We see something that works, and then we understand it

ssurprisetalk 4 days ago 30 commentsRead Article on lemire.me

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vlovich123•about 4 hours ago

> As a teacher, I can tell you that students get really angry if you put a question on an exam that requires a concept not explicitly covered in class. Of course, if you work as an engineer and you’re stuck on a problem and you tell your boss it cannot be solved with the ideas you learned in college… you’re going to look like a fool.

Very flawed comparison. At work I get to go off and do research, experiments, can collaborate with peers and people who might have more expertise in a given sub problem, and generally have much more time. An exam trying to test you on material you haven’t studied is supposed to test for what? Your ability to synthesize knowledge out of thin air.

The rest of the article is well written and correct, but this particular aside felt weird.

zipy124•34 minutes ago

I agree that it's a flawed comparison but it does touch on a very real issue in the workplace. The difference between employees who I can send away on a problem and they'll encounter issues and try to solve them, vs those who come back to the senior at any problem, presents a serious ceiling on the level those employees can work at.

kaashif•25 minutes ago

As a leader, I can just tell people literally that: if you can't go away and work independently on a problem, it puts a ceiling on how well you're going to do. Then I ask people what they've tried before asking me.

Just being upfront with people can break low performance patterns of behavior.

lazyasciiart•30 minutes ago

Perhaps the example should be a homework assignment, not an exam.

andai•about 4 hours ago

I think it depends on the question. If it's not a question of the form explicitly presented before, but answerable with a minute of thinking using the knowledge the student has already mastered, then it makes sense.

A time limited exam is probably the wrong place for that, though, due to the stress interfering with that kind of thinking. It would be better for a homework assignment.

If ChatGPT didn't exist.

Okay, maybe in class, on paper is the right place for that.

noduerme•about 2 hours ago

>> Your ability to synthesize knowledge out of thin air

As someone who graduated high school, I'd hope my more accomplished peers would know the difference between hypothesis, theory and proof. It is entirely possible, and useful, to test someone's ability to form a cogent hypothesis. If you were faced with a question beyond the scope of the ideas you were taught, and could not rely on any assistance, the only useful thing to know about you is how well you would handle it yourself.

If you would synthesize knowledge out of thin air, that would be a failing grade.

from_memory•about 2 hours ago

I feel like it's an argument for the benefits of abstract reasoning. I don't think they are saying it'll be like that in the real world, I think they just want to test how you do under adverse conditions.

Stress testing the student's academic prowess, if you will.

sdenton4•about 3 hours ago

The while premise of "learn some stuff them take an exam on exactly that stuff" is pretty flawed, and that's the point. So much of the academic structure is about what's convenient for evaluation, rather than what's best for learning. Why not get rid of the exam and replace it with something else entirely? Who says we have to have exams at all?

rukuu001•26 minutes ago

I think it’s largely there to set up the point that comes after, which is that it would be absurd in a professional setting to pronounce a problem unsolvable because the entirety of your university education doesn’t provide enough information to solve the problem.

jrowen•about 2 hours ago

I found the whole article to be a bit heavy on anti-academia. And I went to industry after undergrad.

It's a false dichotomy between the "thinkism" bogeyman (actually reading books and papers and putting work into theoretical design is just bad now? Have they tried building anything in the physical world? Checked in with nuclear physics, ever?) and hands-on experience. Both are important. It should be about balance, not trashing an incredibly valuable set of tools because others exist...

mettamage•about 1 hour ago

I am team academia more than hands-on experience. And I have 5 years of experience. To me, it felt like most SWE things could eventually be solved by what I learned at school.

Not everything I did I learned at school, such as navigating codebases with more than a million lines of code. But most things? Yea.

With that said, I am curious how people say that they learned much more through experience, what did you specifically learn?

ttoinou•37 minutes ago

Could you tell us what you learned at school that is useful for your SWE career? Im sure there is a lot of us that learned 0 at school and learned everything ourselves as kids on the internet

bsrhng•about 1 hour ago

I find that many people can learn a lot by doing but then at some point hit a wall and really struggle to recognize that another kind of learning needs to take place to understand a deeper concept.

dosisking•about 2 hours ago

From my experience, the boss is usually a complete moron, so who cares. It also creates this unhealthy assumption that the engineer is subservient to the boss.

bryanrasmussen•about 2 hours ago

From my experience the boss does not know things you know, that does not make them a complete moron because they probably know things you don't.

