How Old Is The Shepherd? (2013)
robertkaplinsky.com
How Old Is The Shepherd? (2013)
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Re: How Old Is The Shepherd? (2013)
#2Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6848166
Re: How Old Is The Shepherd? (2013)
#3I work for a government agency. You’d be surprised how often we play very complex versions of this game.
Or maybe you wouldn’t. In any case, in my experience, about once a week. Essentially, your sponsors lets you know they want an answer to an unanswerable question (“how can we best weaponize salmon?”). Then we play “guess the answer the sponsor wants”.
Re: How Old Is The Shepherd? (2013)
#4It isn't much different in the working world. Answers are expected regardless of how impossible they may be and frankly most management do not take a non answer well.
Re: How Old Is The Shepherd? (2013)
#5Re: How Old Is The Shepherd? (2013)
#6Timothy Gowers had a similar point at https://plus.google.com/+TimothyGowers0/posts/4bkfusUoXot (dead link now):
> if one asks children a question such as the following: a number 35 bus pulls up at a bus stop and 8 passengers get on; what is the age of the bus driver? A large percentage of children, their minds numbed by years of symbol manipulation, will give the answer 43. This is a tragedy: rather than being trained to think, these children have been trained to do the opposite.
Also here: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/11/maths-...
This is basic stimulus-response behaviour: school education is effectively a game that the children are playing to win points, and within that environment “thinking” is wasteful and disincentivized.
(See also: Lockhart's Lament https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament...., the heart-breaking How Children Fail by John Holt, etc.)
Gowers also had a couple of posts on a very different way of teaching mathematics:
https://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/06/08/how-should-mathemati...
https://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/07/07/a-trip-to-watford-gr...
Re: How Old Is The Shepherd? (2013)
#7There is no answer. That's not the point. They want to know your response anyway. Will you be funny, loud, blunt - whatever you do, answer.
Re: How Old Is The Shepherd? (2013)
#8The correct answer is:
5 Re: How Old Is The Shepherd? (2013)
#9[deleted]
Re: How Old Is The Shepherd? (2013)
#10Timothy Gowers had a similar point at https://plus.google.com/+TimothyGowers0/posts/4bkfusUoXot (dead link now): > if one asks children a question such as the following: a number 35 bus pulls up at a bus stop and 8 passengers get on; what is the age of the bus driver? A large percentage of children, their minds numbed by years of symbol manipulation, will give the answer 43. This is a tragedy: rather than being train…
The same attitude persists long after graduation: if the task is to build a website/app/project, completing the project is what's measured and rewarded. Learning how to work with the tools provided isn't valued. At my previous shop, it was called a wasteful tendency for curiosity...until you urgently needed an answer that was only available because someone sought to answer a question that wasn't purely tied to a deliverable.