Comment on Rationality Quotes May 2016

Sat, 07 May 2016 18:32:50 GMT

Culturally there's a sense that asking a Western doctor to use a checklist means to assumes that he's not smart enough to do the right thing. I don't think that exists to the same extend in China.

Before germ theory Western doctors refused to wash their hands because they didn't see the point of cleanness as a value.

Checklists are known to be very helpful with certain things, even if the relevant profession (e.g. doctors) don't always widely recognize this. On the other hand, why should I wash my hands if you can't give me a reason for cleanliness, neither theoretical (germ theory) nor empirical (it reduces disease incidence)?

Ideally, we should value checklists and rituals as a tool, but also require there to be good reasons for rituals, and trust that those who institute or choose the rituals know what they're doing. We should also be open to changing rituals, sometimes quickly, as new evidence comes in.

Maybe Eastern traditions achieve a better social balance than Western ones on this matter; I wouldn't know.

I think you can describe me easily a system II heuristic that you use to decide when to check more. I don't think you can easily describe how you feel the emotion of surprise that exists on a system I level. Transfering triggers of the emotion of surprise from one person to another is hard.

I think everyone agrees on this. Humans can't fully learn new behaviors just through abstract knowledge without practice.

I would say it's because the relevant professors see issues of algorithm design as higher status than asking themselves when programmers should recheck their code. It seems no Computer Science professor took the time to setup a study to test whether teaching programmers to be faster at typing increases their programming output. That's because the mathematical knowledge get's seen as more pure and more worthy. It has to do with the kind of the knowledge that's valued.

I would say it's because most CS professors don't really care about programming, and certainly not about typing speed. Programming isn't computer science! CS is a branch of applied math. The professors don't care about misallocation of intellectual resources across different fields, because they've already chosen their own field. You'd see the same problems if electrical engineers all studied physics instead, and picked up all the missing knowledge outside of formal education.

There are dedicated software engineering majors, some of them are even good (or at least better at teaching to program than CS ones), but numerically they produce far fewer graduates.

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