Here's an example, consulting at a large Danish company, every Friday morning all departments in this big building would share breakfast and the bosses would say some things.

So this one morning they explained that in the coming months people should register time in a particular way because of accounting and how it related to a particular government grant and money that needed to be used up by a particular time in order to get to the next step of blah blah blah.

I realized as my eyes glazed over, damn this is just the same reaction people who don't understand browser rendering engines get when I start telling them about different events.

I also noticed other clueless people gamely trying to question these finance nerds on how things worked, and the patient finance nerds explaining some detailed bit and the clueless person clearly out of their depth with that "uuuuhhhh, hope they don't ask me if I understand" look on their face.

Now, if it hadn't been for them explaining this stuff I would have gone around thinking the boss is a complete moron. I once saw him mistake a nail gun for a drill! He doesn't understand how search engines work and why stemming and decompounding might be important, I know because I tried to explain to the idiot one time!! But since he actually talked about his work for a bit I realized he just happens to know stuff I don't.

I'm betting most of the morons you know are maybe not quite so stupid, although probably not as forthcoming as why things need to be done in a certain way to those who work under them.

dijksterhuis•about 1 hour ago

yeah.

someone, somewhere, at some point, will think i’m a clueless idiot.

we’re all clueless idiots at the end of the day.

noduerme•about 2 hours ago

The author is talking about two orthogonal problems.

1. "Thinkism": As described, over-engineering before writing code for a complex system and seeing where it takes you. Maybe decision by committee, or just overthinking. But its like one form of replacing on-the-ground adaptable, creative thinking, with a dumber process.

2. Which should be completely separate, it's saying that students are mad if they're forced to think for themselves. This is a complaint about underthinking and the tendency of inexperienced coders not to come up with a grand plan before writing a line of code.

So which one is the problem? I'd say the problem is not knowing when to over or under-think something.

cdavid•about 4 hours ago

Did not know of the "thinkism" expression. When I was studying in France eng. school, I called that "the mythe du cerveau" (literaly "the brain myth", though does not roll on your tongue as well).

It is guaranteed failure mode of large orgs. Curious to hear about more references on how to fight this at an organization level, besides the one given in the OT.

qsera•about 2 hours ago

Yea, we just name things that we want to see destroyed...

Not everything need to be made so easy to refer, like using three or four of words instead of one..

kang•about 2 hours ago

try replacing the word with 'thinking'

JSR_FDED•about 2 hours ago

As a kid I noticed that repairing things is the perfect way to combine experiential learning and "thinkism" - you have to develop a mental model of how something should work, what's broken, and how to fix it. Then you combine that with the physical sensations of how tight the nut is, or how hard you need to turn that wrench - which in turn feeds into the mental model and determination of next steps.

rustybolt•9 minutes ago

Nobody said it better than von Neumann: "Young man, in mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them"

FailMore•about 3 hours ago

I liked the article and the term thinkism (which I hadn’t heard before). I think education should be radically changed to be about doism instead. I think it’s likely we have more engaged kids learning more valuable life skills.

vladms•22 minutes ago

Reminds me of https://xkcd.com/927/ - and to avoid confusions: everybody has good intentions and think they know better.

We definitely should try to improve and experiment with any system, including education, but I really doubt it is that easy to improve education and it will depend on objective, culture and political environment more than doing A or B.

AdityaAnuragi•about 2 hours ago

I agree that doism should done more in all honesty

Cuz in real life also its more about "doing" you're physically fixing a clock, or writing code, or designing a building

Doism shouldn't be 100% but it certainly should be more

iceman28•about 2 hours ago

Like everything there’s always a balance. Sometimes building something and seeing how it works might have a higher cost to “correct” once built. Other times, it’s much faster to build.

AdityaAnuragi•about 2 hours ago

Game developers are the best at this sort of stuff (especially valve and puzzle game designers)

Portal (a puzzle game by valve) had levels built in such a way that it introduced the player to new mechanic, and only then building on top of that

andai•about 4 hours ago

I call this, the way to learn stuff is by doin' stuff.

Also buildin' stuff! (Which is the best type of doin'.)

kang•about 2 hours ago

this misunderstands whats thinking is ..

> Thinkism sets aside practice and experience

thinking succeeds experience & precedes practise, its not apart from it