Errors vs. Bugs and the End of Stupidity

[celandine13]

"A pianist has to believe in telekinesis.  You have to believe you have the power to move your fingers with your mind."

I learned that from Phil Cohn, my piano teacher's piano teacher.  Once in a while, when I was in high school, she'd arrange for me to have a master class with him.  He was a diminutive man who looked exactly like Dr. Strangelove,

Comments

[browngirl]

*makes a note of this sensible essay*

[dogofjustice]

I think of statistical knowledge as one of the lowest forms of knowledge, what you use to describe a phenomenon when you do not have or cannot trust more specific insights. A Gaussian error is often just a sum of a moderate number of specific effects, most or all of which can be comprehended. Peter Thiel recently made some related observations in his Startups class.Thinking of my mistakes as bugs has been second nature for me for as long as I can remember; it did not occur to me that this was unusual. I wonder how common this actually is. "Maybe nobody's actually stupid" strikes me as literally false but usefully provocative; a teacher should calibrate the speed of teaching to the student's abilities--so that systematic debugging is possible--and then work with the student on the actual debugging. Ideally, the student learns to and gets in the habit of debugging their own mistakes most of the time

[wordweaverlynn]

Thanks.

[denyer]

Tags like "stupid," "bad at ____", "sloppy," and so on, are ways of saying "You're performing badly and I don't know why."

Stupid's also shorthand for wilfully ignorant, as with Douglas Adams' oft-cited example of laughing at boffins not making planes out of the same material as black boxes. A lot of humour relies on stupidity and desperation to belong, and people are to some extent what they do.

Debugging's a great metaphor, particularly taken to some conclusions -- eventually a particular subroutine's reasonably debugged, there may be limitations of the language that can't be worked around, and setting further targets for refactoring can become counter-productive and it's time to move on to other areas. All of which is generally easier to tackle with independent study than in a class environment with thirty students to juggle.

Thank you - Very insightful

[ext_1412378]

Thank you for taking the time to write this. This has was one of the most insightful articles I've read in a long time. I had been thinking along these lines for a while now mostly prompted by my efforts to teach Math and Reading to my 5 year old son. It was nice to see everything thought through in your article and helped me to understand my own thoughts.