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You can't tell people anything (2004)

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Re: You can't tell people anything (2004)

#121

Post by carapace »

This happened to me the other day with something called Lab Streaming Layer. A friend of mine explained it to me and I nodded and said, "Yeah, that's cool."

Then I saw this video and the penny dropped: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1at7yrcFW0 Introduction to Modern Brain-Computer Interface Design - Christian A. Kothe ; Swartz Center for Computational Neuroscience, University of California San Diego

I go back to my friend, all excited, and tell him what I saw, and as I'm describing it I realizing that I'm just repeating back to him just what he told be the other day! I stopped and apologized.

I like to think I'm on the ball but sometimes things just go over your head even when you think you know what's going on.

Re: You can't tell people anything (2004)

#122

Post by tempestn »

mopsi wrote: post #58
jerf wrote: post #7

I often think of this as "it's hard to tell people the solution to a problem they don't have", or don't know they have. I think it's one of the major problems in the entire structure of the educational system... it's all telling people solutions to problems they don't have yet. Sometimes this is just unavoidable; I'm not sure how to turn geography into a problem you have. (I mean, you can fake it, but people's brains…

> "it's hard to tell people the solution to a problem they don't have" It's my main complaint with how maths and physics were taught in school. I didn't understand electricity, trigonometry, integrals etc until long after school when I started tinkering with microcontrollers and robots, and had to solve real-world problems. Then, suddenly all those concepts sprung into life and got real meaning with clear and observa…

Most of my engineering degree felt like that. I especially remember control systems classes where we learned all kinds of details of how to run the math to place poles and zeros blah blah, sometimes even with some incredibly simplistic example of launching a rocket and controlling its trajectory or something, but... you just never felt like you had any idea how/when/why you would use this stuff in a real work environment. (And once I graduated I discovered that almost no one does; at best they're using basic PID controllers. I doubt even the professors could have given real life examples of the more complex stuff in use.)

Re: You can't tell people anything (2004)

#123

Post by analog31 »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #112
jerf wrote: post #7

I often think of this as "it's hard to tell people the solution to a problem they don't have", or don't know they have. I think it's one of the major problems in the entire structure of the educational system... it's all telling people solutions to problems they don't have yet. Sometimes this is just unavoidable; I'm not sure how to turn geography into a problem you have. (I mean, you can fake it, but people's brains…

I think this is very insightful. I hated higher level mathematics specifically because I couldn't see any use for it. Due to a variety of circumstances I ended up taking my math classes out of sequence with the physics and EE classes in my EE degree and as a result I'd get a concept introduced in math that had no apparent use, only to find out the next semester or year what you would use it for. Very frustrating at t…

>>> I hated higher level mathematics specifically because I couldn't see any use for it.

That's why I loved it. But I think this is a dilemma of teaching any number of subjects: How to convey both the useful aspect and the intrinsically interesting aspect, for lack of a better term.

Re: You can't tell people anything (2004)

#124

Post by qwertygnu »

Mirioron wrote: post #100
memco wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I often think of this as "it's hard to tell people the solution to a problem they don't have", or don't know they have. This may be way off in another field, but this is actually frustrating to me as a father in another way: when we watch shows or read books with our child so many of the stories are so far detached from reality as to make me ask, "Why are we asking kids to care about this?" I have particular ire fo…

I disagree. I think stories like this are important. They teach you to take a hypothetical scenario seriously. It teaches people to ask "what if X were true?" and to seriously consider the ramifications. This is a springboard into abstract thinking. Without people taking the hypothetical seriously they will want to deal with concrete things and will have trouble with abstract reasoning. Imagine you were trying to hav…

So if a kid doesn't watch enough superhero/disney/scifi movies they won't understand racism...?

I agree that stoking kids' (and adults') imagination is useful and has benefits. But it sounds like you're claiming they literally won't be able to conceptualize anything outside of reality without them.

Re: You can't tell people anything (2004)

#126

Post by junyoon »

jerf wrote: post #7

I often think of this as "it's hard to tell people the solution to a problem they don't have", or don't know they have. I think it's one of the major problems in the entire structure of the educational system... it's all telling people solutions to problems they don't have yet. Sometimes this is just unavoidable; I'm not sure how to turn geography into a problem you have. (I mean, you can fake it, but people's brains…

I know this sounds shallow and it is and I've out grown it (I think) but could a young person's 'problem they have' be parental expectations?

It would be interesting to see if there is a correlation between this and a student's academic performance.

Re: You can't tell people anything (2004)

#127

Post by totetsu »

bsenftner wrote: post #35

Anything truly new is met with everything but understanding. Back in 2006 I had the seeds of an idea that you probably know today as a "deep fake", but I was calling it "personalized media". By 2008 I had a fully operating feature film quality automated actor replacement pipeline (my background is visual effects.) However, even with a working system nobody could understand the ramifications this could have on educati…

the Russian film and novel "Generation P" from around that era explores the implications of this tech. It's very ahead of out times. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_P_(film)

Re: You can't tell people anything (2004)

#128

Post by js8 »

efitz wrote: post #50
js8 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, I suspect there is a curse of expertise. If you're an expert, you begin seeing everything as so nuanced, as so fragile, that you will dismiss lots of radical innovation as too simplistic. (And I think especially it affects motivation to actually try something new.) But if somebody somewhat naive comes along, and just pushes through with sheer effort, they might succeed where many experts have predicted a fail…

Or more likely, the newbies will solve the “unsolvable” problem by removing some of the constraints that the old guard was holding inviolable. The newbies crow about their success for a few years while everyone struggles to work around the constraint violations. NoSQL is the biggest example of this. Ignore everything we learned about ACID and just use key-value stores with no transactions or relations. People can bui…

I can't quite buy your example, because NoSQL is pretty much a reinvention of VSAM and IMS DB (not IMS DC).

Regardless, I don't think it's necessarily that the expert would not want to drop some design constraint. It's more likely that it is genuinely hard to decide, which of them to drop and which of them to keep, because there are so many and problems are complex.

But if you're somewhat new (not a beginner either), you don't see all these, and you can benefit from the ignorance. Unfortunately, I think it cuts both ways, it's far more likely that ignorance will actually hurt you. But for a small number of people, ignorance can lead to lucky innovation.

Re: You can't tell people anything (2004)

#129

Post by rckoepke »

gowld wrote: post #94
ksdale wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add to your complaints, so many narratives designed for kids have such a clear delineation between the good side and the bad side. I'm not sure it's great for kids to be so steeped in the belief that the good and the bad are always and immediately obvious. Another qualm I have, similar to yours, is the number of kids' shows that focus on "problem-solving" but then have the solution be some sort of magic item they…

PBS Kids and Mister Rogers are wonderful educational TV. Almost everything else in the "20 minute cartoon industry" is garbage.

I really enjoy the australian cartoon Bluey, and think it generally does a good job demoing "practical" childhood skills. And parenting skills, for that matter.

Re: You can't tell people anything (2004)

#130

Post by [deleted] »

jerf wrote: post #7

I often think of this as "it's hard to tell people the solution to a problem they don't have", or don't know they have. I think it's one of the major problems in the entire structure of the educational system... it's all telling people solutions to problems they don't have yet. Sometimes this is just unavoidable; I'm not sure how to turn geography into a problem you have. (I mean, you can fake it, but people's brains…

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