hamming who said that some of the best researchers can only think well when they have a bench full of equipment in front of them.

JSR_FDED 6mo ago

As a kid I noticed that repairing things is the perfect way to combine experiential learning and "thinkism" - you have to develop a mental model of how something should work, what's broken, and how to fix it. Then you combine that with the physical sensations of how tight the nut is, or how hard you need to turn that wrench - which in turn feeds into the mental model and determination of next steps.

SoftTalker 6mo ago
> how hard you need to turn that wrench And learning what stripped threads are.... Part of learning to repair things is also learning how to not make them more broken.
m463 6mo ago
it helps to back the model with the theory. Screws and bolts have to be stretched to work. torque wrenches are used to enforce "just enough" tension without too much and that's why we use them. Over tensioning can break the bolt by snapping or strip the threads. What's frustrating to me is that I learned to repair things, but there is SO MUCH practical knowledge to fix your iphone font size, but it is much harder for you to run into the real practical knowledge of life, like how to turn a nut/bolt/screw. Wish there was a university of this stuff. how to use a wrench and when power tools. how to ask someone on a date. how to cook easily. how to choose cool clothes to wear.

AdityaAnuragi 6mo ago

Game developers are the best at this sort of stuff (especially valve and puzzle game designers) Portal (a puzzle game by valve) had levels built in such a way that it introduced the player to new mechanic, and only then building on top of that

kang 6mo ago

this misunderstands whats thinking is .. > Thinkism sets aside practice and experience thinking succeeds experience & precedes practise, its not apart from it

noduerme 6mo ago

The author is talking about two orthogonal problems. 1. "Thinkism": As described, over-engineering before writing code for a complex system and seeing where it takes you. Maybe decision by committee, or just overthinking. But its like one form of replacing on-the-ground adaptable, creative thinking, with a dumber process. 2. Which should be completely separate, it's saying that students are mad if they're forced to think for themselves. This is a complaint about underthinking and the tendency of inexperienced coders not to come up with a grand plan before writing a line of code. So which one is the problem? I'd say the problem is not knowing when to over or under-think something.

iceman28 6mo ago

Like everything there’s always a balance. Sometimes building something and seeing how it works might have a higher cost to “correct” once built. Other times, it’s much faster to build.

genghot 6mo ago

[flagged]

rustybolt 6mo ago

Nobody said it better than von Neumann: "Young man, in mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them"

ninalanyon 6mo ago

> As a teacher, I can tell you that students get really angry if you put a question on an exam that requires a concept not explicitly covered in class. Well then I think you omitted a rather important topic in your teaching: that the purpose of teaching is to provide a toolkit with which the student can extend their abilities.

immanuwell 6mo ago

[dead]

joshuahedlund 6mo ago

> thinkism Thank you for this term. In my view, the belief that AGI singularly will rapidly destroy us because it will think 10,000 times faster than us is a form of thinkism.

mikekutzma 6mo ago

Similar to the ideas in ‘On Practice’. A dialectic is required between practice and theory. https://archive.org/details/onpractice00maoz/mode/1up https://archive.org/details/onpractice00maoz/mode/1up

renticulous 6mo ago
Working experiments constrain our thinking from spiralling out. This is the true hindsight bais, a good one at that. When we have a working prototype, we can try to break it in many and find out lot about the underlying theory. Theoretical Physicists do this all the time with toy models.

flimflamm 6mo ago

We humans have a really good system to do this in practice. We use _imagination_ to simulate how things work and ... then we understand it.

kayo_20211030 6mo ago

Yes. There's an adage in medicine. See one, do one, teach one. I think it applies generally.

tardedmeme 6mo ago

Some programming teachers think students should learn all the abstract concepts of programming and then write perfect programs. This is wrong. They should start with hello world, and then hello myname, and they should experiment and write programs that don't work, and after being frustrated for a little while with something just beyond their ability to solve, they should be shown the trick that solves it. Repeat until expertise.

maxsich 6mo ago

> Stop expecting an AI to cure all diseases or solve all problems just because it can read all the scholarship and “think” for a very long time. No matter how much an AI “knows,” it is always too little. AI improves our problem solving in another way though! E.g. I can now quickly spin up frameworks to test/eval my hypotheses. This speeds up our ability to trial-and-error towards progress.