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> That technique – splitting the desired result up into tiny, tiny pieces – gave me a lot of confidence, and was how I worked for the entirety of the project. I
by lloeki 12y ago
> That technique – splitting the desired result up into tiny, tiny pieces – gave me a lot of confidence, and was how I worked for the entirety of the project. If I was stuck on something it was normally because I was trying to solve one problem that was actually several smaller problems.
I'm regularly surprised† that many people have such a revelation by themselves when it's one of the most basic ways of forming knowledge and progressing towards understanding and solving problems:
> Le second [précepte], de diviser chacune des difficultés que j'examinerais, en autant de parcelles qu'il se pourrait, et qu'il serait requis pour les mieux résoudre.
> The second principle, to divide each problem I examine, in as much fragments as possible, and as required to best solve them.
— Descartes, Discours de la méthode, 1637
† "Aghast" would be a better term. My surprise is not so much aimed at people as at an education system that fails both at making people stand on the shoulders of giants and at making them able to reason on their own.
- Torn 12y agoEducation is becoming more and more results-driven. Well, at least in the UK. Tests and standardisation don't leave much room for meaningful development. Children and young adults here are prepped to recite textbook answers to pass exams, rather than build a good understanding of things. Last-minute cramming wins out. We don't foster concepts like autonomous learning (breaking problems down, recognising where the limits of your knowledge lie), critical thinking.
- stdbrouw 12y agoThat's a fairly ungenerous interpretation. It's very much possible to know, on an intellectual level, that it's useful to split up a problem into its component parts so as to get a grip on it, but that doesn't mean you're actually going to do it or have formed a habit to do it. And perhaps education can help there, but actually being faced with a big problem and finding out that without approaching it step by step you're going to get nowhere, seems like a pretty good way to internalize that lesson too.
- lloeki 12y ago> actually being faced with a big problem and finding out that without approaching it step by step you're going to get nowhere, seems like a pretty good way to internalize that lesson too. This is what I mean by "education", not just being made to learn by rote a seemingly random quote, but being effectively trained into leveraging its core principles.
- dammitcoetzee 12y agoIt took me two solid afternoons of work to determine this. I just had such a mental block to the whole concept. I think I was also just used to being able to hold an entire project in my head so it was new to me to have so many large projects that most of it started to pour out of my ears. Here's an embarrassing blog post about it. http://dammitcoetzee.com/2014/05/overwhelming-task-management/ http://dammitcoetzee.com/2014/05/overwhelming-task-managemen...