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.
Just being upfront with people can break low performance patterns of behavior.
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.
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.
Stress testing the student's academic prowess, if you will.
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...
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?
Some I ended up using more during my career than others, but knowing more definitely reduced my tendency to think "ah, that should be easy".
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.
someone, somewhere, at some point, will think i’m a clueless idiot.
we’re all clueless idiots at the end of the day.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
Also buildin' stuff! (Which is the best type of doin'.)
> Thinkism sets aside practice and experience
thinking succeeds experience & precedes practise, its not apart from it