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The findings of this study have been formally retracted by the author. http://www.eis.mdx.ac.uk/staffpages/r_bornat/papers/camel_hump_retraction.pdf http://www

The findings of this study have been formally retracted by the author. http://www.eis.mdx.ac.uk/staffpages/r_bornat/papers/camel_hump_retraction.pdf http://www.eis.mdx.ac.uk/staffpages/r_bornat/papers/camel_hu...

platz 11y ago
Well I won't be linking that anymore. Anyways, I was really more interested in the little narrative observation above than the numerical results of the study.
- sukilot 11y ago
  But the data showed that the narrative was bullshit. (Catch-22: believing the narrative puts you in the narrative's non-logical bucket)
- sukilot 11y ago
  But the data showed that the narrative was bullshit. (Catch-22: believing the narrative puts you in the narrative's non-logical bucket)
- mannykannot 11y ago
  The quote reminded me of a study I read about a year ago, in which the problem-solving skills of toddlers and chimps were compared. The toddlers generally did better, except in one regard: when shown how to do something, but with some pretty obviously irrelevant steps included, the chimps were quicker and more likely to drop the pointless steps. At the time, I thought that might be explained by a human predisposition to pay attention to authority, but, in the light of that quote, perhaps it is (also) a predisposition to formal / abstract thinking? Furthermore (to make a wild speculative leap) perhaps it is this predisposition that is actually behind the phenomena that Chomsky thinks are evidence for an innate universal grammar?
mannykannot 11y ago
I see that section 4 contains a reference to another study offering an alternative explanation for the 'double hump': if a teacher sets the pace by the progress of the fastest learners, you can end up with a group that kept up and a group that was left behind early and so never learned much. I guess this is more likely to happen if you have several students, rather than one or two at most, who already have had some exposure to the material, and that this is more likely in programming than in, for example, actuarial mathematics.

platz 11y ago

Well I won't be linking that anymore. Anyways, I was really more interested in the little narrative observation above than the numerical results of the study.

sukilot 11y ago
But the data showed that the narrative was bullshit. (Catch-22: believing the narrative puts you in the narrative's non-logical bucket)
sukilot 11y ago
But the data showed that the narrative was bullshit. (Catch-22: believing the narrative puts you in the narrative's non-logical bucket)
mannykannot 11y ago
The quote reminded me of a study I read about a year ago, in which the problem-solving skills of toddlers and chimps were compared. The toddlers generally did better, except in one regard: when shown how to do something, but with some pretty obviously irrelevant steps included, the chimps were quicker and more likely to drop the pointless steps. At the time, I thought that might be explained by a human predisposition to pay attention to authority, but, in the light of that quote, perhaps it is (also) a predisposition to formal / abstract thinking? Furthermore (to make a wild speculative leap) perhaps it is this predisposition that is actually behind the phenomena that Chomsky thinks are evidence for an innate universal grammar?

mannykannot 11y ago

I see that section 4 contains a reference to another study offering an alternative explanation for the 'double hump': if a teacher sets the pace by the progress of the fastest learners, you can end up with a group that kept up and a group that was left behind early and so never learned much. I guess this is more likely to happen if you have several students, rather than one or two at most, who already have had some exposure to the material, and that this is more likely in programming than in, for example, actuarial mathematics.