arundelo comments on Open thread, 14-20 July 2014 - Less Wrong

3 Post author: David_Gerard 14 July 2014 11:16AM

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Comment author: arundelo 20 July 2014 03:31:39AM *  6 points [-]

Richard Bornat, one of the authors of The camel has two humps (about a supposed bimodal distribution of programming ability) recently wrote:

I did a number of very silly things whilst on the SSRI and some more in the immediate aftermath, amongst them writing "The camel has two humps". I'm fairly sure that I believed, at the time, that there were people who couldn't learn to program and that Dehnadi had proved it. Perhaps I wanted to believe it because it would explain why I'd so often failed to teach them.

Read the rest: Camels and humps: a retraction.

Comment author: ShardPhoenix 20 July 2014 08:02:50AM *  3 points [-]

Title and excerpt aside, this isn't really a retraction of the actual test, just of the author's overly-aggressive interpretation thereof. Basically he says that the test does have some predictive power but not enough to prove anything about who can or can't pass a programming class.

Comment author: Viliam_Bur 20 July 2014 09:27:32AM 2 points [-]

Did someone actually use an ad-hominem argument against themselves to destroy the credibility of their own paper?

Fascinating.

Will this start a new wave of "sorry, I was high when writing the paper, please don't take it seriously" retractions?

:D

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