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You must read at least one book to ride

ludic.mataroa.blog

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Re: You must read at least one book to ride

#151

Post by tasuki »

pfoof wrote: post #55

I try to read at least 16 books a year (usually it turns out to be more). I cannot stress enough how much this helped me increase my skills. One example: The Go Programming Language. I tried using Go several years back after using Java for years and my experience was horrible. Then I read this book and I understood the philosophy behind Go, followed all exercises. Am I Go expert? Far from it. But I am proficient enou…

That's a curious example. In my circles, Go is viewed as a very plebeian language.

Go is a practical language. It's for getting things done in (large and often changing?) teams. It didn't strike me as a language for people who are ambitious about improving their computer programming skills. Lisp, Haskell, Prolog, whatever J/K/APL... those always seemed to me like languages for the ambitious.

Re: You must read at least one book to ride

#152

Post by Unlisted6446 »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #125
Unlisted6446 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well that's a thorny question, now isn't it? I mean, if it was so clear what 'epistemologies' exist in any field, then there would be little need or interest in the study of philosophy and history of science, no? If it was clear, then I think one would simply state what the epistemology of the field is. That philosophy and history of science are so successful seems to suggest that the way of the scientist is both mul…

Surely the philosophy of science has results, no? Aren't positivism, anti-postitivism, post-positivism, experientialism, and critical realism among others we can rubric psychology or psychological thinkers or results against?

Well, my understanding is that we have not yet found any clear scientific method that will be consistently 'the one' to choose at any time. There are a few criteria that generally stand out, but a general method--no. And if there's no general method, then how can there be a general epistemology?

I mean, psychology isn't actually paradigmatic yet, is it? I don't think there actually is a general method throughout the field beyond surveys and null hypothesis significance testing--but those are too broad to be particularly symbolic of psychology imo.

In that sense, I'm not sure what value the list of perspectives you provided have i.r.t to what scientists actually do in practice and what kind of practice is successful.

Re: You must read at least one book to ride

#153

Post by twitchard »

ludicity wrote: post #147
twitchard wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me get this straight: you can be better than 90% of people if you just read a book, but wait, not just any book, it has to be the right book -- and also it doesn't have to be a book, it can also just be "lived experience" or technical documentation, that counts too. At this point, the thesis is more qualification than statement. Mostly what I drew from the article is that the author feels smugly superior to many…

You can obviously substitute a book for whatever you want, but a great book is a huge accelerator. And yeah, it has to be good, which doesn't seem very controversial. Fluent Python is a great example of this. I could, with enough effort and time, piece together some of the philosophy underlying the language's design, but someone has already put a huge amount of pedagogical effort into pre-chewing a lot of that food f…

A paragraph like

> ...I am clearly worse than almost everyone that emails me along all of these dimensions. I only have a dim understanding of how my 3-4 years of experience coming from a strong background in psychology has rounded to "senior engineer", I've only ever written tests for personal projects because no employer I've ever seen actually had any working tests or interest in getting them, and I wrote the entirety of my Master's thesis code without version control because one of the best universities in the country doesn't teach it. In short, I've never solved a truly hard problem, I'm just out here clicking the "save half a million dollar" button that no one else noticed. I'm a fucking moron.

comes off to me as false modesty in the context of an essay that characterizes the majority of industry colleagues as "drowning sleepwalkers." Take it as a criticism of your writing persona, not a personal insult. You are right that I can't read minds, only the text in front of me.

I am glad you are mentioning specific books about software here in the comments. The essay had a very thoughtful and detailed discussion of books about drawing. If it had kept that energy when it turned to discussing software, instead of retreating into taking potshots at "the average developer", consultants, etc., it would come off to me like a persuasive essay rather than a self-congratulatory smugpiece.

Re: You must read at least one book to ride

#154

Post by keybored »

deergomoo wrote: post #39

> Then there are engineers [...] who never try for the entirety of their careers This matches my experience 100%. I am not a brilliant developer by any measure. I'm competent enough, I can put together good solutions to the admittedly low-scale problems I'm assigned, and I like to think I have a pretty good sense for the right and wrong ways of going about doing so. But I'm not even sure I could land an interview wit…

> Have I just had the misfortune of working at particularly crappy companies, or are things really this bad across the whole industry?

You’re just that good.

Re: You must read at least one book to ride

#155

Post by kelseyfrog »

Unlisted6446 wrote: post #152
kelseyfrog wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely the philosophy of science has results, no? Aren't positivism, anti-postitivism, post-positivism, experientialism, and critical realism among others we can rubric psychology or psychological thinkers or results against?

Well, my understanding is that we have not yet found any clear scientific method that will be consistently 'the one' to choose at any time. There are a few criteria that generally stand out, but a general method--no. And if there's no general method, then how can there be a general epistemology? I mean, psychology isn't actually paradigmatic yet, is it? I don't think there actually is a general method throughout the…

Epistemology is beyond the realm of science. All I desire is for folks to be transparent and have some consistency surrounding the epistemological basis for their agreement or disagreement with particular facts.

Instead what I see, often here, is that folks switch epistemic frameworks in order to prove or rationalize their beliefs. RCT becomes the threshold for knowledge when we're discussing psychology and sociology and trust experts or "science" or vaguely "logic" becomes the basis when talking about "hard" sciences. They typically reinforce the writers preconceived validity of the topic rather than acting as the foundations of belief, and I hope we can agree that's the opposite of how it is supposed to work.

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