Gerry Sussman talked at length about IV during his DanFest https://legacy.cs.indiana.edu/dfried_celebration.html talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arMH5GjBwUQ&t=295 .
How to Understand Things
81–90 of 121 posts
Re: How to Understand Things
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I suspect lots of people go through the entire education system like this. +1. it took me a couple years after getting kicked out of college to get my head sorted out to the point where I felt like I could "think" again I think one of the most harmful things about schooling is the way it imposes a tracked structure on learning. it demarcates knowledge into discrete subjects and sets up a linear progression through t…
Our school is poisonous (can tell for France), if not evil. It become crystal clear after reading Celine Alvarez. Not sure if she got translated yet. In english, but older you also have Alfie Kohn, but I haven't read him. When reading Celine, one understand that children are natural born learner, and there is no effort needed to make them learn stuff. Our school model is industrial production of objects. Thinking hum…
Thank you for the recommendation. Celine Alvarez does have a book translated to English:
The Natural Laws of Children: Why Children Thrive When We Understand How Their Brains Are Wired
> A powerful, neuroscience-based approach to revolutionize early childhood learning through natural creativity, strong human connections, spontaneous free play, and more.
She has a home page, with an English version of some of her articles.
Re: How to Understand Things
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
Our school is poisonous (can tell for France), if not evil. It become crystal clear after reading Celine Alvarez. Not sure if she got translated yet. In english, but older you also have Alfie Kohn, but I haven't read him. When reading Celine, one understand that children are natural born learner, and there is no effort needed to make them learn stuff. Our school model is industrial production of objects. Thinking hum…
Check out Célestin Freinet too (also untranslated in English AFAIK)
Reference appreciated - there is one translated book:
Freinet, C.: Education through work: a model for child centered learning; translated by John Sivell. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1993. ISBN 0-7734-9303-4
Re: How to Understand Things
#84I have always thought that, as mentioned in the article, time is the greatest enemy. Human minds are incredible at understanding and theorizing, if given enough time. But when we are young and lacking information, pressure and trust of authority create a time-restriction that disallows us from forming truly "soft" or flexible models. Thus we are sort of taught to "forget" about a problem once it is solved. The problem itself becomes a task to be finished (for brownie points) rather than an actual problem with its own unique set of rewards. Not every problem rewards equally and even some problems may be detrimental to solve, but the self-education that our education system requires of our minds to succeed in the system makes it such that we regard problems as something we need to solve as proof to authority that we may get some free time.
Great post.
Re: How to Understand Things
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can draw a parallel to this in software development. Some product features that require development "from scratch", where you can get down to the original code and logic - this is where "taking time to think" really pays off. But when you are basically composing a final product from components, libraries and features - this is where figuring something out may take really long time and a lot of effort. It today's wo…
Where do you find this "fundamental" kind of work? How do you select for it?
One example would be analytics libraries that require precise calculations and background in math as opposed to the UI that displays the bar chart with results. The former is what I consider to be "fundamental" where the latter is much higher level and close to the end user (UI).
Other examples: audio / video codecs vs. media player app; game engine vs. intro screen and menu stuff, etc...
Re: How to Understand Things
#86My own take trying to express this dichotomy of second-hand versus firsthand knowledge https://blog.alexrohde.com/archives/682
Re: How to Understand Things
#87Great post. Personal anecdote: I don't think I really understood anything in school, but I was decent at going through the motions of carrying out certain methods and recalling certain facts when I needed to. I went on to study Maths at university, and for most of my first year, I had the same surface level "methods + facts" knowledge that got me through school. After some studying, I could recite definitions and the…
The university I went to offered open book/note exams for almost all courses. It literally didn't even matter how much you memorized... open book tests didn't make anything easier. you need to understand or fail. I'm not into showing off ranking or pedigree but I do genuinely believe that the higher the pedigree your school the more likely the exams will be harder and require total understanding and even creativity o…
> Students able to get into any top school will likely all easily achieve full score on an ordinary tests. The professors at top schools need to make these tests brutally hard in order to produce a bell curve.
This is no longer how “high pedigree” schools function in the US. There is too much blowback from helicopter parents and the kids who haven’t ever had to deal with critical feedback before.
Lookup “grade inflation” if you want to be horrified by the quality decline of “pedigree education”.
Re: How to Understand Things
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
A real logician can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think those statements are considered "vacuously true" for the same reason we say the empty set is a member of every set and x^0 is 1: it makes the rules of calculation simpler if we define it that way than other ways. But you can't use these convenient definitions to learn anything new. You can keep multiplying your equation by x^0 and union-ing your set with the em…
I pretty much told him the same: That we declared such statements to be true merely for convenience - it makes the proofs shorter. And that none of the theorems he would normally deal with would have a different "outcome" if we don't accept such statements - they'd still be valid theorems. But he won't be convinced until he formally studies logic. No idea when that will happen.
Well I have "formally" studied formal logic and he's in for a disappointment. Formal logic is a game, especially boolean logic, which has no grounding in truth, the world, or anything. Sometimes it's a useful game, but there's no inherent meaning behind it.
Tell your friend that implication works that way because that's what we've assumed, nothing more, nothing less.
Re: How to Understand Things
#89Interesting that his understanding of calculus doesn't include non-standard analysis. But then mathematics has a lot of abstractions.
Re: How to Understand Things
#90> But it’s not just energy. You have to be able to motivate yourself to spend large quantities of energy on a problem, which means on some level that not understanding something — or having a bug in your thinking — bothers you a lot. You have the drive, the will to know. This resonates with me. Someone once asked me how I decide when I'm finished with a particular thing I'm working on. The answer is as simple as "whe…
That's a really great and profound answer. Thanks!